Gary Hill

Gary Hill (born April 4, 1951) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

1951-1968 Born April 4, 1951, in Santa Monica, California.

Grows up in Redondo Beach surfing and skateboarding.

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.

National skateboard champion in 1964; performs in the Cannes Film Festival prize winner, Skaterdater

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.

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.

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'.

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 [1977]).

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: Around & About (1980), Primarily Speaking (1981–83), ''Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?

The following works (alphabetical order) may be viewed at Gary Hill's Videos on Vimeo.com: Around & About (1980), Electronic Linguistic (1977), Equal Time (1979), Figuring Grounds (1985/2008), Happenstance (part one of many parts) (1982–83), Incidence of Catastrophe (1987–88), Isolation Tank (2010–11), Mediations (towards a remake of Soundings) (1979/1986), Picture Story (1979), Processual Video (1980), Site Recite (a prologue) (1989), Site Recite (a prologue) (1989), Tale Enclosure (1985), Videograms (1980–81), ''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:

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.

(Come On Petunia)'' (1984).

Gary Hill's work has often been discussed in relation to his incorporation of language/text in video and installation, most evident in a work like Incidence of Catastrophe (1987–88).

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.

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.

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."

These works are discussed in detail in An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings, George Quasha & Charles Stein, with a foreword by Lynne Cooke (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009), which also contains detailed descriptions of Hill's major installations.

Updated descriptions and new exhibitions at Gary Hill's website.

Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington; among others.

His works are in the permanent collection of many museums including MoMA, New York.

Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Library; and the first commissioned installation and performance work for the Colosseum and Temple of Venus and Roma, Rome, Italy.

Complete List of Solo Exhibitions

Complete List of Group Exhibitions