For me the act of making is also an act of finding something.
My name is Ann Hamilton and I’m a visual artist.
For me the act of making is also an act of finding something, and you hope that you set the conditions up to find what you need. The Museum sets up the conditions for associative, meandering thinking.
Different objects draw me in, and this is one that I’ve returned to again and again. This is a puppet or marionette. It has all these traces of being used; the fabric is stained, it’s worn in places. And so it had a life in the world, but it’s now completely removed from that life.
There’s this whole 'body empathy'—there’s an address from the object to me as a viewer. We recognize the figure with the most minimal of information. These red hands—they’re wooden and they don’t have a lot of gesture in them, but they hold the possibility of becoming any gesture. And that’s, then, the magic of the hands that actually manipulate this.
You have to imagine this actually moving. You can imagine, then, that very rigid stoicism of the face or the head, which feels helmeted and regal. Then imagine this cloth and how it moved, and how this could become something that just glides across or commands a presence in a story.
The modesty of it almost gives it more potential. This is the most ordinary stuff: it’s string, it’s cloth that’s falling apart, it’s pigment, it’s a little bit of wood and metal. And out of those really common materials is this animate presence.
I would love to be able to make that, but I can’t make that in the culture I live in. This connects me to a place and culture where the artist has a role to be telling stories.
This had a function in a world outside the museum, and many, many contemporary artworks assume the space of the museum, whether they ever get inside there or not. This is obviously an object that's made to be animated that’s now mute, and so it’s open for me to animate it in another way.
So how do you take the things that you love, that you are drawn to, and approach what it is that they do? You have to go in another side door. What is it that makes this alive? You could think about this as an object that’s emblematic of the role of the artist. Maybe our task is to animate, as, I guess, a puppeteer. You can address things in a puppet that maybe you can’t address face-to-face: contemporary politics and social issues.
You take that lens back into your own process.
