Born in Santa Monica, California in 1951, Gary Hill was a surfer who became interested in sculpture in high school.
He studied sculpture and painting in Woodstock, New York, and in 1973 he borrowed a video portapak from Woodstock Community Video (WCV).
From 1974 to 1976 he was TV lab coordinator at WCV, producing tapes that “arose out of a dialogue with the properties of the medium.”
From 1975 to 1977 Hill was an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, where he made use of various tools including the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor and David Jones’s colorizer which Hill helped build.
In 1976 Hill met poet George Quasha who, along with Charles Stein, inspired Hill’s first experiments with language.
Hill’s early works investigated synthesized imagery, ecological subjects, and post-minimal political statements (Hole in the Wall, 1974).
Hill’s works exploring the intertextuality of image, sound, speech, and language emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, such as Soundings (1979) and Around and About (1980).
Hill has gained an international reputation for his video art tapes and installations.
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VER | Blind Spot | A short encounter between the artist and a man on a North African street is slowed down, forcing the viewer into an intimate relationship with the subject and the shifting emotion seen in his face.
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Around and About | Around & About is one of those intimate tapes where Gary Hill makes his contribution through his own voice and the text: its subject covers a private situation. The artist finds himself in the same situation as a writer, but with video that he can transform into a space of solitude. Around & About’s text is about a difficult relationship between two people (corresponding to the pronouns “I” and “You” ): “I am not ready to be complex”, “I want to be with you”, I don’t want to be separated”, “I want to carry on”… The spoken word attempts to reach out to the other person, but holds back on the very brink of itself, as if the other person were already inaccessible. It is blunt, futile and monotonous. It is a monologue and makes its declarations without any return response, itself making, in advance, the return responses of the other. The image comes and gives various bodies to what is said: the image is in perpetual fragmentation. Small segments move about the screen like bricks of meaning which fit together and come apart. In this way, the inside of an office is assembled then broken up; moving local micro-perceptions alternate with global units of comprehension which themselves vary. The system of inclusion opens up from inside the surface of perception. The logic of the union and separation of the visual elements indicates pure differences within the space which become places. Gary Hill, in fact, maps out concepts, perceiving them as distinct places – and thought is the movement which generates a passage from one to another.
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Sounding | “Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio speaker. The speaker delivers sound both audibly and visibly, with the camera revealing the minute vibrations of the speaker’s cone. Referring to the cloth covering of the speaker as a ’skin’, Hill intones, ‘This is the skin of space where I voice from’. The materialized voice is clearly an extension of the artist’s intention. Hill proceeds to bury, puncture, burn, and drown the audio speaker in an effort to physically alter or overwhelm the sound coming out of it, the sound of his own voice. Each carefully constructed experiment explores the confluence of sound, image, and text, suggesting a kind of concretized poetry or ‘electronic linguistics’.”
—Lucinda Furlong, “A Manner of Speaking: An Interview with Gary Hill,” Afterimage 10:8 (March 1983)
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“I’m sure it could have gone on another way, a completely different way, a way that doesn’t ever come to mind but that’s a given. One can never observe all the possibilities and still go on to the next. Sometimes one just exits and enters again. I think I can agree with myself that it is not a matter of choice. You might think that agreen is a kind of choice, even a (blain…) choice, but that’s not all you are interested in either. There’s another determining factor and that’s what we have to concentrate on, at least I do. I agree it is easy to get (psy…). It’s not even that there’s a lot going on. We are just busy. I mean it’s not complicated. You can go on, I can go on. We can assume there’s something happening, or not something happening. I don’t know perhaps it is unfair to go on, maybe we should take our minds of it and think about something else. Maybe it is not worth thinking about at all, but that leads to other things just as problematic. Maybe it should be more complicated. We are looking at it too simply. Look, we don’t have to consider all the possibilities but instead really complicate one, if that’s what you want to do. I don’t know, maybe it’s my fault. I came unprepared. I’m not ready to be complex. I don’t think that’s the answer though. I don’t think it’s an answer we are looking for. In certain ways that’s probably obvious by now. Even knowing that you’re a little uneasy with it and I am too. But I think it’s a way I can work with now. And maybe you can and maybe you can’t. I mean I’m thinking about that, there’s time involved here and it’s yours as much as mine. I certanly don’t want to threaten your time or make you feel you have to be deciced yet I want you to be here. I mean I assume you are here but I don’t want to back you into a corner and by the same talking I don’t want you to start from that corner. That’s a particular relationship I would like to put aside for now. I know this isn’t free a bullshit I mean I’m coming from somewhere of a selfcouncious place. It’s a kind of staking I mean the ideas just pull up but are interwoven. They’re no connected or disconnected. It’s a thought at least. I can see it. Decent (bod…) ideas being thrown against a wall. But that isn’t fair. That isn’t fair for me or you. That really kind of loads things down and that’s not my intention. I can assure you of that. I want you to be with me. I mean you don’t have to listen. Just hear me out. I don’t want you to be involved into (…) or anything. But then that’s your prerrogative and I don’t want to get in your way. There’s something I can be sad for that and I here you but I don’t want to listen to it. I realise it’s easy for one to say that I’m being ambiguous. But I don’t think so. I mean if you want to leave you can do that or you can just turn off. I’m not trying to say i’m indiferent, I just think there’s a way here. Maybe you really do here me and I’m going on and on, but we have to continue for some time. I’m mean I think that’s part of it. It would be easy to stop at this point, it would just be unarresting and over and possibly boring. But that isn’t even the issue, is important that we go on. This is the way I think it has to be right now. If it wasn’t this it would be that and there’s still this area that we have to get through, so that the “this” and the “that” won’t become significant to this. I mean what I’m talking about isn’t important in that way that importants through ours attention. You might even think this is a game of some sort but really you’ve tried ways that were (…) to this one when you weren’t thinking about the consequences. You may even have heard this before in so many words. But I want to go on, I’m not interested in this kind of talking. It has its pourpose but it can get very stiky. I would rather settle with you, some way that’s non reversible, a way of being with you when it’s the only way. When I arrived here I have no way of knowing it would be this way. I thought about it a lot in the beggining. I tried different ways in thinking of you. What you response would be? And that has to be considered now too. I’ve never lost sight of that. I don’t think there’s been a lost of anything, it’s just that I haven’t been accumulating things for me or you. There’s always time for a sense of ergency. I want to avoid that for now. I don’t know though, maybe you are waiting for that, waiting and listening.”

“(…) talvez seja preciso encontrarmos outra língua, ou, melhor dizendo, um outro modo de linguagem, para nos surpreender, nos maravilhar novamente.”
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