Between Cinema and a Hard Place: Gary Hill's video art between words and images - Critical Essay

So what is left but the business between hands. On the one, to dig (deeper); on the other, to bury (deeper) ... And if the right hand did not know what the left hand is doing....

--Gary Hill (1)

WHAT IS VIDEO ART? Rather, where is video art located? Or, perhaps, what are its borders? What are its influences, confluences, and confusions? What limits it and defines it? How does video art speak about itself? For my purposes here, I would ask, who is Gary Hill? Or again, where is Gary Hill? Or, still again, what is Gary Hill between?

Hill's video art does not sit easily within an art historical perspective, nor does it rest well within an already unstable history of video art. The history and nature of video art is problematic because it is "between cinema and a hard place," as the title of Hill's 1991 video installation suggests. Hill--and other video artists--can undoubtedly be shown to be influenced by art movements such as conceptualism, Dadaism, performance art, as well as the history of film, but what will be of concern here is the unique and singular location of Hill's art. What is significant with regard to Hill's art is that his influences stem from poetry and philosophy as much as they come from anything within an art historical field. Therefore, to place Hill's art necessitates a perspective from which linguistic elements are taken into account as well as those of the visual arts.

To begin to show the distinctive nature of Hill's video art, the first half of this article is an analysis of his video installation, Between Cinema and a Hard Place. This installation acts as a self-referential questioning of the status of Hill's own video art and serves to show why an approach to Hill's practices must come from nonvisual as well as visual fields. Once a relation between Hill's video art and the verbal fields of poetry and philosophy are established, I turn to examine his art within the context of other visual arts, showing parallel developments between video art and the related media of television and film.

On a broad level then, this article suggests that an understanding of Hill's status as a "video artist" must take into account particular relations between language and image both intrinsic and extrinsic to his art. I argue that it is within these relations that Hill's singular place is constituted within the discourse of video art and the broader discourse of art history. Furthermore, the idea of "influence" from one field to another is shown to be too banal, and what must be accounted for are the radical disruptions that occur when a particular sign-system is transposed into another sign-system, in other words, when a text is taken up in a visual artwork, or vice versa.

   Between Cinema and a Hard Place

   Each of [Hill's] works is found to be singular and sweeps the
   general technique called video along in an adventure that renders
   it irreplaceable, but irreplaceable among other irreplaceables,
   other unique effects of signature, even if it puts to work many
   other things, many other "arts" that have nothing to do with
   video....

   --Jacques Derrida (2)

   The sense in which Gary Hill's videos are conceptual or image-text
   art done in video form is the sense in which the boundaries of a
   medium have long ago disappeared, but for our institutional need to
   categorize.

   --Maureen Turim (3)

Hill's video installation, Between Cinema and a Hard Place (1991), is a self-questioning self-referential art piece. (4) The installation is technologically, philosophically, and imagistically complex. Formally, it comprises twenty-three video monitors of various sizes (stripped of their casings): twelve thirteen-inch color, five nine-inch black-and-white, and six five-inch black-and-white. The multiple monitors are conjoined through a computer-controlled video-switching matrix that also brings together three audio speakers for an aural component.

Exposed wirings and picture tubes, and the otherwise sparse layout of the installation give an impression of simplicity, of a "stripped-down" video installation. One might think that Hill has taken video apart, exposed it and taken away the framings that separate it from the space of the museum and viewers; the video installation turns into a video "expos-ition." Unlike television, cinema, and most video installations (including Hill's), Between Cinema and a Hard Place allows the viewer to see behind the scene, to realize the amount of infrastructural wiring necessary to put the final image on the screen. While technology disappears in most interactions with a screened image, Between Cinema and a Hard Place turns the technology inside-out, rips the guts out and displays the entrails.

Looking closer at the formal setup, Hill's expos-ition is essentially composed of four monitor groups. The first group is made up of the nine thirteen-inch monitors along the back row which function in synchrony with each other, transposing images from monitor to monitor. An image of an object (e.g., an image of the moon or a stone) may appear on the far right screen and seemingly move between screens toward the left. While the monitors work in harmony, a distinction is maintained in that each monitor is shifted slightly, pointing in a different direction, and each monitor has been adjusted to give off a slightly different hue than the others. Similarly, the second group--five nine-inch black-and-white monitors to the viewers' right--function together and are slightly shifted, but the images are not as abstract as they appear in the first group. There are even some motion scenes, e.g., the cutting of an apple. The six five-inch black-and-white monitors directly in the middle-front form the third group, again displaying related images between them. Yet the images on these screens are all form and contrast; there are barely any clear figures or objects to focus on. Finally, the three thirteen-inch color monitors on the bottom left provide the most detail. The two side monitors generally correspond with each other as the middle monitor shows abstract images that appear somewhat akin to those in the other monitor groups, however not in harmony with any other monitor.