Gary Hill

Images and language are decon­structed and regene­rated, gestures are trans­formed into speech, colors are exchanged and manipu­lated, texts are spoken forwards and backwards. From a loudspeaker membrane slowly filled with sand, we hear that a voice is buried here… The exhibi­tion Gary Hill. A Question of Percep­tion shows how the American US-American media concep­tual artist has been revealing the essence of image and language through the medium of video for more than five decades.

Active since the 1970s, Gary Hill (b. 1951 in Santa Monica, lives in Seattle) is one of the key practi­tio­ners working with video , language and electronic media. With his inimitable feel for a medium’s technical and concep­tual possi­bi­li­ties, he helped establish the limina­lity between video, perfor­mance and concep­tual practices in contem­porary art. Long before the manipu­la­tion of media became common­place, Gary Hill’s videos repeatedly brought together the elements of image, language, and text, creating a special awareness of how we perceive and process different kinds of infor­ma­tion. His work is parti­cu­larly relevant today because of the ubiquity of electro­ni­cally generated images and their manipulability.

Gary Hill’s videos and instal­la­tions do not tell stories; on the contrary, he uses technical means to orches­trate, modulate, and stage experi­ences or pheno­me­no­lo­gical phenomena. On the one hand, they create an expanded conscious­ness; on the other, they sow a deep skepti­cism about the construc­tion of percep­tion, meaning, or reality. Far beyond a mere critique of images and media, his works invite us to question our habitual patterns of percep­tion and judgment. Through a strategy of discon­ti­nuity, he develops new visual and auditory modes of percep­tion and commu­ni­ca­tion. His art draws on everyday, personal, literary, scien­tific, and philo­so­phical experi­ences and themes. For Gary Hill, the medium is never merely a means of repre­sen­ta­tion, but always an invita­tion to reflec­tion. He demons­trates that “images are not just there but emerge with the light of each moment” (Gottfried Boehm).

All of Gary Hill’s video works are of powerful intensity and at the same time create great intimacy. In terms of content and their media dynamics, they never work towards a quick punch line or a specific climax. It is a special quality of his work that Gary Hill always maintains a produc­tive balance between content and effect. This balance is parti­cu­larly conducive to a conscious and intense experi­ence of tempo­ra­lity. In some cases, the images literally burn themselves onto our retinas or develop such a strong physical presence that indivi­dual images and words rever­be­rate in our memory for a long time.

With forty-six works spanning five decades, the Kunst­mu­seum Wolfsburg has the largest collec­tion of works by the American video pioneer in Germany. In the last few years, several more recent instal­la­tions have been added to the holdings and are now being shown for the first time in this exhibition.

Curators
Holger Broeker, Elena Engelbrechter