GARY HILL
FOYER
Stað fastur
Place Holder
Gary Hill, 2019
Innsetning (vídeó, hljóð)
Installation (video, sound)
HD video, multi-channel audio, LCD monitor (16:9 format | dimensions variable), media player and video file
Edition of three and one artist’s proof
Place Holder sees the artist himself, repeatedly flipping a coin until he drops it and drops out of the frame (about every 14 minutes) at which point the sound of the coin hitting the ground takes center stage circulating around the space until it comes to a halt. The action, as if to question chance, or hope of a different outcome, also touches on questions of artificial intelligence and perhaps even a cursory nod to the magic trick.
https://garyhill.com/work/mixed_media_installation/place-holder.html
Gallery 3
Sínusbylgjan (lífsferlið)
Sine Wave (the curve of life)
Til minningar um Donald Young
In memory of Donald Young
Gary Hill, 2011
Blönduð tækni
Mixed media
Installation with two fabricated free standing curved projection screens (wood, masonite, hardware, white paint), two video projectors and mounts, two amplified speakers, and computer configured for two channels of HD video playback (color; mono sound)
Sine Wave is derived from a single uninterrupted recording of a glass of water (half empty/half full) that stands at the end of a flat aluminum bar or plank. The location is a natural setting of lush trees and plants at early dawn. During recording the bar was counter balanced and rested on the artist’s shoulder. Since the relative positions of the glass and camera remain the same, the glass doesn’t move from the center of the frame while the landscape moves behind it and is also refracted in the glass. The second image is the same but delayed. Depending on the direction of the panning movement that switches back and forth, the channels alternately switch in time to “correct” and maintain the semblance of a continuous panorama across the two screens. Each screen is slightly curved, one concave and the other convex, further resonating with the shape of the glasses. The doubling theme is reiterated by the inhaling and exhaling sound of the artist’s breathing throughout the work.
Klein flaska með mynd af eigin tilurð (eftir Robert Morris)
Klein Bottle with the Image of Its Own Making (after Robert Morris)
Gary Hill, 2014
Blönduð tækni
Mixed media
Blown glass, micro video projector, media player and one USB drive with media file, cables, MDF, latex paint
A klein bottle is a mathematical form in which inside and outside are ambiguous instead being one continuous surface. The artist made a video recording of the bottle being made and projected it “inside” the form, a direct reference to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making from 1961.
https://garyhill.com/work/mixed_media_installation/klein-bottle-with-the-image-of-its-own-making.html
Tungumálsgryfja
Language Pit
Gary Hill, 2016/2021
Blönduð tækni
Mixed media
Two 10-inch speakers/amplification for playback, projectors, or displays (space dependent), Two micro-video cameras, media player, and assorted cabling.
Language Pit is driven by short phrases derived from the general drift of political sound bites as well as gender politics and the complexities thereof. Forms of Identity and language structures give way to wordplay, scrambled pronouns, and idiomatic expression.
The spoken exchange, riddled with percussive phonetics, “plays” large visible speaker cones that are mounted facing up–one voice per speaker. Wired through the skin of the speakers are fingertip size circuit boards complete with video cameras and integral microphones. They’ve been given a short leash on which to run amok in their own private sphere of sound; speech provides a dynamically oscillating and challenging surface. The cameras’ speech-driven movement is seen projected or on mounted displays.
https://garyhill.com/work/mixed_media_installation/language-pit.html
Gallery 4
Ekkert af ofantöldu
None of the Above
Gary Hill
2022
Videó
Video
The artist recites a reflexive text in real-time that playfully feeds back on itself between the space(s) of one and zero. As hand movements allude to the idiomatic triad—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—a visceral portrait emerges from an evolving loop aggressively cut with overlapping patterns of shifting time.
SINGLE CHANNEL WORKS
Gary Hill
Around & About, 1980
Video (color, sound); 4:45 min.
Electronic Linguistics, 1977
Video (black-and-white, sound); 3:45 min.
Elements, 1978
Video (black-and-white, stereo sound); 2:00 min.
[…] One of the earlier works Hill produced on the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer, Elements combines abstract “landscapes” with fragmented syllabic language. Undulating topological forms superimpose themselves on one another, changing their shape and direction of movement.
[…]
The nature of the image constantly shifts from what could be microscopic forms—amoebas moving in all directions—to what may be aerial views of impenetrable-looking networks that gradually fall into place before one’s eyes. At the same time, one hears syllabic fragments of the words “earth,” “fire,” “water,” and “air” that, although abstract, give the work a rhythmic pulse that converges with the rhythm of the visual elements.
Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 578.
https://garyhill.com/work/video/elements.html
Full Circle, 1978
Video (color, sound); 3:25 min.
“This work tries to make manifest the perhaps irreconcilable space between the body as physicality and conceptual models built upon ephemeral, yet also physical, media. What happens is something of a Catch 22: ‘both self-sustaining and self-contradictory, something between paradox and oxymoron, apparently embodying the illusory possible in physical fact’ (Quasha):
“The image plane is divided into three sections. In the lower half, a close-up of two hands form a circle out of a metal rod. The upper half of the screen is vertically divided into two parts. On the right, a concurrent view of bending the rod with the entire body is visible in high contrast black and white. On the left is the green trace of an oscilloscope. A sine wave tone is first heard corresponding with the static green trace, a horizontal line. I drone a ‘similar’ tone that together with the sine wave changes the trace into a wavering circle. The steadier the sound I make, the steadier the circle. As I expend more energy bending the rod to ‘copy’ the electronically generated circle, my voice struggles to maintain pitch. Consequently the circle vibrates, collapses and morphs into multiple forms, mirroring the strain of my voice. Once the rod has been bent into a circle, I steady myself before the object and emit several sustained drones, which causes an increasingly stable circle to be emitted. The copper-coated metal rod could be viewed as having a magical, even alchemical, relationship to the green phosphor signal emitted by the oscilloscope, thus making the work into a kind of ritual performance. On an extended plane of meaning, the metal rod introduces another level of physicality as the same material I used in earlier sculpture constructions, and I was thinking of ‘full circle’ as a return to working with the physical object.”
Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 579.
https://garyhill.com/work/video/full-circle.html
Happenstance (part one of many parts), 1982-83
Video (black-and-white; stereo sound); 6:30 min.
The opening sequence of this black-and-white work shows the square, circle and triangle as the basic elements of the formal repertoire. They are joined by letters and words, whose configuration suggests the shape of the triangle. Simultaneously sounds are linked to the visual elements: a bass drum to the square, crash cymbal to the circle and a kind of ‘twang’ sound to the triangle. After first concretizing themselves, amorphous electronic forms (almost like reading the stars, a bird, a fish, a snake and a frog seem to appear if for only moments) become lost in abstract structures as individual words and sentences play counter point. The interplay between language and image builds to a text filled page: “vanishing points” which shifts down the page into “points vanishing.” The letters, which initially morph to a pyramid, now turn into the humus from which grows a letter tree whose leaves fall to the ground as characters, partially forming words there. Hill is creating a kind of choreography of thought, which as already seen in Videograms (GHCR 43) – gives rise to an area of tension between the images and the spoken or written texts. At the textual level, he addresses the ephemerality of linguistic meanings inside the ‘nature’ of language. Musical and sound elements underscore the character of the individual passages and the complex intertextuality of the work.
Broeker, Holger, ed. Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002, GHCR 46, pp. 102 – 104.
https://garyhill.com/work/video/happenstance.html
Incidence of Catastrophe, 1987-88
Video (color, stereo sound); 43:51 min.
Inspired by the novel Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot wherein the protagonist of the novel is the reader of the novel he is in (who may well be Blanchot himself). In the video, Thomas the protagonist is played by Hill which confounds the self-reflexive nature of the book’s relationships all the more, making the video something of a “transcreation.” The “reader” begins in the liquidity of the text almost as if he were waking from drowning. Images of the sea ravishing the shore – small cliffs of sand eroding and collapsing – are inter-cut with extreme close-ups of text and the texture of the page and book itself being flooded with ocean waves. In scene after scene the reader attempts to re-enter the book only to find himself a part of intense dreams and hallucinations. Thomas/Hill reads the book, when, suddenly, he feels he is being watched by the words. The character then experiences the book as a forest of words he is fighting through. Another “chapter” finds him alone in his room at night, overcome by a strange illness, in which the vision of the text has him vomiting violently. The text infiltrates the reader’s entire experience. Thinking he is still capable of functioning socially, the character finds himself at dinner with a group of hotel guests. Their conversation turns into isolated words that, like the sand, erode and wash away with seemingly all possibilities of meaning. The final scene shows the reader in the form of Hill physically and mentally destroyed. Cowering naked in the fetal position, he lies in his own excrement on a white-tiled floor, babbling unintelligible sounds. The pages of the book have grown into monumental walls with colossal letters that menacingly surround and imprison the naked body.
Broeker, Holger, ed. Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002, GHCR 59, pp. 130 – 132.
https://garyhill.com/work/video/incidence-of-catastrophe.html
Mediations (towards a remake of Soundings), 1979/1986
Video (color, stereo sound); 4:17 min.
Primarily Speaking, 1981-83
Video (color, stereo sound); 18:40 min.
Site Recite (a prologue), 1989
Video (color, stereo sound); 4:00 min.
Appearing as a hazy horizon laden with strange objects, the scene comprises bones, skulls of small mammals, butterflies, nuts, and other botanical “finds” spread out on a round table. These are objects of the kind that one might collect on a nature trail in a forest—but also shells and crumpled notes. They are relics that suggest the cycle of life in a way familiar to us from vanitas still life painting and natural history collections. The camera moves around the table, picking out objects which, because of the shallow depth of focus, stand out one after another from the panorama of the jumbled collection. A bird’s skull, a piece of bark, or a crystal appear needle-sharp in the picture, whereupon the focus changes and the contours of a shell emerge from the nebulous background. In this way the camera discloses the transient beauty of the items one after the other, capturing the beauty of each for a fraction of a second before focusing on the next object. This precise focusing/unfocusing continues for the duration of the work, while a narrator explores his momentary state of consciousness and relationship with the world, verbalizing his own thoughts as transient objects in an ontologically focused vanitas of mind. The rhythmic vocalized syllabics synchronize with the focusing and blurring of the image. And the final tableau places the viewer inside the mouth of the speaker looking out. Just as the narrator opens his mouth and speaks, light enters the speaking cavity, the tongue moves, and the teeth masticate the last words of the work: “imagining the brain closer than the eyes.”
“A prologue to Which Tree, an unrealized interactive videodisc that later morphed into Withershins. Using a track and dolly system, the camera was set at table top level from where thirteen circular tracking shots were made, each at a set focal point across the table. Additionally, the camera was ‘locked down’ at sixty-four points equal distance around the track from where the camera was rack focused through an extreme shallow depth of field. The thirteen rings and sixty-four points create the possibility of eight hundred thirty-two ‘match points’ toward seamlessly editing the rings and intersections together, as if one camera in continuous motion. The initial idea was to have the viewer/participant navigate a circular two-dimensional map representing the description given above—thirteen concentric circles with sixty-four intersecting diameters. As one walked the pathways, a spoken text would be heard spatially in relation to one’s location and change as one continued through the path. The prologue/text was produced as a representation of a single walk suggesting a myriad of other ‘walks’ and other ‘texts.’”
Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 591.
https://garyhill.com/work/video/site-recite.html
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia), 1984
Video (color, stereo sound); 32:00 min.
This tape is the first of Hill’s works for which he deliberately wrote a screenplay. The title defines the piece’s starting point: Alice in Wonderland asks her omniscient father why things get in a muddle. They then talk on a metalinguistic level (i.e. about language using language). A glimpse through the looking glass reveals an inversion of the customary order of things. The father ingests the smoke from his pipe, Alice does not so much blink her eyelids momentarily open as stare wide-eyed, and the playing cards fall out of the air in an orderly manner into the girl’s hand. The language of the two protagonists is strangely slurred and partially incomprehensible. Gradually the reason for these phenomena becomes clear. Almost all the passages are being played and spoken backwards, and the tape can likewise be played backwards, with the result that at first sight the action appears plausible. This also explains why at second glance the movements of the protagonists’ bodies look strangely mechanical. Hill made phonetic notes of the texts spoken backwards by Alice and her father. At the end of the tape, when Alice is standing in front of the looking glass, the letters of the subtitle (“Come on Petunia”) logically regroup as “once upon a time.”
Broeker, Holger, ed. Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002, GHCR 50, pp. 113 – 115
https://garyhill.com/work/video/why-do-things-get-in-a-muddle.html
.