Gary Hill at Barbara Gladstone - New York - video recordings

Art in America, March, 2003 by Cathy Lebowitz

The sounds emanating from the four video pieces in Gary Hill's recent exhibition at Gladstone--random wailing, garbled voices and repetitive droning--evoked nothing so much as a nightmarish madhouse. It seems an apt association for this artist who often explores the limits of ordinary language. Two new works were shown here for the first time along with two slightly older projections.

The simple yet powerful Remembering Paralinguay (2000) presents a woman walking toward the viewer and hollering wordlessly. At first, she appears as a mere speck and gets larger as she comes closer. Her intermittent screams could be heard throughout the gallery. Nearby, a male voice from the soundtrack of Twofold (Goats and Sheep) monotonously intoned such phrases as "the right hand can't know what the left hand is doing." This piece is a recent version of a series initiated in 1995 with the installation Withershins; the series features various configurations of a poemlike text written by Hill and expressed through speech and sign language. Here, the black-and-white video consisted of two sets of male hands signing parts of Hill's text. Twofold (Goats and Sheep) engages ideas such as repetition and asymmetry. The animals in the title, according to the gallery, refer to a passage in the Bible (Matthew), in which Christ puts the sheep, the saved, on his right-hand side and the goats, the damned, on his left-hand side.

The human hand's expressive potential is also the theme of Language Willing (2002). This video incorporates two circles of floral-patterned wallpaper, one red, the other white. A man's hand appears in each circle. Both hands, positioned on their fingertips like five-legged spiders, move in a jerky, unnatural manner. The shallowness of the projected spaces brings to mind painted rondos and gives the hands an iconic quality. Four speakers emit a male voice making sounds that are almost, but never quite, recognizable as words. According to a gallery handout, the soundtrack comes from a text written and performed by Chris Mann, a poet and composer. Mann's idiosyncratic inflections, rather than any technological intervention, remove ordinary comprehension from his words. The odd pitch and staccato rhythms of the quadrupled voice correspond to the jumpy abstract movements of the hands. Together they formed a surprisingly engrossing environment.

In the gallery's largest room, Accordions (The Belsunce Recordings, July 2001), 2001-02, contained five projections of the inhabitants of an Algerian town going about their daily life. Opening with groups of people, Hill slowly zooms in on one person in each shot. A statement by the artist indicates his intention to create portraits of these individuals in real time. The successive zooms of the camera alternate with periods of darkness, in which no image appears. The dark moments become longer as the flashes of the faces become shorter. Accordions' audio track consists of voices and random noises from the pictured scenes, and the sounds stopped and started in correspondence with the video. Further complicating matters, the five projections are not synchronized. I ended up circling around myself to catch the active projector, an effect that was more immediate and powerful than the subtleties of individual facial expressions and gestures.

In lieu of exactitude, Hill offers possibility. While his work can be frustratingly obscure, at its best, it opens up the imagination to new forms of communication.