|
Gary Hill (born 1951) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1970s and 1980s, he in fact began working in metal sculpture in the late 1960s. Today he is best known for internationally exhibited installations and performance art, concerned as much with innovative language as with technology, and for continuing work in a broad range of media. His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. The recipient of many awards, his influential work has been exhibited in most major contemporary art museums worldwide. ==Main Themes and Works== Gary Hill's work has often been discussed in relation to his incorporation of language/text in video and installation,〔Chrissie Iles, ''Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977'', p. 55.〕 most evident in a work like ''Incidence of Catastrophe'' (1987–88). In the late 1960s, he began making metal sculpture and, in Woodstock, New York, engaged by wire sculpture’s sounds, explored extensions into electronic sound, video cameras and tape, playback/feedback, video synthesizers, sound synthesizers, installation-like constructions, video installations, interactive art and public interventions. Later in the 1970s, living in Barrytown, New York, interacting with poets/artists George Quasha and Charles Stein, he extended his growing interest in language to a level of poetics and complex text, as well as performance art and collaboration. Initially “language” for him was not specifically words but the experience of a speaking that emerged inside electronic space (certain sounds “seemed close to human voices”), which he called “electronic linguistics” (first in the transitional non-verbal piece, ''Electronic Linguistic'' ()).〔George Quasha, "Electronic Linguistics," ''Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts'', ed. Thomas Bartscherer, Roderick Coover, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.〕 From that point, irrespective of whether a given piece uses text, his work in particular instances inquires into the nature of language as intrinsic to electronic/digital technology as art medium. Verbal language soon enters this electronic focus co-performatively, as an intensification of a dialogue with and within the medium, yet with a new language force all its own, its own unprecedented poetics. Highly realized single-channel works in this process include: ''Processual Video'' (1980), ''Videograms'' (1980–81), and ''Happenstance (part one of many parts)'' (1982–83), another stage of the dialogue with technology as a language site where machines talk back. Here the artist’s path moves to the celebrated language-intensive works of the 1980s: ''Primarily Speaking'' (1981–83), ''Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia)'' (1984), ''URA ARU (the backside exists)'' (1985–86), and ''Incidence of Catastrophe'' (1987–88). Art historian Lynne Cooke summarizes: :"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. Single channel works were soon followed by installations in which video screens were unhoused, suspended, multiplied, miniaturized, or otherwise manipulated. On other occasions, video tubes mysteriously projected unframed images in dark fields; or from oscillating beacons panning an empty room, text and figure swiveled in anamorphic distortion. No artist of Hill’s generation probed this medium with such invasive scrutiny, and none deployed it with such protean irreverence. And when his restless curiosity led him to computer based technologies and virtual space in the early Nineties, few of his peers proved so avid or dedicated in exploiting this uncharted terrain for art making. Since he rarely deployed technology as a tool in service to an exploration of the visual world, questions of representation have played a relatively minor role in his work: typically, he treats mediums as sites and enablers of languages both verbal and visual. Surveying with hindsight what now amounts to more than three decades of his activity, it’s striking how far his path has veered from his peers’—and not least because it betrays so few allegiances to histories of representation."〔Foreword to ''An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings'', George Quasha & Charles Stein ( Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009).〕 The sheer richness and complexity of the artist’s work over four decades is open to continual further characterization. As an artist working from a ''core principle'', often with strong conceptual aspects, his inner focus and dialogue within a given medium allows him high variability and unpredictability. Working with one or more principles at a time (e.g., the ''physicality'' of the medium and of languaging and imaging; ''liminality'' or the intense space between contraries and extremes of appearance), he can make it happen on multiple planes simultaneously—physical, personal, ontological, social, political—without reification of any one of them. Result: a singular event of reflexive speaking that marries mind and machine beyond any notion of reference as such—no stable signifier or signified, yet intense engagement at personal, emotional, and intellectual levels. Later works in computer animation—e.g., ''Liminal Objects'' (1995-), ''Frustrum'' (2006)—challenge one’s sense of “object” and mind-body boundaries and the very basis of our “reality.” Major projective installations—''Tall Ships'' (1992), ''HanD HearD'' (1995–96), ''Viewer'' (1996), ''Wall Piece'' (2000), ''Up Against Down'' (2008)—raise these issues of physicality, objectivity, polyvalent signification, and language itself to a further human dimension—a principle of torsional engagement both within one’s own mind and body and up against the surface and face of the other.〔''100 Video Artists'', ed. Rosa Olivares, EXIT Publicaciones, Madrid: 2010.〕 He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s, but he instinctively evolved beyond the conceptual as such, working into a refined domain of principle that put him in full processual and open dialog both with electronic media and the language of thinking. His reading of the fiction and philosophical literary essays of Maurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other'. Such reading informs Hill's visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. For example, in ''Cabin Fever'' he uses the binary opposition of light and darkness to convey the notion of an interaction between a self and an ‘other’.〔Donald Young Gallery: (New Installation Works at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago ), January 2007〕 He has also explored immersive environments, as seen in his 1992 piece ''Tall Ships''. Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer. In Roland Barthes' terms, Hill’s video narratives can be understood as ‘writerly’ texts. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gary Hill」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|