The Lucky Penny

A few weeks ago I was walking home up Park Avenue after work and I noticed a banner with the words Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread hanging off the side of the Park Avenue Armory on 67^th street.  I stopped for a moment outside the Armory vaguely recalling seeing a review for the show on a news segment that played on a taxi cab screen during a recent ride.  I could not remember much except that the exhibit included large wooden swings that you could swing on, I however had failed to realize at the time I saw the advertisement that the show was being held so closely to my apartment.

Last Friday my boyfriend John and I decided it would be fun to check out the Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread exhibit before it ended on Sunday.  We made our way over to the armory around 4:30PM and after a half hour wait inline to pick up our tickets at roll call, we made our way to the entrance of the instillation.  If you have never been to the Park Avenue Armory the inside is a sprawling 55, 000 square foot hall which Hamilton was commissioned by the Armory to fill with her artwork.  When first entering the hall we were immediately drawn to a table with many wooden crates containing live pigeons in them.  At the table, a man and a woman knelled beside it, wearing heavy grey cloaks, softly reading text in front of them into two microphones.  Across from the readers two scrolls spilled off the table and on to the floor as if to symbolize the injection of the soft hum of the readers spoke words into space of the exhibit.

The hall was divided into two halves by a white curtain spanning floor to ceiling and wall to wall with each half filled with dozens of wooden swings.  The swings, large enough for two people to sit on together were all connected to each other by an intricate network of strings spanning across the ceiling on both sides of the curtain.  The strings holding the swings together were also attached to the white curtain which appeared to dance, slowly rising up and down, pulled by the movement of people swinging on the swings.  At the other end of the hall there sat a woman calmly writing at a writing desk, a spotlight illuminating the space around her.  There were brown paper bags being handed out to some of the revelers which contained speakers in them which occasionally would play a recording of a woman or man speaking, what they were saying was hard to make out.  At the end of the evening they released the pigeons from their cages right after a singer appeared on a balcony above the exhibit, singing a haunting melody that would be recorded and then played the following day at the exhibit.

Needless to say it was definitely a strange instillation, but strange in only wonderfully perplexing ways.  The gentle movement of the curtain rising up and down coupled with being surrounded by people swinging created a very serene feeling within me.  The sound of conversation around us, combined with the two cloaked readers reading into their microphones, as well as the occasional recorder spoken words playing in the paper bags being carried by visitors, created an atmosphere that was dreamlike in many ways.  As John and I sat on a swing, swinging back and forth together, looking up at the matrix of strings above us I knew I did not understand fully what the artist was saying with all the different pieces of the exhibit and yet I somehow felt like I was a part of it, like the collective experience was somehow connecting me to everything and everyone around me.  The connection I felt was indeed part of the intention of Hamilton, and with each part of the installation, the reading, writing, singing, and swinging she created a place, a space that seemed to detach itself from the outside world while bringing all those inside of it closer together. Unfortunately the last day of the show was on Sunday January 6^th but I look forward the next Ann Hamilton installation as the unique world she created within the Armory Walls was one I will never forget.

Continue reading →