thumb|right|upright=1.7|Gary Hill, Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place, Sixteen-channel audio/video installation; dimensions of horizontal niche: 16" h. x 54" x 66", 1990. Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gary Hill (1951) is an American artist whose work has centered on video, installation art, sculpture and performance. Based on works extending over fifty years from the late 1960s onward, he is considered a foundational figure in the areas of single- and multi-channel video and new-media art. Although his work has connections to conceptual art and minimalism, Hill is known for an independent approach that is inspired more by philosophical and literary texts than by central concerns of art and film such as representation, narrative and description. He has used an array of nascent technologies—computer software, projection, virtual reality, CGI—to examine consciousness and its relationship to the body, perception, time, and visual and verbal language. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel commented, "Hill creatively uses high-tech instruments to elicit personal experiences of archetypal simplicity. With his work, the invisible operations of thinking take tangible shape. Perception and cognition circle around one another, engaging their subjects." Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate Gallery, and Whitney Museum, among others. He has exhibited at those and other international museums and been featured multiple times in events such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial. Hill lives and works in Seattle, Washington and Mallorca, Spain.
Early life and career
Hill was born in Santa Monica, California in 1951 and grew up in Redondo Beach, where he was an avid surfer and skateboarder.
In the 1970s, Hill integrated experiments with electronic sound, video, synthesizers and performance into his welded and mixed-media constructions. Emerging amid the conceptual and performative context of that era, he worked on parallel tracks, producing single-channel videotapes that involved electronic image processing, distortion and language, as well as sculptural installations that used video and the body as elements. For the installation Hole in the Wall (1974) he filmed himself cutting a television monitor-sized hole layer by layer through a wall at the Woodstock Artists Association. He then placed a monitor in the new orifice that played a loop of his recorded action, enacting video's occupation of exhibition spaces previously devoted to painting and sculpture. According to critics, Hill's techniques create a liminal conceptual space whereby philosophical questions are posed but not answered, an approach which invites active participation—a hallmark of his art.
Individual works
Single-channel video
In the late-1970s, Hill explored the structure of meaning in a series of single-channel videos. These works used interplay between image, language, sound and electronic phenomena involving formal, rhythmic and textural patterns of enunciation and visual transformation (e.g., Electronic Linguistics, 1977).
Multi-channel installations
In multi-channel video installations beginning in 1980, Hill sought to externalize the inner world of consciousness, experience and feeling using a fusion of objects, images, written text and spoken word.
In later works, Hill presented images flowing across exposed video tubes that were strung together like words in a sentence, pages of a book, or fleeting thoughts.
Projected video installations
With projected video installations beginning with Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) (1990)—which cast two different images from the ends of a slowly oscillating tube—Hill freed his video work and audiences from the constraint of the monitor. According to writers George Quasha and Charles Stein, this impels a self-conscious turn in viewers to their own reactions and internal processes. In the installations Frustrum and Guilt (2006, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain), Hill employed material and linguistic metaphors to convey personal responses to role of the United States in the Middle East. Frustrum is cinematic in its presentation, confronting viewers in a darkened gallery with a wall-sized projection of a computer-generated eagle that is trapped—excepting its wings—inside the triangular scaffolding of an electrical pylon. It is perched above a large, rectangular reflecting pool of deep black oil with an ingot of gold bullion in its center.
thumb|left|upright=1.6|Gary Hill, Fidelio, Act II, Scene VIII (Finale), performance, Edinburgh Festival, August 8, 2013.
Collaborative projects
From early on, Hill has collaborated with writers, philosophers, engineers, performers, and others. Varèse 360° (Holland Festival, 2009), a two-night, mixed-media performance of the composer Edgard Varèse's complete works for which Hill produced the dramaturgy and visual elements; and a restaging of a Beethoven opera in outer space, Fidelio (Opéra de Lyon, 2013).
Splayed Mind Out explored characteristic themes of embodiment, fraught communication, entropy and collapse through a fragmented narrative involving viewing, gesture and interplay between performers and video imagery on portable monitors and a back-wall projection.
In 2018, Hill participated in 24 Hours with Gary Hill, a marathon interview with twelve art professionals conducted at Arminius, Museumpark during Art Week Rotterdam. In 2021, Hill released You Know Where I’m At and I Know Where You’re At, a book collaboration with Martin Cothren, a Yakama Native American he met by happenstance while scouting for subjects for Viewer. The encounter led to a twenty-year creative exchange documented in the book in drawings and handwritten letters, which like Viewer, explores the encounter with otherness.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions of Hill's work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including the Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Colosseum and Temple of Venus and Roma, Fundación Centro Cultural Chacao, IMAI (Inter Media Art Institute)/NRW-Forum, LUMA Foundation, MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology), Moderna Museet, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1994); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011); West Den Haag (2018); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, Glenstone, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Henry Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Kiasma, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Pushkin Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, among others.
Hill has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (1981, 1989), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1986, 1990), American Film Institute (1986) and MacArthur Foundation (1998).