The Common SENSE: Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery

“The common SENSE”

Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery October 11, 2014 – April 26, 2015

I like the multiple puns in the title of this exhibition. Common sense is a term we use for what works on the most basic level. It helps us through a lot of situations that might otherwise be difficult. (We should, in fact, think of it more often these days, when everything seems so convoluted). Another meaning is suggested by capitalizing SENSE. Ann Hamilton is fascinated by our senses: this exhibition emphasizes the sense of touch, but seeing and hearing are part of that idea for Hamilton.

A third meaning is that everything on the planet shares the common sense of touch. According to Jainism, the world is divided by the number of senses we have. The only sense that every class of life on the planet has is touch, some have only that (the pay off is that some one-sensed vegetable bodies, like the turnip, have numerous souls). One might say that touch is what we will be left with when all else fails.

That idea suggests another reference (not a pun) in this title. Commonsense is telling us that climate change is deeply altering life on the planet. Common sense says we must change.

The exhibition leads us to this idea in an unusual way.

In each gallery a shelf has been set up with pairs of metal prongs that hold stacks of a single passage of text on newsprint. We could read, and, if we chose, and even take a text with us. During the course of the exhibition, then, the texts will disappear (they are taken from a tumblr site where we can all add passages that are selected for inclusion). Some new texts will be added, but even in my two visits separated by ten days, there were many gaps where texts had been before. Gaps, that is another point here.

We are actively removing the exhibition content, the opposite of the usual museum visit, when we are allowed only to look, never to touch, and certainly not to take away the work. But here, the artworks are these texts on newsprint. They have no value except as an exchange of ideas. Although they are supposed to be on the theme of touch, I found most of them spoke of seeing, writing, creating.  We can say that our creative lives are dependent on the primal touch: we touch the keyboard, poetry touches our ears, a play touches our eyes and there is the touch of emotion on our hearts.

In the first gallery we immerse ourselves in brief passages from well–known writers, like Elizabeth Bishop or John Berger or T.S. Eliot and , oddly,  “Cock Robin” children’s books.  In the same gallery is a case full of scissors and copies of “commonplace” books,  an accumulation of favorite texts copied down together.

We are invited to make our own “commonplace book” with the texts in the gallery and place them in a folder labelled “A Common Place” that we were given as we entered. Since I love to read, that seems like a great idea.  There is a bit of a ready-made quality, compared to actually copying quotes, the texts are readymade, preselected, and typed. But they are resonant quotes. And the pleasure of reading them is partly the need to slow our pace, and think about what they say. We cannot rush through this space. That is one of Hamilton’s trademarks: expanding time and space in a meditative way.

But suddenly the exhibition changes its flavor as we turn the corner into the next set of galleries. First we see dead animals in cases. We recoil and wonder why they are here. We had warning (the story of the murder of Cock Robin), but we didn’t know it, until it was too late.  But more copies of children’s books with the story of Cock Robin’s murder and funeral await us across the hall.

Then comes another shock: almost unbearably the next four large galleries have eerie, blurry images of dead birds and small  mammals. They are reproduced as multiple copies: the dead creatures were laid on a flatbed scanner (we don’t know that right away),printed on newsprint and then hung in stacks on the wall. Apparently, only the parts that touched the scanner are sharp  (the claws, the heads)

What are they? Why are they there? I am invited to “take” an image. I can’t make myself take anything. It is too horrifying to take an image of a dead bird. So the gallery facilitator rips one off and hands it to me. I feel sick to my stomach. As I pass the blurry photographs of dead birds and animals (dead at the hands of scientists who preserved them and studied them I learn later) I feel increasingly oppressed. At first they are like shadows, then it is death captured in a copy, hanging on a wall.

Then, it comes to me. Of course, this is about extinctions, climate change, what we are doing to the planet. Our acts of early classification and taxidermy, our urge to extract species from their natural life cycle and habitat and categorize them, has led inexorably to our present accelerated slaughter of the planet. We are just killing on a larger and larger scale with each new extraction, by fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands as well as climate change itself which is altering the seas, the seasons, the cycles of life from the microscopic to the huge ( For example pine bark beetles have longer breeding seasons in warmer winters and are killing many more trees now) .

In one gallery a young woman reads from a book. It is The Peregrine by JA Baker. She reads a passage and then copies it into a notebook. In another gallery, a young man sings a dirge “We remember the elephant, we remember the polar bear, we remember the camel, we remember the shrew, we remember the armadillo, we remember the leopard etc.”

Downstairs we go to the next gallery which is filled with large old fashioned glass museum cases, all enveloped in curtains.  When we open the curtain, we see a new set of specimens, not animals or birds, but fur coats, animal skin clothes, various examples from the Burke and Henry collections, each with a tag that identifies the donor. ( Can you imagine donating your fox skin wrap to a museum today).

After the claustrophobia of the specimens in cases, the final very large gallery opens up into an entirely different sensory experience. On one wall are the familiar shelves with texts, but filling the space are what appeared to be wind operated fans; initially, I thought it was a reference to the millions of birds killed by wind power (perhaps it was indirectly). Scattered around on the floor are stools.

On closer inspection, though, the “fans” were complex devices: the artist identified them as “bull roarers” traditionally a simple shape with a string attached to it, that is swung around the head to make a vibrato sound that can be heard over great distances.

Ann Hamilton’s idea here appears to be to gather us together on the stools in this gallery to listen to the sound and meditate on it as well as the state of the world.

But I am not sure of that. These bull roarers are extremely complicated in their design, one side is a blade, the other is a constructed device that makes a sound as it moves up the pole by friction and down the pole by gravity (like a breathing cycle the artist explained). They have little relationship to the simplicity of historical bull roarers (which we usually identify as part of a sacred indigenous ritual such as burial, perhaps another reference the artist had in mind). The exhibition needed the sense of resolution, but I think the “bull roarers” designed according to a mechanical anglo tradition, did not create a space for spiritual gathering.

In spite of my reservation about the last gallery, “The Common SENSE” by Ann Hamilton at the Henry Art Gallery is a landmark event.

First, the artist created unusual networks on the University of Washington Campus by reaching out to the Burke Museum, the Special Collections at the Library, and even the choral music program.

Second, she invited our participation, in both the removal of texts from the exhibition to start our own “Commonplace Book”  and the addition of texts at the tumblr site (readers-reading-readers.tumblr.com), as well as, if we chose to, reading in the gallery ( sign up at readerscribe@henry art.org).

Finally, at the exit of the exhibition, we are invited to have our own photograph taken behind a white screen, with only our shoulder touching. We become specimens like the birds in the galleries, except of course, we are not dead, and can walk out of the building.

But perhaps as we walk out, we bring with us a new common sense of the results of the actions of humans with five senses on the planet, and the responsibility we bear to make sure that the planet will continue to survive. We cannot continue in the line that Ann Hamilton has drawn from the medieval murder story of Cock Robin to the present rapid rate of extinctions.

Ann Hamilton has embraced the present state of the planet and our responsibility for it in this emotionally complex art work.