Gary Hill`s place in the pantheon of contemporary video art is attested to by his many awards and exhibitions - a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1995; participation at the Documenta IX in Kassel; solo exhibitions at MOMA in New York; frequent participation at Whitney biennale; exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris; and many other prestigious awards and grants.
This year MediaForum and GMG Gallery decided to launch an initiative to introduce the classics of contemporary art to the Moscow public, and Hill`s exhibition is one of those projects.
Hill`s early video art works researched the synthesized image, which was made with experimental video equipment, capturing objects in such a way that their perception conflicts with post-minimalist or conceptual postulates, for example, Hole in the Wall, (1974). Later, Hill took an interest in contemporary poetry, and text began to play a central role in his work and in the relation between image, rhythm, and the sound narrative, such as Surroundings, (1979), as well as Around and About, (1980).
Maurice Blanchot's idea that language influences phenomenological experience is reflected in Hill`s work. His more recent works such as Viewer, (1996), and Blindspot, (2003), we see that the person is the hero. The artist is interested in the relationship between the viewer and the hero, which is signified by emotions and signs produced with the help of video equipment. Here, we see the artist turn to the theme of the Other, relying on the texts of the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, which has been used often in contemporary art. The video portraits of people began to touch the human and emotional factor, and are subjected to dialectical analysis of people on both sides of the screen.
The main theme of Hill`s oeuvre is researching the relationship between word, sound, and the electronic image. In essence, Hill`s work is based on structural analysis and deals with the problems of the essence of text. Nevertheless, text is mostly dealt with in a post-modern way, as a way to depict the surrounding world. The video image separates the subject reality into its semantic and material components. Hill shows the divergence between the spoken word, the visible subject and the present reality of this subject, which actually has little in common, and are tied together only in human consciousness.
The formal perfection of his complex multichannel video installations speaks about the author`s research in the figurative world of the visible subject environment and its conflict with human communications.
GMG Gallery will show Hill`s most significant works, which were chosen mostly because of their educational use for the Moscow public.
Hill`s most famous and most «total» installation is Wall Piece, (2000). In this single-channel installation the author rhythmically hits his body against a black wall as the moments of impact are lit by flashes from a strobe light, until finally the video image disappears under this aggressive light. The sound of the body beating against the wall alternates with a story about aging spoken by the author: «I go, looking at how I go…».
The next well-known work is Viewer, (1996) - a complex synchronized installation from five screens merged together, and one of his largest works. It shows a line of people of various sizes and ages. They are the same height as the viewers and stand directly in front, not moving while contemplating each other. Thus, the main theme of the work is created - the video image on the screen is looking at and analyzing the viewer at the very same moment when the viewer is looking at and analyzing the image on the screen.
Hill captures the moment when passive contemplation changes into individual activity. The confrontation of contemplators (spectators on the screens, and the real spectators) begins from the moment of adaptation when people at an exhibition gradually start to look in the eyes of the heroes. Logic and sight, which supposedly can attain everything, create the world on the basis of existing information, pondering and creating for itself an objective picture of the world, but they begin to digest themselves and to be lost in an effort at self-analysis. This is the ideal form without a narrative, and with the story excluded.
Any content can be placed in this field of tension between the observers and the observable, but Hill consciously reduces any superfluous meaning, concentrating only on the most complicated details and on the phenomenon of spectator perception; the glance being a way to receive information.
One of the works at the exposition will most likely be a world premier made especially for Moscow.
MediaForum is the most avant-garde program at the Moscow Film Festival, and is dedicated to new and experimental forms of screen culture. The MediaArtLab Center for Arts and Culture has introduced multi-media culture to the Russian public for 11 years, organizing exhibitions of the best video artists and their master classes, lectures and round tables, as well as sound art and net art, and all that is new and cutting-edge in contemporary art.
GMG Gallery is one of the youngest galleries on the Moscow art scene, but in its three years it has shown projects by Yoko Ono, Bill Fontana, Thomas Joshua Cooper, as well as exhibitions of the classics of Moscow Conceptualism, and important Russian and western young artists who participate in the most progressive art forums in the world.
GMG continues its cooperation with leading representatives of the western contemporary art scene that work with video. After the world premier of works by Bjorn Melhaus, «Deadly Storms», the next step in this direction will be the solo exhibition of Gary Hill, «Viewer».
A showing of Gary Hill`s works, as well as his master class, will be on June 20 at 20.00 at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.