Mouth-Operated Pinhole Cameras, Bubbles, and more (Ann Hamilton) | Art21

<v ->I've always felt that there's</v>

this very strong connection for me,

between the thread of sewing 
and the line of that thread

and the thread of writing.

(charcoal scraping across canvas)

(sewing machine)

I certainly grew up doing a 
lot of hand work, needle work,

sewing, knitting, embroidery,

all of those traditional textile arts.

I think the process is just really satisfying,

but the metaphors that cloth offer up

are really extraordinarily beautiful

because every piece of cloth that we wear

is made up of all these individual threads,

whatever their weave,

and that each one of those is still something

that you can see,

and the whole cloth needs each one of those.

And so it's a social metaphor to me.

It's actually very beautiful.

The very first piece I did 
when I was in graduate school,

I had taken a, just kind of generic gray man suit,

and covered it in toothpicks 
so that the whole skin of cloth

became like a hide. It looked like a porcupine.

(ethereal music)

<v ->(whispering) Find the 
linear broken below a human.

I know for me,

that relationship between the 
thread and the written line

and the drawn line,

it's about a really very fundamental act of making

(indistinct whispering)

that the relationship of the 
line that makes something

is related to how we make things with language.

<v ->(whispering) Certainty.</v>

<v ->I think that I'm always trying to work</v>

with words as materials,

the same way I work with other kinds of materials.

The project "Lineament," which is a title

that comes from a Wallace Stevens poem.

That flat two-dimensional plane of the page

is made into a three-dimensional body

because each line is lifted

out of the book as if it is a thread.

And that thread of text is run through the hands,

it's tactile, it's touched, 
and then it creates a ball,

which is the body of the page.

So. there are all these places I see

that there's this constant tie of thread as line

and line as line of writing.

Yeah. Now go down that way. Right.

(crinkling plastic)

I'm just gonna set up the 
pipes and then we'll bring the

fabric over.

Seven, eight, nine

For me, working in installation

is to work in relation to a particular place.

You're coming in and you're, in some senses,

animating the space

and you don't know what that space or situation

will do to you and vice versa,

what you will do to it. (laughs)

Like, you try to make yourself blank

so that you can just pay 
attention to what comes up,

what it makes you think of...

What are the things you feel?

All of those ways that your skin is a organ

and is a membrane is incredibly smart,

and immediately you walk through any threshold

and, you know, it's... you smell.

And you feel the temperature and the light

and all of those things that 
have an enormous influence.

(birds chirping)

<v ->This particular building,</v>

it's had 1200 people working here at one time.

it's in an area that was sort 
of like a company town area,

and it's been forgotten.

And it just went out of 
business about three months ago.

<v ->(whispering) So, it's...</v>
I didn't ever actually visit this building

when it was in operation,

but as a textile factory and house of production,

that was now silenced.

You know, the hollowness of that,

the emptiness of that was very palpable.

I'm all thumbs today with these strings.

(indistinct)
Can you grab this string?

<v ->I wanted to have one room 
be the room of the writer

and one room be the room of the reader.

And now they've become ghost-like suspensions

of silk organza that sit side by side.

So, they're identical in form.

They're about 30 foot square rooms

that are just suspended within the architecture.

(metal clanging)
Yeah.

<v ->Hey Emmitt, can you carry this over there</v>

with the other pipes?

<v Offscreen Male>Honey, he can do it.</v>
Don't, don't worry about it.

<v Emmitt>Yeah.</v>

<v Ann>There you go. And then 
within each of those rooms,

there's a long 10 foot wooden table,

and upon that will be a spinning projector.

(metal clanging)

<v ->With what Anne's doing.</v>

Remember, she's not a traditional artist

in the sense that it's a piece of painting

or it's a piece of sculpture.

This is something that people 
really have to reach for

and break out of what they expect to see.

And it's saying really to the people

that there's more here

than we even saw.

And there's someone else that's seeing that.

Here, Emmitt, you can help 
pull the projector. Okay?

<v ->So right now, this is 
actually the section

that's going backwards in the video.

So it's the pencils, like, eating the line.

(whooshing)

Part of making work is to allow those things,

perhaps that are always already there,

but not visible to us

and to try to make them visible

in a way that they're experience-able.

(whooshing)

(crickets)

(bells clanging)

(indistinct whispering)

(birds chirping)

This Jeffersonian neoclassical building we inherit

as a real emblem of an American democratic ideal.

(women speaking in phonetic code)

And so, I wanted to engage that in the building.

How do we deal with the stains of our own history?

How do we take those aspects 
of our social history,

slavery being the largest one.

That we have a democratic country that was founded

and based in slavery, and 
how do you talk about that?

I felt like the only way to do it, perhaps,

was very abstractly.

This stream of intensely chromed fusca powder

sifted down the walls.

And it would catch on raise plaster dots

that were fixed to the wall, 
spelling out a text in braille.

And that text was edited from the poems

by Charles Resnikoff.

From the corner of each of the four rooms,

there was a soundtrack

of Lincoln's second inaugural address,

which was really one of healing.

It was translated letter by letter

into the phonetic alphabet.

(Women whispering phonetic code)

(birds chirping)

(door opening)
(door closing)

Come on, Timmy. Let's go.

(dog leash clanking)

<v ->I live in Ohio and I 
moved back after teaching

for about seven years in Santa Barbara.

It is a very conscious decision to wanna move

and be closer to my family who live here.

This is where I grew up.

(geese calling)

it's a, kind of, a real comfort to come home

and to work out of that place.

And for a long time, my parents also really helped

with a lot of my work.

You know, my mother would sometimes fly out

to work on a big project

and my dad has helped on projects.

And now increasingly they're...

They provide me with that kind of backup

that actually allows me

to do the kind of traveling 
that my work has needed.

I think that would be much harder for me

if I didn't have all that.

Do you wanna help change the film?

<v ->You can't be a mom and have 
a child in kindergarten,

and not have some other help.

Hey Emmitt, do you wanna come see your picture?

(mouse clicking)

There's an aspect of my work,

which is wanting to give voice,

but my voice is not necessarily 
the voice that's here.

I feel like my voice is maybe here and here.

And so, how do I literally 
make the place where song also,

as well as all other words, exits the body

actually become my eye.

I devised a way of making pinhole cameras.

I put the camera in my mouth 
and then I unblock the aperture

so that when I reopen my lips,

I'm actually exposing the film.

(footsteps)

You know,

you're never supposed to have 
your mouth open in public.

This is like, you don't see 
people standing, you know,

(laughs)
It's a vulnerable position.

It's a place where you've relaxed

and you've let yourself be open and vulnerable.

(laughs)
Sorry.

You ready?

<v ->Um-hm.</v>

<v ->Um.</v>

<v ->It became very interesting</v>

to register this time of standing quite still,

face to face with another person,

like soul to soul,

and revealing something that's not, you know,

the surface stuff that we 
usually allow out to the world.

The shape of the mouth is very much

the same shape as the eye.

And the image becomes almost like the pupil.

(bell ringing)
(dog barking)

Good.

So to...and sometimes invert the location

of one sense to another part of the body.

Those kind of dislocations or slippages is one way

that we come to see something differently.

(motor running)

<v Female Voice>Looks like there's fire coming</v>

off of your hand.

<v Ann>Wow, look it.</v>

Look, oh, totally magic.

<v Maarten>It's a flat sheet of water</v>

with soap on either side.

And it's about a 50th of the 
thickness of a human hair.

And when things get that thin, 
like oil slicks on water,

they tend to reflect certain 
colors of light depending on

their thickness.

I just thought it would be interesting

to try to see if Ann would 
be able to incorporate this

in any of her work.

...Which is part of the problem.

<v ->You know, Martin sort of 
said, "I'm doing this thing,"

and I...and then he demonstrated it.

It's like, I, I don't know 
necessarily how or when,

or what I would use this,

but it's becoming increasingly clear to me

that it's related to everything I've ever done.

You know, it's the fluidity of the cloth.

It's the way that you can take your hands

and you can go through the membrane of it.

Oh, I love this bubble coming out like this

and the breath being made 
palpably, visually present.

It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

<v ->And I know when I'm making 
work that I have to...

Like, there's a point where I can't see it.

I can't see it in my head. And then, you know,

there's that moment where you can see it

and you think it might be beautiful.

It's like it bites you, you know,

and then you will go to all 
ends sometimes to try to see it

(laughs) in fact.

And of course it's always 
different or something else but...

(ethereal music)