Life's rhythms quietly revealed in a snowstorm of floating paper
NORTH ADAMS -- The other artists who have tackled the largest gallery at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art -- Robert Rauschenberg, Tim Hawkinson, and Robert Wilson -- have filled it with objects large enough to command the space, which is the size of a football field.
Ann Hamilton empties the space instead. Or so it seems at first. She's concerned not so much with how many feet long and wide it is, but with its volume, which she brings alive with sound, light -- and millions of pieces of translucent white onionskin paper that float down from the rafters, buoyed by air currents. It's like the snow scene in "The Nutcracker," only the "flakes" are 100 times larger. And instead of ballet dancers, it's the public who enter this "stage."
Children adore it instantly, diving into the white piles or scooping them up and tossing them into the air. Adults seem initially more hesitant about interacting with the work, which Hamilton calls "corpus," Latin for the body of a person or a body of writing. The piece is ultimately irresistible, though, and eventually beguiles visitors into participating, whether by wading through the heaps of paper, by writing poems on individual sheets, or by folding them into paper cranes.
There's another, subtler reference to the body. Forty pneumatic mechanisms in the rafters subtly scoop and release the papers at the pace of a human breathing deeply: The lift is the inhaling part; the release, the exhaling. Whether or not you're conscious of the rhythm, there is something comforting and cleansing about it.
The sound element comes from 24 horn-shaped speakers, one human voice represented in each, droning or chanting. The speakers slowly descend to meet the paper and as they do, they form a corridor, a device Hamilton has used before to direct her audiences on a specific path. The speakers lower and then retreat to the heights, like multiple suns setting and rising.
The light in "corpus" comes through rose-colored glass. The old 12-over-12 windows that line the long gallery are covered with reddish silk organza that makes the room -- and you -- glow. The effect is something like being in a cathedral suffused with light filtered through stained glass, only there's no narrative fussiness in Hamilton's piece, just a gradual shift in the shadows and reflections as the day wears on.
The rosy windows (perhaps a play on the rose window over the entrance of a Gothic church?) make the space buoyant and warm. But this is just the first of the three experiences Hamilton offers. Beyond the long gallery is a square, dark room, barren except for a quartet of metal rods attached to the ceiling. They spin constantly, as if in some Shaker or Sufi rite that ends in exhaustion. (Hamilton has worked with Shaker themes before.) Each also has a speaker, which emits breathing sounds. This space feels as confined as its predecessor is open and airy. It perhaps represents the dark night of the soul, a nondenominational spirituality as opposed to the Christian references in Wilson's "Stations of the Cross." It reminds me, more than anything else, of the closed-off feeling in Houston's Rothko Chapel.
Once out of the darkness, you ascend a flight of stairs. The journey is brief, but carries all the meanings, literal and metaphorical, of "ascension." You find yourself in a large balcony area where a Shaker austerity prevails. Thirty rugged timbers, roughly carved and full of cracks and holes, line up like pews in a meetinghouse. That they echo the rafters in the space is deliberate: They were, in fact, taken from a floor removed to create the double-height gallery. There is no hierarchy among the benches, no focus on an authoritative pulpit; everyone is equal here. Sitting on a bench, you feel you've reached the end of a pilgrim's progress -- and you can look down on others just beginning the trip.
"Corpus" is quietly glorious, altogether satisfying, a place of refuge and even perhaps of revelation. Of the works that have occupied MASS MoCA's largest gallery to date, this is the only one I can imagine as a permanent installation (which it isn't; and, alas, it is so site-specific, with the balcony and all, that it's unlikely to be re-created in its present form somewhere else).
Hamilton, a lifelong Ohioan, has represented the United States in important biennales and has won just about every award she was eligible for. She's no stranger to Massachusetts audiences. Her favorite themes -- language, the body, the relationship of inside and out, corridors -- have been explored in works exhibited at both ends of the state.
At MASS MoCA last year, she showed a piece made, in part, of videos she created from 19th-century children's copybooks, in which grade school students practiced their handwriting. What made the copybooks seem "modern" was their endless repetitions: Entire books were filled with a single sentence, or even a single word. Hamilton likened the exercise to a Gertrude Stein poem.
For her 1992 installation "aleph," at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, she created a wall of books -- not on shelves, but joined together like pieces of a patchwork quilt. Clambering over one another, they seemed to compete to communicate, as if shouting "Me! Me! Me!" The books blocked a windowed wall; the outside world ceased to exist. Hamilton lit the central axis of the space, creating another of her corridors to lure visitors to a tiny video at the end of the room. It showed the inside of the artist's mouth, filled with small stones. Without swallowing or spitting she rolled them around for an entire hour, like Demosthenes practicing his speeches with pebbles in his mouth to become a better orator.
"Corpus" is the finest of her works that I've seen in Massachusetts. The piles of paper accumulate until they're knee-high. Then they're cleared away, like brush burned to allow new growth. The falling papers start again; the process begins anew. "Corpus" is a cycle -- like the cycle of a New England winter, filled with snowstorms, shoveling, plowing, and more storms. Global warming may play havoc with the patterns of the world's weather; "corpus" powerfully retains its rhythm.
Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.
