Ann Hamilton, an internationally recognized performance and installation artist, began her artistic training in textiles at the University of Kansas before attending Yale University, where she earned a graduate degree in sculpture. Since earning her M.F.A., Hamilton has taught and produced multimedia art. She is best known for lavish, multiple-room installations in which she disrupts protocols of artistic experience and invites visitors to reexamine their accustomed ways of encountering art. Over the past twenty years, Hamilton has received considerable critical recognition for her distinctive pieces at such locations as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Capp Street Project; Banff Centre; Wexner Center for the Arts; Museum for Contemporary Art, San Diego; Headlands Center for the Arts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Dia Center for the Arts; Henry Art Gallery; and Walker Art Center. She has also represented the United States in the São Paulo Bienal, Venice Biennial, and Carnegie International. Hamilton is recipient of MacArthur, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts fellowships.

Until this book appeared, though, it had been nearly impossible to follow Hamilton’s career. Literary experimentalist Gertrude Stein wrote in a timeframe she called the “continuous present”; in something of the same way, Hamilton’s insistent art exists almost entirely in the present tense. Its field of action is a temporal paradox: labor-, time-, and material-intensive pieces made to be temporary. She offers finely wrought scenes set to flicker and vanish. The ephemeral character of Hamilton’s site-specific works has rendered them as fleeting as productions for the stage. Even the photographs made available in some earlier, less complete, publications of Hamilton’s work, fall well short of approximating the participatory experience of the viewer. Critic Jean-Pierre Criqui addressed the finite properties of language as an instrument of meaning, commenting how the “experience dramatized by Ann Hamilton, more than any other, is probably that of acceding to or winning back access to speech, in short, an experience of the limits of language” (Ann Hamilton, Ann Hamilton: Present-Past, 1984-1987 [Milan: Skira, 1998], 25). Perhaps this is the reason Hamilton’s works are sometimes described as propositions and predicaments: the viewer helps to complete the utterance of the piece, not merely to receive it.

Joan Simon is the thoughtful force behind this first compendium of, and commentary on, Hamilton’s installations, featuring works dating since her sculpture open houses as a graduate student. It was Simon who proposed the book to Hamilton. The two were not acquainted at the time but began the project in 1994, and some eight years later, this fully collaborative volume is packed with documentation and insight into the artist’s work. Simon, a former managing editor for Art in America and an independent scholar and curator, has published extensively on the subject of contemporary art. Her edited and coedited works include treatments of artists from Jenny Holzer to Bruce Nauman. Simon authored Susan Rothenberg (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), an award-winning examination of works by an artist whom Simon had known since the 1970s. In her exploration of Rothenberg’s art, Simon referred to herself as a “participant-observer,” taking a term from anthropology for the ethnographer who spends significant time with a native population, and that is much the way she investigates Hamilton’s career. For this project, Simon interviewed Hamilton extensively and gained unprecedented access to Hamilton’s archives.

The result is the first complete document and sustained analysis of Hamilton’s interdisciplinary ventures: sculptures, installations, performances, videos, photographs, and more. A chronological treatment of Hamilton’s projects follows Simon’s lucid overview of installation art as a genre. The impeccably prepared bibliography is equally praiseworthy. Simon directs the reader to virtually all scholarly writing on Hamilton’s work, much of it scattered across contemporary performance and art journals, from Artforum, Artspace, Artweek, Art in America, and Arts Magazine to Fiberarts, Flash Art, Harvard Architectural Review, High Performance, and New Art Examiner. Simon’s bibliography proves an aid to researchers seeking a comprehensive listing and includes articles on Hamilton from popular press venues.

Hamilton’s works, often enough fashioned with stunning quantities of humble materials (from pennies to toothpicks), typically involve conspicuously detailed handwork in their fabrication and/or installation. As critic Thierry Raspail notes, the level of care afforded to ordinary objects in Hamilton’s sites has the effect of redirecting audience attention to the seeming minutia of daily life: “What matters for me in Hamilton’s work is that she offers the very small, such as the thousands of gestures we ignore, the thoughts evading us, the dreams we forget, the words we mumble, everything that actually constitutes us” (Hamilton 13). With a poetic sensitivity to emblems and a talent for research as the instrument of collective reflection, Hamilton invites her viewers to renewed contemplation of the tacit, yet potent, meanings of our material surroundings and the inner worlds to which they correspond.

By her own accounts, Hamilton’s works not only produce complex sensory environments, but also summon a nuanced vocabulary of social metaphors. In this regard, Simon identifies the primary themes of Hamilton’s work as “nature eliding culture; a desire for absorption and its impossibility; the isolation of her figures within an overarching social space; an appreciative yet suspicious attitude toward language, and her trust of non-linguistic experience” (Simon 45). This simultaneous preoccupation with and unease about language pervades Hamilton’s work. Even the materials edging her exhibition environments underscore the theme. From the walls of books in aleph and the vellum ceiling of dominion to the tons of linotype slugs that form the walking surface of capacity for absorption and the hand-written language marking the floor of between taxonomy and communion, written language and its devices bind the space and its possibilities.

Likewise, the performed elements of Hamilton’s installations return inexorably to life within a chirographic culture: altered books in indigo blue, the heat-erased or heat-reinscribed lines of books in tropos, the coils of print text wound into balls as emptied from books in lineament, and the wrapping of typewriter ribbons around a performer’s hands in mattering. As with print, sounded language figures prominently within Hamilton’s work. Whether it is aleph, with its video of a speaker with a mouthful of marbles so reminiscent of elocution lessons, or the tape recording of a speaker with aphasia in tropos, or mantle with its radio voices issuing from a table heaped with flowers, Hamilton’s poignant references to the experiences of language aloud underscore difficulties in articulation, communication, and reception of human messages. Hamilton extends this theme of language’s perils and possibilities through a series of historical and literary allusions. Upon entering one of Hamilton’s installations, the visitor might detect the sound of Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” happen upon the words of a Cotton Mather sermon entered in a ledger, or see the poetry of Hamilton’s colleague, Susan Stewart, embroidered on a gentleman’s glove. Through this use of intertexts, Hamilton offers the reminder, by turns alienating and affecting, of a chorus of voices preceding and accompanying the viewer’s own entry into speech. Finally, there are Hamilton’s incorporated elements of kinesthetic perception, where the senses switch places with provocative effect, as in mneme, where a finger replaces a tongue, or in Hamilton’s photography, where open lips holding light-sensitive paper replace the camera’s or eye’s lens. Throughout, Hamilton confronts language as underexamined bearer of received cultural messages.

Simon’s book, like Hamilton’s art, has been well received by its audiences, and deservedly so. Only with such a resource can viewers begin to think and imagine across Hamilton’s pieces to discern their rich patterns and equally important disjunctures of symbol and statement. Across her media and her pieces, Hamilton challenges audiences to navigate through her disconcerting artistic environments and beyond the limits of a language too seldom scrutinized for its cultural residue of implication. Given Hamilton’s predilection for featuring—and altering—books within her work, one can only wonder whether Simon’s volume will next find its place in an upcoming installation.