In Plato's electronic cave - video artist Gary Hill, Guggenheim SoHo, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, June, 1995 by Michael Duncan

Gary Hill pursues an ambitious goal in his video installations: to use dazzling state-of-the-art technology to transform literary and philosophical themes into immediate sensory experience. This combination of the abstruse and the immediate is difficult to pull off, but, at their best, Hill's works bring to life a range of contemporary ideas about the interaction of electronic media and the human mind and body.

Hill's installations liberate video art from the confines of the screening room; his video projections and multimonitor, digitally edited imagery can awaken even the most dazed TV channel-surfers. Tall Ships was the one undisputed hit of Documenta IX and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and remains one of the most compelling works of the last decade. Moving through a 90-foot-long darkened corridor, viewers automatically activate a series of video projections, so that ghostlike, life-size figures appear to approach, make eye contact, then turn and walk away. Tall Ships taps into the psychological appeal of portraiture, recalling a phenomenon like that of Ingres's Comtesse d'Haussonville, whose penetrating gaze seems to follow you through the Frick Collection. Upping the ante with his sophisticated technology, Hill heightens the experience of an uncanny encounter. His 16 video phantoms not only seem eerily lifelike, they are also the ones who abruptly break off contact and go metaphorically sailing back to their mysterious ports of origin.

A survey of nine of Hill's installations of the last decade, organized by Chris Bruce for the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle, has been touring the U.S. and is currently at the Guggenheim SoHo [through Aug. 20]. The past two years have also seen major exhibitions of his work organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Oxford Museum of Modem Art. Clearly Hill has struck an art-world chord.

Hill's explorations of video's pixelated universe have generated considerable critical discussion. In the Henry Art Gallery catalogue, essays by Lynne Cooke and Bruce Ferguson help to trace the complex theoretical sources for his works. Much of the writing about Hill, however, is hampered by the difficulty of describing the installations' complicated technology and intricate visual effects. On the whole, the critical commentary tends to obscure the experience of the works, which can be extraordinarily clear and emotionally compelling.

Originally trained in sculpture, Hill conceives his installations with a flair for spatial drama. In the course of the 1980s he turned from making videotapes for a single monitor to more complex arrangements of multiple monitors, audio speakers and props. Although he avoids straightforward narrative, there is a theatrical quality to all his works. Perhaps the simplest example of Hill's method is the 17-minute video piece Soundings (1979). Here the severing of sound and image has a blunt rigor worthy of Godard and a streamlined structure reminiscent of Michael Snow's film Wavelength. Soundings consists of a single continuous shot of a bare audio speaker lying on its back, like a bowl. While we hear a spoken text, a handful of sand is tossed inside the speaker. The grains of sand begin to jump with the speaker's vibration in a literal depiction of the "rhythms of speech" and the "weight of words." More and more sand is poured over the speaker, as the text becomes gradually muffled and finally indecipherable.

Many of Hill's works also play off traditional art-historical genres in unpredictable ways. He has explored, for example, the psychological and philosophical ramifications of the still life (Learning Curve, 1993), the nude (Suspension of Disbelief, 1991-92) and the landscape (Primarily Speaking, 1981-83). One of the Seattle survey's best works, Crux (1983-87), is an update of a particularly daunting art-historical theme: the Crucifixion.

For this piece Hill trekked across the deserted Bannerman's Island, situated on the Hudson River, recording his journey with five video cameras that were strategically attached to his body. One camera was mounted to each of his shins, one was braced in front of his head and focused on his face, and one was clamped to each of his arms, which he held out to either side of his body. In the resulting installation, five monitors are mounted on a wall in the form of a crucifix, simultaneously showing the artist's hands, bare feet and face; the central part of his body is never seen. The viewer is drawn into Hill's elaborate conceit by the odd experience of watching five continuous close-ups at once, all of which feature glimpses of the same background landscape. This indifferent landscape, as in Italian and Northern Renaissance Crucifixion scenes, furnishes the setting for the foreground drama.

With outrageous audacity, Hill taps into the angst and abjection of the Crucifixion. Bearing his televisual "cross," he records a simple but arduous walk in the woods, passing through an abandoned armory (a symbol of the ruins of civilization) and moving on to the river. The physical strain of carrying five cameras strapped to Hills body can be seen on the artist's face as he pants and puffs his way across the island. With his cumbersome apparatus weighing him down, Hill stumbles slowly along, his bare feet almost slipping on rocks, his stiffly held hands having seemingly gone numb. The 26-minute cycle ends with Hill awkwardly bending over and splashing his sweaty face with water.