Gyroscope, Reinstalled

Today was gorgeous... I took a long walk down around The Mall this afternoon, and it was incredible. I took my parents down there, and they went to the Museum of the American Indian and the Botanical Gardens, while I went to the Hirshhorn.

I love the Hirshhorn. Their "Gyroscope" exhibition of the permanent collection is always changing, and the Fall 2005 presentation recently went up. There was an Ann Hamilton installation piece that is new since the last time I was there; it was pretty amazing. It consisted of a room papered floor to ceiling in probably a thousand little pieces of parchment paper, each covered in writing... snippets of story, little confessonal memoir bits. Each one was attached to the wall by a pushpin at the top, and the paper kind of rustled and fluttered because a fan was set up to blow across the room. The floor was similarly tiled with the pieces, though these were under a layer of beeswax, and couldn't be read. I was just really moved by the whole thing, and spent a significant amount of time in there reading the individual story bits.

I was still thinking about it when I sat down to my computer that night, and so I did a little research about it... the pieces is called Palimpsest. What does that mean?

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. Another motive may have been directed by the desire of Church officials to "convert" pagan Greek script by overlaying it with the word of God.

For poststructuralist literary critics, the palimpsest provides a model for the function of writing. Like Freud's discussion of The Mystic Writing Pad, the palimpsest foregrounds the fact that all writing takes place in the presence of other writings--that it is not people who "speak" language, but language which "speaks" people. Palimpsests subvert the concept of the author as the sole originary source of her work, and thus defer the "meaning" of a work down an endless chain of signification.

That defintion is interesting w/r/t the piece on several levels, but the part about subverting the concept of the author as the sole originator of the work is really apt. We generally think of the artist as the person who "owns" the piece, but in this case, the fact that the building blocks of the installation are the stories of hundreds of other people make it really obvious that the art isn't an isolated creation of one person. At the same time, by conceptualizing and executing the piece, the unattributed stories do in some way belong to the artist... the individual pieces wouldn't have the meaning that they do if they were viewed in isolation. It's as if the author has written her own text over the individual manuscripts, converting the works into a new story. Brilliant!

Knowing this background, I feel like I have to go back and see it again. (Oh-- as an aside, apparently there were also live snails in a jar with some cabbages to eat... I didn't even notice that part, and don't know what to make of it. Maybe on another visit...)