The large scale and more ephemeral installation work has benefitted from the scholarship and documentation of many hands, keeping them alive long after they are disassembled. One important voice in that scholarship is that of curator Joan Simon, who has written extensively about the work in Ann Hamilton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002) and Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006). This text is an excerpt from the 2006 publication.

Made of many things tangible and intangible, including language spoken and written, Ann Hamilton's objects and installations share many qualities with poetry—the makings of "the figure," as Susan Stewart illuminates that process and that form. Hamilton has also often described herself as a maker, invoking the how as much as the what of the installations that have brought her international critical acclaim and the objects, which, since the outset in the mid-1980s, have had an important if less critically explored relation to the installations. For both types of work, Hamilton draws on her training in textiles and design as an undergraduate and in sculpture as a graduate student, as well as her self-taught investigations of film, photography, video, and audio. She is an artist whose works employ many types of matter and whose individual projects and objects are characterized by a particular gesture of the hand.

Hamilton's installation work follows a form of making where a site is claimed temporarily for performative events or situations and for the gathering there of found or made elements. They follow on 1960s happenings, assemblages, and environments, and in particular they share qualities with such hand-makings as the commodities within Claes Oldenburg's Store and the obsessive repetitions for the sculptural environments (as well as the furniture and costumes) of Yayoi Kusama. They also continue the 1970s "whole house" reclamations and domestic narratives of Los Angeles's Womanhouse, where daily labor as well as contemporary myth and taboo were offered up in transgressive acts, interventions, and performance. And, with those of her contemporaries who also first came to public attention in the 1980s, Hamilton's installations share an understanding of socioeconomic subtexts that are embedded in consciousness as well as in place but are often lost or effaced from written histories.

Hamilton's environments share an even longer strand of exploration: the autobiographical interventions of Kurt Schwitters's "Merz" art, created at different sites over some fourteen years from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, and Dada and Surrealist interventions that redefined rooms or galleries so as to engage viewers actively with the space as much as (if not more than) with individual objects, such as Duchamp's addressing the ceiling (with an estimated 1,200 suspended coal sacks for the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme) or the spaces "in M Sound, voice, touch, motion, extension and moral recognition . . . The figure made by practices of making themselves. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses between" (created in the central void that he crisscrossed with miles of string for the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in the gilded Whitelaw Reid Mansion). Hamilton's installations echo the quantities and obsessive repetition of materials used in these Duchamp installations and the experiential exploration required of viewers who step within the bounds of such environments.

Hamilton's installations (and the objects that relate to them) are distinguished from related artistic practice in three significant ways. First is her emphasis on time, not only as a process but also as a material itself and for its relation to the experience of the body. Her hand-makings tactily count out time as they fill space. Related is the slow pace of sensory investigation required of the visitor. The duration of a Hamilton installation is as important as any of the objects materialized (or unmade) during the course of an installation's display, and the cycles of growth as well as decay played out during its course. This quality relates as well to the objects which embody a gesture of ongoing time, and the incipient possibility of such a gesture's reenactment, for Hamilton's objects are keyed to a moment between the temporal and the fixed.

Second, Hamilton brings to installation sites something more ineffable than surreal coordinates and does more than place unusual things in juxtaposition within rather usual sites. Her materials, and her methods of making, serve as an invocation of place, of lost collective voices, of communities past and communities of labor present. In different ways this collective voicing, which Hamilton herself has referred to as a variably sized "choir," is embodied materially as well as spoken audibly.

Third is the paradoxical nature of combining a conceptualist's roaming of language and ideas with an almost contradictory quest to materialize these referents and further to craft them individually and/or hand-place each found bit into a large incremental, formally specific placement. This sense of crafting—of making, figuring, and ending by touch— the component parts (as well as the whole) distinguishes Hamilton's work from many of her generation who use resonant elements of an abject sort, collected or dispersed informally. Even more so does the political and moral sense of how her works are made set Hamilton apart: the visceral understanding that each placement of an element is an act of attention, a unit of a larger collective act of labor. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Hamilton's figuring of objects to installation and re-figuring of installations to objects is the sense of isolating the necessary gesture, the relation of act and thing, and the almost moral imperative that the making of each object (as an independent work or as a component of an installation) condense both voice and matter.

It is perhaps helpful to note that Hamilton has, as a critical part of her practice, recognized herself as a reader. She reads spaces for her site-responsive installations; she reads for the specifics of her installation's component parts and as background and inspiration, digging into volumes of history, socioeconomic theory, anthropology, and urban and agricultural studies. She has included readers (herself and others) within her installations, who absorb texts by speaking them silently to themselves while moving a hand over a line of text so as to rub or burn it out, or actually to lift it from its two-dimensional plane. Hamilton has used books in her installations as sensuous, tactile presences remade by the mark of the body. Books have also issued as objects from her installations. Moreover, each book serves practically and conceptually as an overall "corpus"—a body of information, a given container or figure—that is used in its entirety just as she also addresses the body and its sheltering clothing and architecture.

— Joan Simon

Text excerpted from Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006. Joan Simon.