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Between Absorption and Awakening: The Installation/Performance works of Ann Hamilton

Rhee Jieun 1

1명지대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper studies Ann Hamilton’s performance/installation works, which employ various ready-made and found objects and humans engaged in seemingly mundane activities. In straddling between performance and installation, her works tend to blur the boundary drawn between the two distinct artistic practices. Hamilton’s creative efforts can be also considered as a critique of what can be seen as the dominance of sight in visual art by allowing other senses such as smell, sound, and touch to participate in the making and experience of her art. These qualities, the blurring of genre and non-ocularcentric treatment of materials, can be called postmodern in the sense that they take issue with Greenbergian Modernism, which has championed the visuality and the purity of separate artistic practices on the basis of their own material conditions. Ironically, however, the reception of Hamilton’s work reveals that viewers take her works otherwise. With all the aural, tactile, and olfactory distractions that draw their attention, the viewers of Hamilton’s work tend to take a position that has been primarily understood as that of the beholder of Modernist painting. Far from being “awakened” by the work into the surroundings, the viewers are submerged into a state of absorption as their aesthetic response. Many critics duly note the contemplative aspects of Hamilton’s work, using the terms such as ‘meditative’ ‘nostalgic’ ‘religious’ and even ‘sublime’, that have been the words describing the traits of modernist painting. Reading in parallel with the receptions of modernist painting articulated by Michael Fried, this paper will argue the unique qualities of Hamilton’s performance/installation that challenge the binary opposition of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics.

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