{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025602783992045738, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005468555804126274, 'mean_word_length': 5.337007874015748, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Cabinet of Curiosities

In a relatively brief time, Ann Hamilton has drawn international attention to her ritualized sifting of language, memory and subjectivity in curious installation/performance hybrids. Her projects are quintessentially and peculiarly "alternative" in their amalgamation of artifacts, books, photo documents, video, performance and sound. They are complex, obsessive and impeccably crafted. Lyrical examples of a sort of New-Age Dadaism, they romance meditative tasks that occupy space between meaning and non-meaning, history and fiction. "[T]he body and the object," a show organized by the Wexner Center, gave unexpected attention to the arcane collection of artifacts from 12 years of Hamilton's contemplative projects. Except for a catalog that includes a CD-ROM with images and a history of earlier installations, these objects were exhibited without clues to their original environments. In this exhibition, her uncanny constructions, once so pivotal to specific dialogues on artistic intellect, strain to become wholly self-referential sculpture. Even her increased production of video is autonomous and rhetorical, removed from the sites of its original theatrical tableaus. Fragmented and relaxed with respect to date and origin, key objects, photographs and videos have been edited and restaged, almost randomly, from her oeuvre. These fall into two categories: constructions that require special installation (usually video), and discrete freestanding works. Visitors entered the show through a rotating 20-foot high drapery that spun like a dervish as one entered. This untitled section, from an installation exhibited at New York's Sean Kelly Gallery in 1996, was reminiscent of a larger, motorized textile construction designed for the Art Institute of Chicago's 1995 exhibition, "About Place: Recent Art of the Americas." The Chicago piece was architectural in scope, expressing containment and passage as it led the viewer into an interior cell. It was designed for a site adjacent to a panoramic gallery window and as a result connoted domestic drapery, but it billowed from a metal track like stage curtains, repeatedly peeling back for an ever-changing spectacle. At the Wexner Center, the resituated skirt-contoured organza spoke of matriarchal majesty. However, seemingly unrelated to nearby artifacts, its main function seemed to hastily christen each new viewer, thereby initiating a series of animated works that repeated itself throughout the show, destined to serve as segues from one object-laden section to the next. Once inside, attention was diverted from armored suits constructed of toothpicks and overalls of flashlights and reflectors to a palm-sized video monitor embedded high in a gallery pillar. Elevated nearly eight feet from the floor, the video displayed an animated and garishly lipsticked ventriloquist dummy's jaw biting the air. Moving closer to the image caused the LCD screen to solarize and become a negative x-ray version of itself. Here, a tendency of Hamilton's to erase the physical boundaries of media was underlined by the conditional transmission of the image. Although her complete installations, of which this was only a part, often feature these tiny video monitors displaying facial details and are part of complex psychological narratives, the tapes by themselves are detached, which is not to say they are not provocative. By grafting these slow, silent images onto gallery walls and eliminating the visible electronic hardware, she animates white walls with Bunuel-like phantoms. One of Hamilton's most enduring participatory works, first shown as part of a larger 1988 project called "the capacity of absorption," here consisted of 100 wall fixtures constructed of copper armatures ensconcing clear glasses. The glasses were filled with various levels of liquid electronically stimulated into tiny whirlpools. The fixtures were arranged randomly over 600 square feet of wall space, transforming the room into a spectacular ritual site. …