Gary Hill

"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 informative interviews, aswell 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.

Foreword by Lynne Cooke. Text by George Quasha, Charles Stein.

This book is the story of two men who began an odyssey together that became a thread, which when unraveled, reveals how Cold War paranoia escalated into the death of a president. Robert Edward Webster and Lee Harvey Oswald were manipulated like marionettes on strings of espionage. Unraveling these strings (or threads) may lead us to the puppeteers controlling them. Were these "controllers" orchestrating a series of events that would lead to JFK's assassination?

For over two decades Gary Hill's work in video and installation art has cross-pollinated mediums--video, books, the speaking voice, composed sound, strobe light pulsation, experimental text, image transformation, computer animation, the human body--to alter awareness of art as language. Language Willingmodestly presents four of Hill's recent installations: Wall Piece, Language Willing, Accordions (The Belsunce Recordings, July 2001)and Crossbow.

Haunting and strangely provocative new installations by artist Gary Hill, celebrated worldwide in major museums and galleries, are introduced through a highly readable essay by two of the artist's long-time poet/artist collaborators. In a sort of lineup, seventeen day-workers, full-size, stare at you from the wall, eerily present by the magic of video-projection (Viewer). A solitary Native American stares you in the eyes, while he stares at himself from an adjacent wall-then the projections switch position: the watcher becomes the watched and the watched becomes the watcher (Standing Apart). This third in an ongoing series of the Quasha & Stein dialogue on Gary Hill is beautifully illustrated in full color to give a living sense of the actual installations.

In People Who Don't Know They're Dead, Gary Leon Hill tells a family story of how his Uncle Wally and Aunt Ruth, Wally's sister, came to counsel dead spirits who took up residence in bodies that didn?t belong to them. And in the telling, Hill elucidates much of what we know, or think we know, about life, death, consciousness, and the meaning of the universe. When people die by accident, in violence, or maybe they're drunk, stoned, or angry, they get freeze-framed. Even if they die naturally but have no clue what to expect, they might not notice they're dead. It's frustrating to see and not be seen. It's frustrating not to know what you're supposed to do next. It's especially frustrating to be in someone else's body and think it's your own. That's if you're dead. If you're alive and that spirit has attached itself to you, well that's a whole other set of frustrations. Wally Johnston, a behavioral psychologist, first started working with a medium in the 70s to help spirits move on to the next stage. Some years after that, Ruth Johnston, an academic psychiatric nurse, who'd become interested in new consciousness and alternative healing, began working with Wally to clear spirits who weren't moving on. These hitchhikers had attached themselves to the auras of living relatives or strangers in an attempt to hold on to a physical existence they no longer need. Through her pendulum, Ruth obtains permission from the higher self of both hitchhiker and host to work with them. Then Wally speaks with them, gently but firmly, to make sure they know they are no longer welcome to inhabit the bodies and wreak havoc on the lives of the living. Hill has woven this fascinating story with the history and theory of what happens at death, with particular emphasis on the last 40 years and the work of such groundbreaking thinkers as Elmer Green, Raymond Moody, William James, Aldous Huxley, Edith Fiore, Martha Rogers, Mark Macy, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Bruce Lipton, and a host of others, whose work helps inform our idea of what it is to live and to die. As it turns out, our best defense against hitchhikers is to live consciously. And our best chance of doing that is by paying attention and staying open to possibilities.