Rooted in the Experiential

Abstract

Gary Hill is a Seattle-based media artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally for the past thirty years. One of the early innovators in video art, Hill's work addresses themes of and communication. Inspired by philosophy and linguistics. Hill continues to reinvent the medium of video. This interview was conducted via Skype on August 4, 2009. COLETTE COPELAND: Michael Rush, in his 2003 book Video Art, categorizes you as a video installation artist. In George Quasha and Charles Stein's essay, Speaking for Before, (1) both avoid categorizing you as a video artist, citing it as reductive or condescending. You are quoted as saying that video is ultimately the wrong word for what you are involved with. It seems that this paradox of the inadequacy, yet necessity, of and our desire to name and categorize is an underlying theme throughout your work. How would you describe yourself and your work? GARY HILL: Categories aside, would say my work resides between media; it rather deals with the flux of poetic space. George and Chuck make the argument that I'm perhaps more a artist than a video artist, and there is indeed some, truth to that. The reality is that, when one is working, the question of what it is that one does vanishes into the process that is happening at that given moment. The culture of mind and creativity is very different than the world that is attempting to put things in their proper places so as to be understood. These worlds mix about the same as oil and water, though. work with more than or installation. work with stuff and what's happening now. Most of the time the materials and initial impulse tell me which way to go with a work--it is very hard to put one's finger on it. Nonetheless, go with that kind of unseen energy. CC: In many of your video installations, both written and spoken become a tangible, physical entity. Large-scale projected text asserts its authority beyond the textual. Quasha and Stein question this notion of as object: Language wants to surround us like air, to be the medium in which we live and breathe ... Is or any instance of an object ... its status equal to the thing it represents or communicates or speaks for? (2) How do your works transcend the notion that exists only in what it can represent or communicate? GH: don't think of as something external that we use to communicate with. It's more the sense that I am language from the get-go. We have become divorced from our being by representation. A linguist once pointed out to me that when we begin to speak, to tell, we don't know how we are going to end the thought, how the sentences are going to form and transform. We are in a process of thinking it through, thinking out loud, so to speak. Getting back to your question, guess I'm returning to and coming upon the root of as a continuous process. It's extremely powerful when words open up, and suddenly meaning [and] syntax come alive and you're kind of swimming in language. try to use this process to open up images too, beyond representation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CC: When watch or read about your work, always have more questions than do answers. Because of the multiple interpretations, many of your works speak to the frustrations or miscommunications inherent in language, rather than the structural or semiotic aspects of language. The works are philosophical yet evoke an emotional response. GH: Maybe there's a kind of work that's not necessarily tied to questions or answers, that's not entrapped by such a duality. mean, is wondering a mode of questioning? would say not. This is a space like to evoke--one of wonder. Wonder opens up when we are delighted by the mystery of something--knowing we cannot know something. think of the Cheshire cat smiling behind the mind. …