The Event of a Thread

Reading to the pigeons. Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread, 2012. Commissioned by Park Avenue Armory. Courtesy the artist.

Project Description

Commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory for the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the event of a thread was on view from December 5, 2012 through January 6, 2013. Set into motion by visitors, a field of swings, a massive white cloth, a flock of homing pigeons, spoken and written texts, and transmissions of weight, sound, and silence animated the hall's particular civic and social space.

The intersections of reading, writing, and singing bracket the open field of the hall, which is bisected by a massive white cloth—suspended through ropes and pulleys to forty-two swings—that registers the back and forth, up and down, pull and lift of body weight. The silk's liquidity registers the combined velocities and accelerations of the field of swings. The shifting weather of the white cloth is generated through collective action.

At the threshold of the hall and facing a flock of caged pigeons, two readers, seated at a wood table, read aloud from scrolls that slowly amass below on the floor. Their address is to the birds; part explanation, part impossible communication. Transmitted to radios in paper bags, their voices are hand-carried throughout the space by visitors. On the hall's opposite end and facing away from the white cloth, a seated writer responds to the elements of the room and the space as seen in a mirror reflection whose rotating view is determined by the cloth's movement.

As the hall is bracketed by reading and writing, the interval of the day is bracketed by live song and its recording. At day's end, a vocalist on a balcony serenades the pigeons when released to flight. Composed by David Lang, their plainsong is cut live to vinyl lathe. A different singer on each successive day accretes, in turn, an additional record, and in time, a "chorus."

the event of a thread is made from crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer's hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag, is a stylus crossing a groove, is a touch being touched in return. It is a flock of birds and a field of swings in motion. It is a particular point in space at an instant of time.

On the event of the thread

I can remember the feeling of swinging—how hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. We were sailing, so inside the motion—time stopped—and then suddenly rushed again toward us. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together.

Suspended in the liquidity of words, reading also sets us in motion. We fall between a book's open covers, into the texture of the paper and the regularity of the line. The rhythm and breath of someone reading out loud takes us to a world far away. As a child, I could spend hours pressed against the warmth of my grandmother's body listening to her read, the rustling of her hand turning the page, watching the birds and the weather outside, transported by the intimacy of a shared side by side.

the event of a thread is made of many crossings of the near at hand and the far away: it is a body crossing space, is a writer's hand crossing a sheet of paper, is a voice crossing a room in a paper bag, is a reader crossing with a page and with another reader, is listening crossing with speaking, is an inscription crossing a transmission, is a stylus...