Ann Hamilton

Photo by D. James Dee, courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery

Ann Hamilton, "Privation and excesses- chair" (1989)

Photo by Ann Hamilton, courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery

Ann Hamilton, "Acoustic Tower Project"

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Yes. It helped me to understand that the work has been built out of the relationship of single objects, gestures, or materials to a larger “field”—that’s the word I’ve been using.

By “field,” do you mean the context that is the larger work?

I mean context, but I also mean literally the field that it makes when it’s multiplied. When the single blade of grass becomes the lawn. The single thing can exist in one form or structure, but in my thinking there is always the possibility of the field and discovering what happens when you make the whole field.

Why did you decide to publish the book as an inventory?

The crass part of it is the simple inventory of objects: here’s this stuff that I have! But the whole process is also taking stock of where you’ve been, as a way of going toward what you don’t know. Because objects haven’t been at the center of my practice, going back and tracing through the lineage of these things was also a way of tracing through the way my work has shifted conceptually.

I enjoyed how the book documents how many of your earlier concerns are still relevant today.

In a way when you go through a process like this you’re giving yourself a vocabulary back, or a different way of naming the things that you’ve done. It opens it back up. The thing that was really exciting about making the book was that all along the way I was returning to ideas that are still alive for me. There are things that—if I have time—I want to return to, and draw forward now. I went through the book and I made all these notes: “You’re not done with collars,” and “You really need to return to this,” and “Oh, I wanted to make that!” So the act of inventorying is going back to go forward.

So what projects are you working on now?

I’m in the middle of the trying to make a chorus of speakers. I don’t know exactly where it’s going. There are questions about speaking in unison, and collective speaking, and speaking in public spaces, and where do you speak, and what do you say, and what do we need to hear, and how does it need to be said—all of those kinds of questions.

But isn’t that uncertainty one of the great attractions of working as an artist?

Oh, I know, it’s so true. I look at this book and I want to make material things and I love the satisfaction of that process, but on the other hand I have these questions just now and they’re off in a completely different territory. We’ll see. It all comes around in some way. I suppose that’s what an inventory is—it’s where you see that everything is connected.