Gary Hill

"Each of his works is found to be singular and sweeps the general technique called video along in an adventure that renders it irreplaceable, but irreplaceable among other irreplaceables, other unique effects of signature, even if it puts to work many other things, many other 'arts' that have nothing to do with video."--Jacques Derrida, from "Videor"

"Time, this is what is central to video, it is not seeing as its etymological roots imply. Video's intrinsic principle is feedback."--Gary Hill (From "Inter-view")

For more than twenty years Gary Hill has been at the cutting edge of video, often setting the terms for its development and pointing it in new, exciting directions. Since the mid-eighties, Hill has established himself as one of the major voices in the medium. His work has been the focus of major exhibitions and retrospectives at museums in Europe and the United States, including the Guggenheim Museum in Soho, the Whitney Biennial, and the Lyon Museum in France. He has received numerous awards, including the coveted MacArthur Award (1998).

Hill's work focuses on the poetic and philosophical implications of temporal perception. Tall Ships, for example, is a large-scale video installation that presents haunting images of isolated human figures in a darkened corridor, seen from a distance, then close up. Hill's representation of time in videos is partly informed by his adolescent experiences as a surfer in Southern California: his Learning Curve series invites the viewer to sit at the end of a long table and watch a black-and-white projection of a wave folding and unfolding upon itself. Other themes in Hill's work include meditations on the self-referentiality of the medium and explorations of the connections and conflicts between language and image.

This new volume in PAJ's Art + Performance series is the first critical edition devoted to Hill's work. Edited by Robert C. Morgan, it anthologizes a number of critical essays tracing Hill's reception from the mid-seventies to today, a series of informative interviews, as well as a selection of Hill's writings--revealing him as an original and articulate thinker. The book also offers a detailed chronology of Hill's career, a bibliography and videography, and twenty-five photos from his installations. Morgan's introduction traces Hill's emergence as an artist out of the sixties' counter-culture and explores how his work creates dialogues with philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marshall McLuhan.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Gary Hill: Beyond the Image
Video Spaces: Gary Hill
Video
The Image of the World in the Body of the Text
Time in the Body
Surfing the Medium
The Matrix
Primarily Spoken
Standing Still on the Lip of Being: Gary Hill's Learning Curve
Notes on the Feedback Horizon
Between Language and the Moving Image: The Art of Gary Hill
HanD HearD/liminal objects
Postscript: Re-embodiments in Alter-Space
Projection: the space of great happening
Why Do Language and Meaning Get in a Muddle?
Loss Illuminates
A Manner of Speaking (1982, 1983)
A Discussion with Gary Hill (1992)
Gary Hill: An Interview (1993)
Surfing the Medium (1996)
Six Questions to Gary Hill (1996)
Liminal Performance: Gary Hill in Dialogue (1998)
Primarily Speaking (1981)
Primarily Speaking (1983)
URA-ARU: The Acoustic Palindrome (1985)
BEACON (Two Versions of the Imaginary) (1990)
Inter-View (1992)
Site Recite (a prologue) (1989)
Site Re:cite (1991)

Biography

Selected Video Works, 1973-1992 Bibliography Credits