Art That Stirs Creativity: Rufus Wainwright

 

For “Touchstones,” ARTnews asks creative figures from different disciplines—writers, musicians, filmmakers, chefs, and so on—about one artwork that has inspired them.

Meredith Monk

Composer, singer, creator of the opera ATLAS, winner of 2015 National Medal of Arts…

…on Ann Hamilton, The Event of a Thread (2012) [pictured above]

The Event of a Thread was a huge installation mounted in the Park Avenue Armory in New York. It was multisensory and combined different perceptual modes into one. There was a huge white curtain strung across the Armory and swings that came down from the ceiling; when someone swung, they were attached to pulleys and chains that influenced the movement of this beautiful silk. It was a piece about interdependence and interconnection, and to be able to manifest a philosophical principle like that in an aesthetic way was extraordinary. It was a kind of weaving in real time of objects and language and action.