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Indepth Arts News:
"Gary Hill: Selected Works 1976 - 2001"
2001-11-10 until 2002-03-10
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg, ,
DE
Video art is still a comparatively young discipline. In the 1960s, the
medium was pioneered by such artists as Dan Graham, Nam June
Paik, Wolf Vostell and Bruce Nauman. Works by Paik and Nauman
have already featured in major exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum
Wolfsburg. Gary Hill, whose piece Searchlight is already in the
permanent collection of the Kunstmuseum, is a member of the
second generation of video artists.
An American, living in Seattle, he
began his artistic career as a sculptor. The Kunstmuseum now
presents a representative survey of Hill’s video pieces. The early
videos of the 1970s, which concentrate on formal experimentation,
are included alongside technically sophisticated video installations,
most of which date from the last ten years. In these, Hill deliberately
treats technological apparatus as sculptural form. Videos run on
television sets that have been liberated from their cabinets. The
naked cathode-ray tubes look like eyes; the screen becomes the
retina, on which a film is playing. Hill’s interest centres on issues of
the perception of image and language. He explores the connections
between body reality and the articulation or reception of visual and
linguistic signals. Hill acknowledges the epistemological models
devised by the French structuralists, most notably Foucault, Blanchot,
Barthes and Derrida, as a major influence on his work. As specialists
in the humanities, as linguists and as philosophers, these thinkers
set out to organize things in ways that were no longer defined by
consciousness or subjectivity but by systems involving rules and
codes. Gary Hill’s video works often manifest a linguistic chaos worthy
of Babel. Different texts are recited simultaneously. A story is
presented in written and spoken form, in such a way that the two
levels differ both in content and in timing. Text-image combinations
include permutations of the spoken word with letters and with written
key phrases. Optical alienation effects are an important feature of
Hill’s early ‘mono-channel’ pieces. Realities are broken down almost
entirely into abstract structures, with an effect strongly reminiscent of
the visual language of early psychedelic music videos. Many of the
video installations are positively harsh and physically effortful – as
with Reflex Chamber and Wall Piece, in both of which the projected
image is punctuated by staccato strobe flashes. Here, Hill is
deliberately exploring the outer limits of perception and endurance.
Alongside these, there are works of impressively deep, almost
meditative calm. Examples include Viewer and Searchlight, from our
collection, or the piece Tall Ships, which was acclaimed at the
documenta 9 exhibition. In this, wraithlike human figures emerge
from darkness and seem to make contact with the viewer before
vanishing into the void. Many of Hill’s works unmistakably reveal his
interest in performance art. Since 1971, in association with a variety
of other performers, he has created almost thirty performance pieces;
the most recent is Remembering Paralinguay, a joint work with his
partner Paula Wallenberg-Olsson. Both in video and in performance,
Hill treats language literally as a material. This can be seen, for
instance, in his frequent use of palindromes: words or phrases that
can be read either backwards or forwards. He has learned to speak
even complex sentences backwards without apparent effort. The Wolfsburg exhibition is the first major European retrospective of the
work of Gary Hill, a recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize. It will contain
thirteen complex video installations and a wide selection of Hill’s
mono-channel pieces of the 1970s and 1980s.
IMAGE:
Gary Hill
Remarks on Color, 1994
Single channel video installation
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