LIMINAL PERFORMANCE

Gary Hill in Dialogue with George Quasha and Charles Stein

Excerpted from Performing Arts Journal, No. 58, Jan 98

Gary Hill’s seminal and internationally celebrated work in various mediums—especially video and installation art (with a broad orientation including cybernetics, electronics, sound, language and image)—has been exhibited at major museums around the world including solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Soho in New York, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Watari Museum in Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and currently at 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle (August 3 – September 15, 2007)

QUASHA: Your identity as artist seems complex virtually from the beginning: sculptor, sound artist (also sculptural), video artist, creator of installations involving electronics (especially video), language art (“video poetics,” as we have called it), and performance art. The latter is perhaps the least well defined and therefore the most interesting ground to break in the present context. But you started out as a sculptor, working with metal. Let’s begin by tracing why you turned to video.

HILL: There were a number of overlapping events that took place from 1969 to 1973 when I was living in Woodstock, New York. I did a lot of sound work with my sculpture—sounds generated by the metal constructions themselves. Then I began using tape recorders working with tape loops, feedback and other electronic sound. I had a little EMS synthesizer in a briefcase. At around the same time, and for the most part by chance, I did some recording with a portapak that I borrowed from Woodstock Community Video. The fluidity of taping and viewing in real-time freed up my thinking in a very radical way. Suddenly the sculpture I had been doing for several years seemed overwhelmingly tedious and distant from this present-tense process. Video allowed the possibility to “think out loud” as if with some “other” self. It was a continuously self-renewing situation—like “reality,” yet the monitoring gave it a sense of hyperreality. Here was an immediately accessible process that was a seemingly much closer parallel to thinking than basic sculpture.
The very first thing I did was to record myself as I watched myself on a monitor. Then I played that back on the monitor and recorded myself interacting with this prerecorded image of myself on the same monitor to combine the recorded and the “live.” This really had nothing to do with making images but was rather a kind of externalized thinking pertaining to coherences between mind and body. After this initial discovery I first made a couple of tapes in which there was no editing, no effects. Then I did sort of a performance piece with a friend: we painted colored rectangles all around the town at night. After three or four nights, there were a lot of them, and we got caught and were arrested. I made a documentary about it that included individual responses and suggestions to questions as to whether we should put up more, remove them, etc. It was interesting how the responses correlated with property ownership and private/public space. “Decorating” the war memorial in the center of town was a lot more taboo than we had imagined.

Gary Hill’s Glass Onion in the New Media Gallery

QUASHA: Sculpture, sound, performance, street performance—this sequence touches a lot of bases that reappear in your work. Perhaps video, given its history of increasing portability, “takes to the streets” even more easily than theatre and performance art. Perhaps video is intrinsically performance art, particularly with the advent of the portapak, which if I’m not mistaken also marks the beginning of self-conscious “video art.”

HILL: Often, especially, during those early days, I would indeed “take to the streets”—just to see what I could see, so to speak. And, as you say, inevitably there was a certain self-consciousness. There was something about the extension of one’s nervous system through the camera that made for the possibility of connecting to the environment in a very new way. But even when I worked with a conscious idea, with a conceptual parameter, there was always a lot left up to the “medium” and to the event itself. This usually involved feedback loops of some sort—some way of looking at oneself looking and/or performing some kind of activity. Many of my early single-channel video pieces were in a sense “system-performances” that generated their own time in relation to real time. There are really so many folds in time involving media, feedback, delay, writing, speaking, and the body. Time becomes more like a Möbius band or Klein bottle without an absolutely “real” side.

QUASHA: Over the years, however, we have noticed a certain impatience on your part as regards the distinction “video artist,” which still tends to follow your name.

HILL: I’m definitely not comfortable with the tag of “video artist.” Once again, it foregrounds a passive sense of image. Virtually all my work in one way or another has something to do with putting into question the hierarchical position of the image. For me, working in video involves a thinking space that is part of the milieu of working with electronic media. It includes feedback processes, cybernetics, and various I/Os from and to the world, all on an equal footing with the aspect of the work that has to do with recording and processing visual images. So the term “video art,” even for my work that is technically single-channel video, can be very misleading. Also, keep in mind that the artworld didn’t so to speak discover video art until Documenta 9 (1992). I think a lot of this comes out of habit and laziness but above all economics.

Gary Hill’s Glass Onion in the New Media Gallery

STEIN: So for you the crucial issue is the possibilities of feedback that electronic media offer.

HILL: I think so. And how they differ, not only from writing, but other feedback situations. I feel that feedback phenomena really dominate the whole issue of video. Actually, this seems more important than, say, the fact that a tape is made in “real time” as such, even though, of course, feedback occurs through real-time process. So the deep time/actual time distinction from “real time” is interesting. But the important result is the feedback; feedback is what gives you something different from the more ordinary ways of working with a medium. The feedback situation that arises when you are working with video tape can involve a certain cognitive element—an implication of abstract thinking that has nothing to do with, say, the way your hands work some material, that is, the ordinary sense of feedback that has to do with craft. If you focus a video camera on yourself—there you are, outside yourself.

STEIN: Of course if you claim that this is happening, it all becomes quite questionable—people can say that referring to those issues is a kind of pretension, particularly if they don’t enter into that kind of experience.

HILL: Exactly. And at this point it really becomes a matter of belief or faith. There’s nothing that’s going to prove that you are on any said “level.” You do know, say, that you’re in a feedback process—there’s a camera on you; there’s a monitor in front of you and you’re looking at it. But once you enter into what we could call “meta-feedback,” the space that opens up when you are simultaneously in your own body looking out and out there on a monitor or projected onto a wall being looked at—you have to make a leap—you have to commit yourself to the connection, to the fact that you believe that there’s a kind of feedback that comes from this total situation that is beyond the mechanical, first-order feedback of the camera and the monitor. I think that the interest in this marks a difference between my work and that of a lot of other artists who use video feedback in one way or another.

QUASHA: Aren’t we also dealing here with something very close to biofeedback and psycho-feedback? Biofeedback in some respects is the best model for discussing a whole range of processes human beings are involved with—even the crude instance of biofeedback where you put an electrode on your head and watch a gauge that tells you when you’re agitated. The feedback situation allows you to reflect upon your own productive energy—what you are producing in the way of energy waves, mind waves, which exist along some kind of a spectrum of electronic impulses. One of the things that has always been attractive about video feedback is the strange way that video seems to engage the mind’s sense of itself as if there were a resonance between the bio-electricity of the nervous system and the emission of electrons by the cathode-ray tube—a sense, obviously, that film doesn’t excite. I don’t know that I have any satisfactory notion of what it means, but it does seem to relate to the biofeedback that occurs in doing hands-on bodywork, for instance, or touch-oriented movement like Contact Improvisation or tai-chi push-hands. Perhaps we need a notion like “biointerfeed” to suggest that the feedback—the engaged “listening/signaling”—is going both ways, as it obviously is in many performance situations where the performer is modulating behavior according to audience response.

HILL: I think the real difference between the kind of feedback that occurs in video and bodywork or biofeedback, on the one hand, and film, on the other, is that neither biofeedback nor video is essentially pictorial. The end result is not an image, even if it involves images, in a sense, along the way. One is not engaged in setting up a scenario to represent something through an image. The outcome, the output, is more a blueprint after the fact of what occurred in the feedback situation. That’s not true of all my work, but take pieces like Dervish (1993-95) or Between 1 & 0 (1993) or anything where the image is really agitated—the whole thing has to do with keeping you in an agitated state, to force you to remain or become aware of the process of seeing and looking and being in a certain place and becoming engaged in what it means.

QUASHA: An excited feedback situation.

HILL: An excited feedback situation.

QUASHA: It moves somewhat close to a “flicker” effect at certain times. It engages you at a neurological level. Certainly you get that in Dervish: a strange, neurological, even trippy quality.

HILL: Circular Breathing (1994), too—a continuous pulsation at the same rate. And what’s interesting—and this is something I want to pursue more—is, like you say, this kind of trippy neurological thing which is embedded with some notion of narrative or of there being something underneath. In other words, it’s not solely a mechanical or biochemical effect, but an opening up of another view on what a story is, what a narrative is, what images are, and what do images mean when they are next to each other flickering at such and such a rate.

QUASHA: The great forbidden subject—how this all works in with actual transformation, actual states of mind, the work as initiation into our “further nature,” to use Charles Olson’s projective term. But here we are on the threshold of another dialogue, one that leads us into the further life of all our genuine work.
“I’m so foolish,” Olson also wrote, “a song is heat!”