Gary Hill
Video art, performance
United States
Gary Hill
Video art
Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970s. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia, and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.
Umerous awards and honors.
Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others. Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Public Library in Seattle, Washington, and an installation and performance work for the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome in Italy. Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1995), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), and honorary doctorates from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA (2011).
Disturbance (among the jars), 1988
Seven modified 27-inch color video monitors (cathode ray tubes removed from chassis), two painted MDF-board platforms, seven straight-back wooden chairs, two speakers, seven-channel synchronizer, seven laserdisc players and seven laserdiscs (color; one with stereo sound)
Dimensions variable; requiring two platforms (one including two stairs on either end that functions as a veranda) which measure 18 x 324 x 54 in. (45 x 822 x 137 cm.) each (the depth of the chair platform/veranda is variable)
Note: The work was commissioned directly from the artist by the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, in 1988.
Disturbance (among the jars) is a multi-lingual adaptation of selected Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945/46. The structure of the piece is based around the metaphor of fragmentation, more specifically, that of a broken sentence reflecting the original condition of many of the texts. In a completely white room lit with several thousand watts of light, a veranda with seven straight-back wooden chairs faces a low pedestal of the same height on which seven 27-inch bare cathode ray tubes (display bulbs of video monitors) are positioned to form a fragmented line. The positions of the monitors can be seen in a multiplicity of ways. Monitors 1 and 2 on the far left are placed like an opened book and function as mirrors, dyads and doubles throughout the work. When not linked to the continuous “sentence” by the extended panorama, monitors 3, 4 and 5 in the middle can be seen as a triad and literally provide the possibility of the most continuous unbroken image. Monitor 6 is, as it were, broken off from the triad (the broken image; the broken word; the gap), but the position of the viewer closes the break, and a quaternion becomes present. Monitor 7 on the far right is the monad, the point of view or source.
The texts were reworked by the artist and, in many cases, by the performers – including actors, persons off the street, poets and writers – themselves. (For example, the sound poet Bernard Heidsieck created a sound text from The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and the philosopher Jacques Derrida wove together lines and phrases from the Gospel of Thomas, ultimately appearing in a kind of cameo role as “The Philosopher.”)
These performances, recorded in the same bright white light of the installation, are interwoven with landscapes from the Cathar country of France and are juxtaposed with encrusted texts that seemingly crawl “through” the video space of the seven monitors. This horizontal movement is further emphasized with the image of a large snake that appears to also pass through all of the monitors as it negotiates a number of pomegranates strewn across the floor space. As the snake makes its way, we hear a spoken text consisting of more than thirty different languages unfold.
Observaciones sobre los colores [Remarks on Color], 1994/2008
Video projector (or monitor), two speakers, one DVD player and one DVD (color; stereo sound)
Dimensions variable (projected image approx. 9 h. x 12 w. ft. [2.7 x 3.7 m.])
Edition of five and one artist’s proof
Note: The Spanish version of this work (originally recorded in English as Remarks on Color and in German as Bemerkungen über die farben in 1994) was recorded in Venezuela and created especially for the exhibition “Gary Hill” at the Fundacion Centro Cultural Chacao, Caracas in 2008.
Remarks on Color is a single-channel video/sound installation which uses projection literally and metaphorically to set up an ambiguous space of readership and reception where meaning, sometimes mutated, broken or perhaps reopened, is ultimately transmitted in the spirit of play. Through a child’s spontaneous reading of philosophical questions on the nature of color, a different “coloration” to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games unfolds. Remarks on Color, Part 1, consisting of 88 segments, is read in real time over a period of approximately 45 minutes, and Hill asked the child to negotiate every word the best he could.
This version of Remarks on Color is unique in that the background consists of very slowed-down (almost abstracted) images of political protests in Caracas – ‘colorful’ in their own way – which juxtapose the child’s reading of a very philosophical, abstract work with the concrete realities of the current political climate. Additionally, it is considerably longer at 76 minutes.
Commentary, 1980
Video (color, sound); 0:40 min. “Made just before Around & About, this work is something of a ‘manifesto in jest’ against television…. I’m a sit-in viewer looking slightly up at the screen making simple gestures into the camera. The mood is ambiguous as I seem to be watching a mirror, covering my face, reaching out to the camera, obstructing my head with a harsh (interrogator’s) lamp, and maybe more. The image, distorted through a fisheye lens, gives the impression of a concave monitor, as if the whole act were seen through a peephole or pinhole camera. In some sense I ‘play’ both sides of the screen—performer and viewer attempting to ‘connect’ either way. As ‘commentary’ it’s two-way, making it also a commentary on commentary.” Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 573.
BLINDSPOT, 2003
Blind Spot constructs a space of living portraiture by “focusing time” on an exchange between the artist (the camera) and a man on the street in the small Algerian neighborhood of Belsunce in Marseille, France. As the camera zooms in slowly on its subject, the imagery is interrupted by longer and longer segments of black/silence, in essence slowing the scene down so that it almost reaches the photographic. Commissioned for Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image. New York: Bick Productions and New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003.
Objects with Destinations, 1979
Video (color, silent); 3:40 min. Three black-and-white video cameras and Dave Jones prototype modules (analog-to-digital converter, digital-to-analog converter, bit switch, frame buffer, comparators with outline generators, variable hard/soft keyers, color field generators, output amplifier) Objects from the artist’s studio (hammer, cathode ray tube, circuit board rack, chair, clip light) constitute the subjects for a series of short sequences in which a single object moves through a series of overlapping transformations. These are electronically altered in such a way that their coloration and contours continuously morph. As the transparent images are superimposed one upon the other and faded in and out, they become slightly displaced, giving the impression that the objects are “wandering” across the image plane. In some sequences, the contours and colors of the objects dissociate, or newly arising color fields spread across the pictorial surface.
The superimpositions and cross-dissolves result in a minimal amount of action, consistent with the ‘destinations’ implied in the work’s title. As in Mirror Road, Bathing, and Windows, the artist uses images of everyday objects together with image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density. Gary Hill has said of this work, “Following Windows, I was still looking for a vehicle to make sense out of a substantial number of circuits I’d spent way too many hours building with Dave Jones’ oversight. ‘Real time’ seemed so integral to the process that the actual image/object was almost a by-product—very much secondary to the ‘verb’ of transformation taking place ‘between.’ The focus was on what was happening; what kind of manipulation/processing took the pixels from one representation to another. As in so many cases, using what was at hand—what was around me—was the only way to keep it ‘live.’” Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 587.