Gary Hill
Gary Hill is an American artist whose work has centered on video, installation art, sculpture and performance. Based on works extending over fifty years from the late 1960s onward, he is considered a foundational figure in the areas of single- and multi-channel video and new-media art. Although his work has connections to conceptual art and minimalism, Hill is known for an independent approach that is inspired more by philosophical and literary texts than by central concerns of art and film such as representation, narrative and description. He has used an array of nascent technologies—computer software, projection, virtual reality, CGI—to examine consciousness and its relationship to the body, perception, time, and visual and verbal language. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel commented, "Hill creatively uses high-tech instruments to elicit personal experiences of archetypal simplicity. With his work, the invisible operations of thinking take tangible shape. Perception and cognition circle around one another, engaging their subjects."
Hill's work belongs to the public collections of the Centre Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate Gallery, and Whitney Museum, among others. He has exhibited at those and other international museums and been featured multiple times in events such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial. He has been recognized with awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship and Rome Prize. Hill lives and works in Seattle, Washington and Mallorca, Spain.
Early life and career
Hill was born in Santa Monica, California in 1951 and grew up in Redondo Beach, where he was an avid surfer and skateboarder. He began making welded sculpture at the age of 16, inspired by the artist Robert Anthony Park, before moving to Woodstock, New York in 1969. There, he studied at the Art Students League and independently with the painter Bruce Dorfman, and later became involved with Woodstock Community Video, a grass-roots television organization.In the 1970s, Hill integrated experiments with electronic sound, video, synthesizers and performance into his welded and mixed-media constructions. Emerging amid the conceptual and performative context of that era, he worked on parallel tracks, producing single-channel videotapes that involved electronic image processing, distortion and language, as well as sculptural installations that used video and the body as elements. For the installation Hole in the Wall he filmed himself cutting a television monitor-sized hole layer by layer through a wall at the Woodstock Artists Association. He then placed a monitor in the new orifice that played a loop of his recorded action, enacting video's occupation of exhibition spaces previously devoted to painting and sculpture.
In the mid- and latter-1970s, Hill ran the Artists' TV Lab in Woodstock and was an artist-in-residence and instructor at the Experimental Television Center and a visiting professor in media studies at State University at Buffalo. In 1985, after participating in the US/Japan Fellowship Exchange program, he accepted an offer to establish the media-arts program at Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle.
Main themes
Hill is considered a seminal artist in video and new media art. His work is known for its exploratory use of emergent technologies and for its post-structuralist focus on the nature of perception, language and consciousness. Many of his works employ visual and verbal syntax in ways that call attention to the unseen processes involved in human cognition. Art historian Lynne Cooke wrote: "A pioneer in his embrace of the then novel medium of video, Hill distinguished himself through a radical approach that both literally and conceptually deconstructed it."Hill's unconventional approach is seen as being grounded in literary and philosophical influences more than in art historical ones. Whereas artwork typically draws influence from the art canon, Hill's work is informed by writers concerned with consciousness and communication, such as Maurice Blanchot, Gregory Bateson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Marshall McLuhan. Critics note a resulting iconoclastic quality in his work, which privileges signification over representation, counteracts the illusion and smooth functioning of image sequences, and rejects cinematic and documentary conventions. Artforum critic Susan Kandel observed, "Hill's work is seductive in part because it is nothing like most video art. … strips away the hardware, imperils the idioms with an idiosyncratic form of discourse, and interrupts the flow with strange moments of epiphany."
A key aspect of Hill's art is its intent and propensity to stimulate conscious reflection, particularly regarding the subconscious linguistic, visual and social processes involved in daily life. Through means including ambiguity, juxtaposition, distortion and fragmentation, the work operates on a meta level to illuminate such processes and encourage viewers to examine them. Many of the works are self-reflexive or designed to elicit self-consciousness in the audience. According to critics, Hill's techniques create a liminal conceptual space whereby philosophical questions are posed but not answered, an approach which invites active participation—a hallmark of his art.
Embodiment is a recurring theme in Hill's work, which enacts the exteriorization of internal processes and explores ways in which physical form may limit and shape experience. He sometimes situates technology as an analogue to human embodiment or, conversely, makes novel use of technology to display bodies in ways that challenge prevailing convention. For example, certain works mirror processes of the brain and body through the movement of signals between machines and screens, while others evoke the body using viscera-like arrangements of unhoused video tubes and cables.
Language is also central to Hill's oeuvre—specifically, how it functions, disrupts and fails in human thought and interaction. Similar to his treatment of embodiment, Hill probes language as a mediator of experience and makes unexpected use of syntax to illuminate the role of linguistic structures in thought and interaction. As he does with images, the artist often rejects the logic of a received grammar of meaning, opting for "a language of evocation" to convey the richness of reality, rather than one of description or explanation.
Individual works
Single-channel video
In the late-1970s, Hill explored the structure of meaning in a series of single-channel videos. These works used interplay between image, language, sound and electronic phenomena involving formal, rhythmic and textural patterns of enunciation and visual transformation. Soundings fused language, sculptural, performance and sound, depicting in abstract close-up a speaker tweeter being submerged, buried, pierced and burned accompanied a Hill monologue describing the actions, his voice seemingly impacted by each one. In Happenstance , he evoked thought through an ephemeral choreography of morphing black-and-white imagery, words and letters whose basic formal repertoire linked the triangle, square and circle to specific sounds.In other videos, speech served as an active force exerted on the image, causing visuals to appear and disappear, pan or fragment—a reversal of the typical sound-image relationship. Around & About consists of images of interiors and objects appearing in succession to the single-syllabic rhythm of Hill narrating stream-of-consciousness disclosures about human relations. He employed a similar method in Primarily Speaking. It features a right-left, split picture plane, each with a rectangle containing video sequences that contrasted with or mirrored one another, set against a graphic background that alternated between basic color screens and idiomatic wipe patterns used in television. The narration—emitted in dialogue manner from the left and right stereo channels—makes punning use of figures of speech and idiomatic expressions while evoking a vague communal crisis.
In two later works, Hill returned to narrated text as a structuring device for imagery, albeit in different ways. The video installation Wall Piece projected heavily strobed, singular moments of Hill throwing himself repeatedly against a wall into a darkened space, itself outfitted with strobing light. With each impact, he spoke a single word, which when strung together, formed an existential monologue describing a corporeal and emotional impasse. The video Site Recite was a meditation on death in which Hill linked the rhythm of the spoken word to the action of a camera using a shallow depth of focus. The camera traverses a vanitas-like arrangement of objects: bird and small mammal skulls, butterflies, bones, nuts, bark. Objects emerge in sharp focus, one at a time against a nebulous background and return to blurs, calling attention to their transient beauty, as well as to the cycle of life and the irretrievability of the present moment.
In several videos, Hill linked related themes of entropy, disorder and catastrophe to the immateriality of electronic media. Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? was one of several works that examined the incommensurability of language and thought through constructed debates and dramas. It portrays a dialogue between Alice in Wonderland and her father regarding words, the order of things, and the direction of time. Featuring references to the Lewis Carroll books in its props, references and structuring, the video also incorporated Bateson's idea of the metalogue—a dialogue whose form illustrates the philosophical problem being discussed. It included inverted imagery and characters reciting their lines backwards; the recording was then played backwards resulting in strangely slurred, partially incomprehensible but properly ordered words.
Incidence of Catastrophe was inspired by the Blanchot novel, Thomas the Obscure, and dramatized the power of language. Hill embodied the novel's protagonist—a man reading a novel in which he is the subject—thus compounding the self-reflexivity of the book. The video includes imagery of the sea flooding the book's pages and a shoreline, text as an impenetrable forest or nausea-inducing phenomena, and a dinner in which conversation becomes incomprehensible. It ends with a collapse of the self that leaves the character naked and curled in a fetal position on the floor of a bathroom as disembodied words tower above him. Writers have linked Wall Piece and Hill's later video-sound installation, Place Holder, to Incidence; all feature Hill as the central figure, elements of repetition and entropy, and variously, physical toil and impasse.