Artist Ann Hamilton Takes On New Borders in La Jolla Installation

You will enter the room through a thick doorway stamped with titles of Aesop’s fables. As you proceed, the glass tiles beneath your feet will buckle and shift, compressing a cushion of raw fleece below. You will pass a large empty cage and continue on to a heavy steel table, dusted with powdered iron oxide and set with rows and rows of animal and human teeth. Water will drip from the table to the glass floor, seep into the wool and stain it.

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, perched on the edge of the sea, on the cusp between countries, is the site of Ann Hamilton’s latest metaphorical musing on the nature of borders.

“I started thinking about La Jolla’s place on the border and it took me to the body,” she said in a recent interview, seated on the floor amid the raw materials of her show, physically casual, intellectually concentrated.

“My work has been very concerned with body edges, that whole notion that things are defined by the edges that separate them. Anything that crosses a border, that isn’t contained, makes us very uncomfortable. When things that should be on the inside are on the outside, they make us uncomfortable.”

Hamilton’s installation, “between taxonomy and communion,” opens at the museum April 7, paired with a show of work by the Swiss artist Markus Raetz. Hamilton’s piece will fill a 30-by-38-foot gallery.

As the first Russell Foundation visiting artist, a position linking the La Jolla Museum and UC San Diego’s Visual Arts Department, Hamilton has been in town since early March, teaching at the university and preparing her show. Several of her students have volunteered to help, joining a network of assistants that include friends from Santa Barbara--where she lives and teaches--and New York, as well as her mother, who lives in Ohio.

During the interview, a package arrived from a former helper in Rhode Island. It contained a letter, a personal gift and a contribution to the current show: a small plastic container filled with human teeth.

Hamilton’s enterprise may be “enigmatic,” as she says, but interest in her work has been plain and plentiful. In the past three years, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles and the Capp Street Project in San Francisco have all played host to her installations, and this year she was one of 10 artists chosen for the annual Awards in the Visual Arts exhibition, a nationally touring show organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N. C.

La Jolla Museum director Hugh Davies, who calls Hamilton “one of the best artists of her generation,” invited her to do a work in the museum immediately after visiting her Santa Barbara studio.

“In the seven years since I’ve been here, her studio visit was the high point, artistically,” he said. “I hadn’t seen anything this rich and ambitious in a long time. That’s why I had complete confidence turning over the space to her.”

Not all institutions are capable of that much trust in the process of her work, Hamilton said. Many remain wary of installations, especially those, like hers, that might involve wax-encrusted walls and floors, a sea of honey-coated pennies or a pen of live sheep. Wrapping viewers in an envelope of sensation has become Hamilton’s chief means of awakening in them associations, memories and metaphors for larger social structures and dichotomies.

“I want to make environments that, in a very sensuous way, let you, through the body, make other connections with the different systems that each of the materials or objects comes from,” she said. The work “gets in through your feet or your skin before it goes up to your head.”

Hamilton’s first installation dates from 1980. Before that, as a student of textile design at the University of Kansas, she created woven wall pieces. She moved into installation work to relinquish the separation between “you and the picture outside you, to move the work out into a real system, a real experience.”

Most of her installations until now featured a live, human component--often the artist herself--acting as “caretaker or image tender.” To grant the viewer more privacy, however, and less self-consciousness in the unfamiliar spaces she creates, Hamilton has removed this performance-oriented aspect from her work. What she learned from sharing those spaces with her audience was that “people don’t trust what they’re experiencing until they name it.”

“It’s an old, fundamental dilemma we live with. We inherit all these dichotomies, like mind-body. Analysis is always put up against intuition. It’s more that we don’t have a language that allows the intuitive to have any validity.”

One of the ways her graduate school professors at Yale best showed their support of her move into installations, she said, was that “they allowed me to be completely inarticulate about my work.”

Hamilton’s mistrust of what she calls the “authority” of language emerges in both subtle and overt ways. When spoken, her sentences turn up gently at the ends, as if testing the fit between word and concept, and her titles are always written in lower case.

“I don’t want them to be emphatic or declarative, to dominate or determine the experience,” she explained. “I read a lot of poetry, and I think that influences my titles. It’s about not wanting to tell something but to present something.”

Hamilton’s elusive, non-literal approach to making art speaks the loudest, however, about her fear of the desiccating power of words. Some have labeled her approach surreal, but this, too, is a label that Hamilton finds chafing.

“For me, nothing is really oddly manipulated. There’s no distortion. The wool is still just the wool, laid out. The relationships are still grounded in this world; they’re not like a dream state.”

In fact, the ideas and relationships in Hamilton’s work relate more closely to scholarly theories than esoteric dreams. She draws heavily on the writings of social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who has theorized on the danger of margins and how, with the slightest of tampering, they can alter the shape of experience. She cites Paul Shepard, too, a professor who proposes that we look to our relationships with animals to understand our own structures of thought and social behavior.

Hamilton explains the symbolism of “between taxonomy and communion” in terms similar to Shepard’s.

“For me, it’s about the desire to be inside the animal and yet the impossibility--that it is always the ‘other.’ I’m trying to set up a container that creates that, but then foiling it,” she says of her carpet of raw wool, sealed over by glass.

“We can’t really be in it, so we’re led to systems of analysis, categorization and codification. That’s where the teeth come in, all laid out like jewels, like objects of study. ‘between taxonomy and communion’ is a push and pull between those two places.”