Word: hamilton
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...arsenal of curious things an artist can do with colored pigment, Ann Hamilton summoned up the equivalent of a cruise missile and fired a shot heard round Venice's Grand Canal. Hamilton, 43, is this year's star-power artist officially representing the U.S. at the 48th Venice Biennale, the oldest of the international art expositions. With 59 countries participating and more than 100 artists on view through Nov. 7, there is, as ever, notable work amid a great deal of minor junk. At the opening, Hamilton's minimalist installation--four rooms that appear empty but for a shower...
...work is internationally known. This year's display is no different, with backing of about $1 million from government and private sources, including a $100,000 grant from the glitzy fashion house Gucci (and the requisite glamour of Gucci's creative director, Tom Ford, posing on several occasions with Hamilton as his bodyguards stood stonily by). These are the trappings of America's high-end art culture at the end of the century: spectacle is required. You go to the U.S. pavilion expecting a little extra wattage and buzz...
...Hamilton, selected from 15 nominees by an advisory committee to the government-sponsored Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, came as a superb choice. The recipient of many honors, including a 1993 MacArthur "genius" award, she's a maker of large-scale, sometimes frightening tableaux--unless you're at home with vitrines full of flesh-eating beetles crawling over butchered meat or a huge room carpeted in horsehair in which the artist sat mute at a table, burning words from a book...
What is surprising in Venice is Hamilton's shift, her outsize Surrealist style giving way to disarming quiet. Sitting in the hotel room where she stayed with her husband and five-year-old son during the six weeks that she and a crew of nearly 20 created the show, Hamilton explains the new approach. "When I started this project, I wanted to make something big and yet something almost humble and empty, to comment on American domination," she says. "There is so much in our history that we cannot look at, that we refuse...
Everything in Hamilton's show follows from that statement. Inside the pavilion, the high white walls are covered with Braille that translates tales of American violence from Charles Reznikoff's poetry book Testimony: the United States, 1885-1915: recitative. Down the walls, bright fuchsia powder, with its overtones of toxic waste, falls from tanks hidden in the ceilings. The artist's recorded voice whispers Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, with its moving call for healing during the savagery of the Civil War, but it too is interpreted, spelled out in the phonetic alphabet used by pilots (Alfa for a, Bravo...