Inside a rare book at the Bernard Becker Medical Library, this 1620 copper engraving shows the “Bonet-method” of sign language. Does it remind you of stylus in any way? How is gesture used in Ann Hamilton’s installation? On the third Saturday of every month, from now until January, the Pulitzer is offering Exploring Art tours in which groups will be asked to ponder concepts in stylus and how they might relate to artifacts, like this one.

In the process of composing stylus, Ann Hamilton visited the medical library, with the possibility of using items from its archives in the Pulitzer galleries. She didn’t, but much of what’s in the archives fits in with themes Ann incorporated into the exhibition. Courtney Henson, our visitor services manager, felt a visit to the library was a perfect jumping off point for relating the exhibition to the outside world, which is the main purpose of Exploring Art. 

This fall’s stylus-tailored tour, ”Call and Response at the Pulitzer and Bernard Becker Medical Library,”  begins at the Pulitzer, where you join docents for an interactive stroll through the installation. Courtney stresses the word “interactive,” because unlike many tours, in which you can simply let information wash over you, you’ll be invited to offer your own revelations, speak into a piano, try on paper hands, read a concordance and otherwise activate the installation.

“The hope is for visitors to be active participants, rather than just passive viewers,” says Courtney.

After being immersed in stylus, you’ll shuttle to the Bernard Becker Library, where you and docents can view esoteric books, from as early as the 1600s, and hearing apparatuses from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here’s a 1950s ad for a device, which can be seen in the library’s digital exhibit Deafness in Disguise: Concealed Hearing Devices of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It reminds me of the performance at stylus’s opening, in which someone on a steel ladder read a concordance into a head microphone, which transmitted his or her voice through a speaker worn on the hips of someone else silently reading from another ladder. You can find shots of this in the opening reception Flicker album. Ann Hamilton wore the speaker at one point and noted it was as if she were “carrying his (the reader’s) voice.”

After you investigate the library and undoubtedly make connections to stylus, your docent will ask you to call 1-314-884-1553 and leave a message. These recordings will be broadcast from the bell speakers on the roof of the Pulitzer.

Courtney suggests that your message answer the question “What might stylus speak?”

For details on Exploring Art tours, visit our main website. Please RSVP to Visitor Services Manager Courtney Henson one week prior to your tour date, at 314-754-1860 or chenson@pulitzerarts.org.

P.S. The blog Accidental Mysteries posted today particularly creepy images from the Bernard Becker Medical Library here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kay Renner, a gallery assistant, explains how to play the pianos in stylus, and how visitors’ experiences depend a lot on what they contribute to the installation.

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David Robertson, Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, describes how Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente relates to the work of Ann Hamilton.

For every exhibition, the Pulitzer teams up with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for a concert series related to concepts behind the works of art in the galleries. The stylus Concert Series begins this September 14th and 15th. For more information, visit our main website.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The founders of All Along Press talk about printing the concordance texts and demonstrate part of the process. Smudge the dog performs tricks.

When you enter stylus, one of the first things you see is a steel table, with a half-circle cut from it, where a concrete pillar shoots through it and two floors of Pulitzer building. On top of the table are what look like newspapers. You start to read one (yes, you’re allowed to touch them) and it feels like you’re doing so from inside a dream; the text consists of a column of repeating words and what, at first skim, is gobbledygook to either side of it. Here’s a short section from one of these papers:

“No one charged us a penny for our pleasure in…disconcerting. I appear to be strangely distracted and barely…bid to become an action star proper looks a fairly safe bet. Just…and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his…by BBC political editor, Nick Robinson.”

“It’s kind of interesting to think about what sentence might have gone with what paper,” says Courtney Henson, our visitor services manager.

These “concordance texts” have their own unique trajectory in becoming part of stylus. Each week, Ann Hamilton chooses specific words, and with computer software, pulls sentences containing those words from the RSS feeds of eight international newspapers to generate the document. An index of those words is ordered alphabetically down the center of the page so you can see how often they’re mentioned in the collage of articles.

“She’s directing that news around the words this exhibition hovers on,” Courtney says, noting two words that Ann has chosen before: light and listening.

Besides in the Entrance Gallery, concordances are placed on the Mezzanine and near the miked table on the stairs to the Lower Gallery. Gallery assistants invite visitors to read the concordances out loud at these stations as a way to activate the installation and be a part of stylus. (You can see Ann reading a concordance on one of the ladders, at the opening here.)

On the top, right corner of a concordance, next to Ann Hamilton’s name is “All Along Press,” the tag of the printing press that is printing, folding and delivering this weekly for the duration of the exhibition.

“If you come in any Friday afternoon, that’s what we’ll be doing for the next six months,” says Elysia Mann.

Elysia Mann and Steven Brien founded All Along Press, a cooperative printing shop, two and a half years ago on St. Louis’s hopping Cherokee Street, a confluence of art galleries, antique shops and Mexican restaurants. Since Rachel and I worked with them last year on our Urban Alchemy guerrilla ad campaign, they’ve moved down the street to a bigger space to fit their growing enterprise. The concordances are their first long-term printing job that requires so many prints be made within a relatively short amount of time.

“We have a few hours to print a hundred and fifty of them by hand and get them to you guys by the next morning,” explains Steven. It usually takes the printmakers around six hours to complete the project.

Every Friday, Ann emails the two a file of the concordance, which they then have printed out at Kinko’s. That copy is what they use to make a film positive, by imbuing it with baby oil. The baby oil method helps them meet their deadline and also gives the final prints a more handmade feel than an actual film positive, which is what Ann Hamilton wants.

Each week, Ann picks a different shade of ink, to further add to the novelty of each paper, and sometimes Steve and Elysia make their own shade off of what Hamilton has wanted in the past. As with other aspects of stylus–the bell speakers, the paper hands–the concordances have been prescribed a basic structure by Ann Hamilton and then given leeway to evolve as others have a hand in their making.

For  a mere $2, you can own one of these prints, designed by Ann Hamilton and facilitated by our friends at All Along Press.

A visitor examines a concordance in the Entrance Gallery.

I knew being a gallery assistant here would be a great venture, and it hasn’t disappointed me yet. I’ve been through Old Masters, Gordon Matta-Clark and now Ann Hamilton. What fascinates me most about stylus is that all of the people that come get some kind of experience. Now you can say it’s the hands-on aspects that everyone enjoys, or you can say it’s the design of the building and the appearance of the projections on the walls. Or you can say that the jumping beans really get people excited–most visitors haven’t seen these in a long time, if ever. For me, it’s the Cube Gallery that makes me glad that I work here. That’s an important room. The piano starts playing when people sign-in at the front desk on the touch pad. Some people in the Cube while this happens get startled, while others just laugh.

As a gallery assistant in that room, I generally keep the laughter going by either singing or playing the piano–and no, I can’t play a lick–and show them the recorder that’s in the piano. It’s very different than our last exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, which often had sad stories associated to the art. It was much more serious. I found myself engaged in the history behind the art in Urban Alchemy and the Old Masters exhibition, as well as how the works fit with the Pulitzer building. stylus is playful and makes you aware of your surroundings – from the sound that comes out of the ground to the light that rotates around the walls, you are sure to find pleasure in this space. That makes my job enjoyable, and I’m able to get into my work and really have a good time with everyone. What a job!

I have been working as a Gallery Assistant at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts for a little over a month now, and the experience has been remarkable. My first visit to the Pulitzer was at the behest of a Tadao Ando enthusiast and part-time art historian; I spent a great deal of time marveling at the modern and elegant design that Ando so beautifully conceived. Later that month, I returned for Ideal (Dis-) Placements and was hooked.

I feel fortunate to have begun my tenure along with the wonderful stylus by Ann Hamilton. It has been fun showing visitors how to interact with the space. The touch pad at the front entrance always draws a curious smile when I ask visitors to sign their name and wait to hear what happens. Delight is often the next reaction.

Ann Hamilton’s stylus is less an installation than a visual and aural experience. Hamilton has truly animated the Pulitzer and done so with particular attention to the space. Each station in the installation coheres precisely to its location; the jumping beans on the Mezzanine wriggle around from the heat of the sun that shines so brightly through the second floor windows. The jumping beans elicit the greatest number of questions: What are these? Why do they move? After a month I feel like I have graduated from novice to near expert on the genus Sebastiania.

As a gallery assistant, I spend a lot of time thinking about the interplay of the space and the installation, but I also engage with visitors and help answer/pose questions. Some of my favorite visitors have been children. They are always astounded that they are allowed to “play” (albeit gently) in the space. They love donning the paper hands in the Main Gallery and rolling the balls on the steel table à la the old Labyrinth game. Then again, everyone seems to like the rolling table. In a short time, I’ve encountered a myriad of visitors: engineer sisters from Houston, museum owners from Kansas, freelance art critics, and very happy five year-olds.

The most transportive part of the installation, for me, has been the “talking piano” in the Cube Gallery. It is hooked up to the other piano in the Lower Gallery and responds to visitors signing in or speaking into the microphone in the Main Gallery. Recently, two young art students told me they had traveled from Kentucky for this installation and one then proceeded to play a long and beautiful song. His playing combined with the other layers of sound that echo throughout the space created an otherworldly experience.

As stylus continues its residency, I continue to appreciate the nuances of the work and its intimate connection to the Pulitzer space.  I look forward to helping others enjoy and engage in Ann Hamilton’s wonderfully creative and interactive exhibition.

Join us this week on August 5, from 6-9pm for the first open Thursday for stylus.

Visitors walk through the Main Gallery during the opening reception for stylus.

The “bean” is actually a seed from a tree found in certain mountainous regions in Mexico. The seed contain the larva of the jumping bean moth. In the spring, these moths lay their eggs on the seed, which then burrow their way inside and turn into larvae. The larvae feed on the soft tender heart of the bean and remain protected inside during the course of their development into moths. The following spring, the moths hatch, and the cycle repeats itself.

The beans actually “jump” as a survival measure. The heat, which causes them to dry out, is their enemy. Thus, when the bean gets into the sun or onto a hot surface, the larva snaps its body in an effort to roll to a cooler place.

At the Pulitzer, the sound they make as they reverberate on the table is miked and amplified through speakers in the floor of the Mezzanine, giving the visitor the experience of being truly immersed in the beans. At times, this sound is also emitted throughout the main speaker system in the building. All in all, the beans provide a living, moving that literally animates the space.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visitors at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts give their impressions at the opening reception for stylus: a project by ann hamilton.