Video & Performance Art

Gary Hill

Name: Gary Hill
Author: Robert C. Morgan
ISBN: 9780801864018

by Robert C. Morgan

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Overview

"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 informativeinterviews, 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.

About the Author, Robert C. Morgan

Robert C. Morgan is in the at.

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Editorials

Courtney B. Wilson

Mencken's book supplies the perfect introduction to a subject whose devotees increase each year. Today, visitors to the great railroad museums of the world are treated to a glimpse of passenger amenities in the preserved examples of these coaches, great and small. Although few can imagine the smoke, clatter, dirt, and danger of nineteenth-century rail travel, Mencken's research provides the contemporary description necessary to gain a full understanding of that experience.

Dick Farley

Easily accessible and useful to anyone interested in the pattern of our cities. —Bloomsbury Review

Edward K. Muller

Through description and photography, Ford offers a guide to the qualities of design, architecture, and ornamentation that create the character of urban spaces. The book is both interesting and illuminating—people will see cities differently after reading it.

John Barth

Glenn Blake is an eloquent singer of gulf coast storms and tides, both meteorological and human. This first collection of his stories is a delight.

John H. White

A pioneering history of the American passenger car, especially valuable for its reproductions of contemporary travel accounts.

Max Apple

These are unique stories, regional at the surface, universal at the core. A Winesburg, Ohio for our time.

Molly Ivins

Let's face it, being born and raised between the Old and Lost Rivers is going to do something permanent to your consciousness, and what it has done in Glenn Blake's case is stick there. So much so that when he writes about it, you can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it, see it, that strange, lost, unknown corner of Texas. It is a whole other country and Blake gives it to you with all its oddity and mystery, as it is.

Robert Phillips

Blake's stories are beautifully understated yet energetic, his imagination elemental yet nuanced. Drowned Moon reverberates with the rites of nature and rural life. Blake creates a world that will long remain in the reader's memory.

Rosellen Brown

Reticent, closely guarded, and cryptic, Glenn Blake's terse prose partakes of poetry's careful measures. His stories concern rice fields, houses that disappear into the encroaching high water, and the poignantly named Old and Lost Rivers. He has caught with a peculiar mixture of sadness and humor the personality of this rough, modest, and little-known place.