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Overview
Described as an artist of "prodigious imagination and intelligence" by the New York Times, Jill Sigman makes art at the intersection of dance, visual art, and social practice. An artist's book that explores the ability of art to engage us and re-envision our environment, Ten Huts documents a series of site-specific huts that were hand built from found and repurposed materials ranging from the mundane (e-waste and plastic bottles) to the bizarre (circus detritus, dental molds, and mugwort grown on the banks of a toxic creek) in landscapes as varied as industrial Brooklyn and the Norwegian Arctic. Each of the extraordinary huts in this full-color book is a structure, a sculpture, and an emergency preparedness kit that raises questions about sustainability, shelter, real estate, and our future on this planet. Ten Huts features an artist essay by Jill Sigman and 499 illustrations, along with essays about The Hut Project by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (anthropology), André Lepecki (performance studies), Matthew McLendon (art history), Elise Springer (philosophy), and Eva Yaa Asantewaa (dance). Also includes a foreword by Pamela Tatge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819576903 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 80 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
JILL SIGMAN and her company jill sigman/thinkdance are based in New York City. Sigman choreographs with bodies and materials.
Jill Sigman and her company jill sigman/thinkdance are based in New York City. Sigman choreographs with bodies and materials.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Hut #1.
JORO BORO
DATE · December 2009 LOCATION · The Border, Brooklyn, New York DIAMETER · 4 feet ARTISTIC COLLABORATORS · Joro Boro (music), Marisol Montoya (video editing)
Hut #1 was an impulse. I didn't intend to build huts. The garbage was always good in the industrial building where my studio was in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I would happily collect things from the dumpster on the off chance that I would use them. (It was only later that I began to feel less self-satisfied about the steady supply of free waste.) One day I took what was lying around my studio — some branches, rods, cardboard tubes, chicken wire, fake fur and fabrics left over from past projects, and quickly built an improvised structure. It was a refuge. A lair. Most importantly, something to go into. I sat inside in silence.
I had recently completed Our Lady of Detritus, a portable performance installation, with composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval and performer Mariana Ferreira. We performed over a six-week period at public sites in four NYC boroughs in places like Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, and Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. It was a crazy circus of a performance with free "trash miracles" and an unscientific survey in English and Spanish asking viewers, "What is the last thing you threw away? How long did you have it?" It was sprawling and open; people came and went; they saw what they saw when they happened to be there. The blind men and the elephant.
I did what I set out to do. I wanted to make experimental performance more democratic. I wanted to bring my work to people who do not go to "underground" venues or have the intention, time, or money to find them. I wanted the work to be available in a larger way. And it was — under highways, on street corners, where people barbecue, and in the bus station that is the navel of New York City. People participated who would probably not have otherwise. And for that I was grateful.
But I also felt that the work was diffuse. I missed having a container and I realized why theaters are important. They allow us all to be together in some special space so that magic can happen. They hold things. I was feeling the need for a container, so I sat in the little hut that I built in my studio.
Over time I began to explore an image of "subsistence living" in the hut. What would a post-apocalyptic world of frontier living be like? I found myself in a survivalist harem weaving strands of red licorice, and making occasional forays out of the hut on hands and knees to search for water. I imagined a topsy-turvy world having put itself back together with a disturbing social order and the meaning of objects reassigned.
In about a week I dismantled the hut. I had no idea that I would build any others.
My "frontier living" in Hut #1 involved weaving red licorice. I am interested in pop commodities like candy as they might be reinvented in an imagined future.
The licorice weavings appeared in Apoca-Harem-Fetish, a short film made with video footage that I shot in Hut #1. It was edited by Marisol Montoya with music by DJ Joro Boro. While the hut functioned as a refuge, it also had a sinister side. The film suggested the life of a part-human part-animal concubine in captivity in the hut.
The portable performance installation Our Lady of Detritus premiered in 2009 at six public sites in four New York City boroughs. It was a wacky meditation on waste for a city on the go. I had misgivings about how hyperbolic it became in order to compete visually and sonically in these busy environments. In response to its diffuse carnival feeling I found myself building the first hut.
an invitation
Choose an object in your environment that is plentiful: plastic water bottles, take-out coffee cups, stones, pine cones, candies, eggshells, athletic socks, magazines ... (It's best to pick something that won't roll away.) Gather many. Find a clear space. Make a big circle of your chosen objects in the space. Sit on the floor in the middle of your circle. How does it feel to be in a circle? And how does it feel to be in a circle of this particular material? What do you notice? Try sitting with your eyes closed as well. Now make the circle larger or smaller and sit inside again. Does it feel different? Now remove the objects and sit on the floor in the same place. How does it feel?
CHAPTER 2Hut #2.
JILL SIGMAN
DATE · December 2009 LOCATION · The Border, Brooklyn, New York DIAMETER · 4 feet
I missed Hut #1 so I decided to build another one. Again, I improvised with things I found lying around the studio — leftover materials from old props and costumes, wood and plastic from the dumpster, and hundreds of Ace bandages that I found at Materials for the Arts.
Materials for the Arts is an amazing thing. A partnership of New York City's Department of Sanitation, Department of Cultural Affairs, and Department of Education, it is a big warehouse where people and companies give things that they want to throw away and artists and educators take them. You never know what you will find there. And when I uncovered "the mother lode" (a huge stash of Ace bandages, discarded but unused), I'm not sure why I felt compelled to take them, but I did.
My intention this time was to make a hut in which I could stand. I decided to weave the top of the hut out of the Ace bandages. But what I neglected to realize is that the bandages, being what they are, pull in and contract so the woven part shrank, creating a kind of Eiffel tower effect.
This was actually quite fortuitous. It helped me to see what properties these bandages had, and I realized I shouldn't waste them by weaving them together. In the future, they became a staple of my building process — almost always tied to things to hold them tightly in place. Because they contract when you tie them and they aren't slippery, they are a great binding material; they cling and grab.
I continued to use the Ace bandages on four more huts, and they won my heart. As for Hut #2, I was so nonplussed that all I have is a lousy cell phone photo.
Ace bandages became central to my building process. In Hut #2, I was trying to stretch them, but I quickly learned how they contract and began to create techniques to knot and wrap with them instead.
When I began to run out of bandages I started to look for substitutes — first discarded elastic of all sorts, then strips of stretchy fabric, then eventually old tights and pantyhose. By the time I got to Hut #10, it was held together mostly by women's hosiery and a few baby socks.
For all the huts, I stuck to very primitive ways of attaching things, staying away from adhesives and hardware because they allow you to defy the forms the materials want to take. It was important to me to follow the lead of the materials and respond to their natural movement and properties. Most of the huts are basically tied together.
Figuring out how materials work and letting that guide me came to characterize the hut-building process. I am trained as a choreographer and movement artist and I am used to figuring things out through movement. It was no different with the huts. I didn't know how a hut would look before I started. I would gather materials and see what they could do. It was an improvisational process. My movement work with human bodies transferred to my work with things like elastic, driftwood, coffee grounds, and electronics. Each hut was different because the materials were different and my improvisations led in different directions.
Over time, this improvisation with the scraps in my studio evolved into a practice of building with site-specific waste, materials cast off by people and nature that I found on or near each site. The waste was markedly different in different places, yet certain common threads emerged. I found that what I collected always fell roughly into six (non-scientific) categories:
1 NON-BIODEGRADABLE TRASH: plastic bottles and containers, tarps, Styrofoam, toys, toothbrushes and other plastic pieces, vinyl, Ikea bags, plexiglass
2 BIODEGRADABLE HOUSEHOLD ITEMS: bandages, old T-shirts, sheets, other fabrics, lumber, glass, wooden crates, cardboard, shredded paper, baseballs
3 PLANTS & OTHER ORGANIC MATTER: branches, dried grasses and yard clippings, earth, coffee grounds, dead lizards, shells, insects, coconuts, bones, shark teeth
4 BLING: orange Hazmat items, hot pink emergency tape, Caution tape, safety vests, sparkly flooring from Fashion Week, bike reflectors, red licorice, costume jewelry, fancy shoes, fluorescent wig, Mac computer boxes
5 METAL AND ELECTRONICS: lamps, car parts, golf clubs, phones, printers, computers, aluminum siding, cooking pots, trays, bicycle wheels, chicken wire, radios
6 KITSCH: plastic flamingos, figurines, paintings, stuffed animals, Christmas decorations, fake fur, toys, old tablecloths, and potholders
Some huts veered more in one direction. Some had a balance of all six types of material.
an invitation
Do this outdoors or at a window. Choose your visual field as if you are choosing a picture frame for what you see. Keep that same frame for five minutes. As you look at the world, notice all the instances of movement in your visual field. When you notice movement, tag it mentally with respect to scale (small, medium, large), distance (near, medium, far), and speed (slow, medium, fast). If you're not sure, just make a guess. See if you can resist the temptation to change your visual field or follow movement out of your frame (a motorcycle, a leaf, a person walking). If you get tired, remember to breathe; send the energy out through the top of your head and down through the soles of your feet. How can you keep doing the same thing even when you are tired or bored? After five minutes, stop. What did you notice about the movement composition that you just witnessed?
CHAPTER 3Hut #3.
PETER SHAPIRO
DATE · January 2010 LOCATION · The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York HOST/CURATOR · Hélène Lesterlin DIAMETER · 10 feet ARTISTIC COLLABORATORS · Peter Shapiro (video), Holland Hobson (music), JOAN (music), Kristin Norderval (music), Marisol Montoya (video editing) BUILDING ASSISTANTS · Michael Doo, Ayriel Hunt
There is a replica of a Lenape wigwam, built using traditional techniques, near the salt marsh in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan. I have long loved this beautiful wigwam and the way that saplings were bent over fire to create its arches. I wondered if I could create something with a similar shape. I also wondered if I could build something bigger than Hut #2.
When I was offered a residency at EMPAC, I saw it as my chance to find out. Ironically, it's an experimental media center full of new technologies and I was interested in some of the oldest technologies around. The staff offered me the empty boxes from their Christmas presents instead of the equipment that came in them. I was just beginning to realize how much waste one could find everywhere, and I asked RPI students to show me "where I could get some good garbage." It was January in Troy; we dug things out from under the snow.
I used the hut as a place to try out building techniques and also movement. Holland Hobson improvised with me live on his electric banjo, and Kristin Norderval improvised vocally from Oslo via Skype. Video artist Peter Shapiro accompanied me to EMPAC and was part of the research around Hut #3. In addition to documenting my movement explorations, he filmed piles of garbage and ominous birds at the dump in Albany, New York, and we experimented with different types of projections on and around the hut.
Hut #3 was built on the heels of a devastating earthquake in Haiti at the beginning of 2010. People were digging through rubble and bizarrely I was building a hut out of fallen branches, a fluorescent sawhorse, and packaging materials. It felt like an emergency preparedness kit. In one movement improvisation, I bound myself to young trees with my ubiquitous Ace bandages and explored wrapping and rocking as processes related to safety, grief, and transformation. I later made a video called Papoose with footage by Peter Shapiro and music by Kristin Norderval.
It was with this hut that I realized that a hut creates a space and gives people room to imagine doing what they do there. Mick Bello was working at EMPAC as a video engineer. When I built Hut #3, he joked about whether his band JOAN could rehearse in the hut. I said, "Sure!" Next thing I knew, four guys carted in two drum kits, amps, speakers, electric guitars ... They played, I danced, and Peter vjed. A rave on the edge of the world.
I slept in Hut #3 one night. A member of the janitorial staff came in early in the morning and froze in the darkness near the doorway, like someone in the forest wondering what kind of animal is out there.
The wigwam in Inwood Hill Park in upper Manhattan was an inspiration for Hut #3. Inwood Hill Park used to be the summer home of the Lenape, a Native American tribe whose territory traditionally included the Lower Hudson Valley, the Delaware Valley, and western New Jersey. The wigwam in the park is a contemporary replica of a traditional Lenape structure. It is built with a double set of arches and large sheets of tulip poplar bark functioning as "siding."
For me, movement comes from dealing with the materials around me. Different kinds of objects, flooring, garments, and bindings suggest different ways to move by providing new constraints, textures, and possibilities. This was very clear at EMPAC At one point, I tied myself to some of the young trees that I had collected; this led to awkward rocking movements and an interesting process of trying to get to a standing position. At other times I engaged with the floor; when I arrived it was covered with heavy plastic to protect it from the wet garbage that I would bring in from the snow! The plastic was slippery, thick, and resistant, and ripping it and moving between its layers gave my movement a kind of dense muscularity. With each hut, the movement vocabulary for my performances came from working with the materials in this way.
Video artist Peter Shapiro and I worked with many forms of projection on and around Hut #3. We noticed what kinds of lighting and video projections theatricalized the hut. This work was eye-opening and made me aware of the fine line between installation and theater set. I realized that the huts were not meant to be theater sets. They are not representations of something else that is more "real"; they are what they are.
an invitation
Find a quiet area with some open space and nothing sharp on the floor. Take your shoes off. Stand vertically, feeling the energy moving down through the soles of your feet and out through the top of your head. Let your feet feel wide like snowshoes. Now begin to walk very, very, very slowly, as if you were a video of yourself walking in slow motion. Keep your eyes looking forward at eye level. Make sure that every part of your walk is the same tempo so you don't speed up in the tricky places and slow down where it's easier. If it helps, imagine many light hands all over the back of your body gently helping you, so that all parts of your body move forward equally. Don't leave anything behind (head, shoulders, butt, etc.). As you walk slowly, figure out how to support yourself. Your whole body is stacked up on this small surface area that is the soles of your feet. As you continue to walk slowly, notice how your visual field changes gradually with your progression through the space. Change direction as you like. Notice how your visual field changes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ten Huts"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jill Sigman.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Pamela Tatge
Preface
Paradise Reclaimed
THE HUTS
Hut #1 (The Border, Brooklyn, New York)
Hut #2 (The Border, Brooklyn, New York)
Hut #3 ( Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center [EMPAC] at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York)
Hut #4 (The Border, Brooklyn, New York)
Hut #5 (The Border, Brooklyn, New York)
Hut #6 (The Norwegian Opera, Oslo, Norway)
Hut #7 (Arts@Renaissance, Brooklyn, New York)
Hut #8 (Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, Manhattan, New York)
Hut #9 (Godsbanen, Aarhus, Denmark)
Hut #10 (The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida)
A Postscript (Kjerringøy Land Art Biennale 2015, Kjerringøy, Norway)
dwelling object hut thing byAndré Lepecki
The Century of Compost, Some thoughts about waste, huts and Pippi Longstocking by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Being Moved, Moving Ourselves by Elise Springer
Planting Dance at the Crossroads by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
The Queer Frontier of Jill Sigman's Hut Project by Matthew McLendon
Selected Bibliography
Author Biography
Index
What People are Saying About This
“I admire how these huts are a way for Jill to bring her generous theater, her concerns about art and people, their placement and predicaments, to the world in a way that is like nature—anonymous, unimposing, and forceful.”
"I admire how these huts are a way for Jill to bring her generous theater, her concerns about art and people, their placement and predicaments, to the world in a way that is like nature—anonymous, unimposing, and forceful."—Ralph Lemon