Art Master Lecture Series
Place Holder
2019/12/12 18:30-20:30
Location
CAFAM Lecture Hall
Presenter
Chen Xiaowen
Professor and Director of Discipline of Art and Technology, School of Design, CAFA
Director of Robot Art Lab, CAFA Visual Art Innovation Institute
Speaker
Gary Hill
*The lecture is open to the public. No application required.
Speaker
Gary Hill
Artist and Distinguished Professor of CAFA
About the Speaker
Gary Hill is an artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. He has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.
Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others. Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Public Library in Seattle, Washington, and an installation and performance work for the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome in Italy.
Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1995), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), and honorary doctorates from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA (2011).
Work of Gary Hill
"Incidence of Catastrophe"
(1987-1988)
Inspired by the novel Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot wherein the protagonist of the novel is the reader of the novel he is in (who may well be Blanchot himself). In the video, Thomas the protagonist is played by Hill which confounds the self-reflexive nature of the book’s relationships all the more, making the video something of a “transcreation.” The “reader” begins in the liquidity of the text almost as if he were waking from drowning. Images of the sea ravishing the shore – small cliffs of sand eroding and collapsing – are inter-cut with extreme close-ups of text and the texture of the page and book itself being flooded with ocean waves. In scene after scene the reader attempts to re-enter the book only to find himself a part of intense dreams and hallucinations. Thomas/Hill reads the book, when, suddenly, he feels he is being watched by the words. The character then experiences the book as a forest of words he is fighting through. Another “chapter” finds him alone in his room at night, overcome by a strange illness, in which the vision of the text has him vomiting violently. The text infiltrates the reader’s entire experience. Thinking he is still capable of functioning socially, the character finds himself at dinner with a group of hotel guests. Their conversation turns into isolated words that, like the sand, erode and wash away with seemingly all possibilities of meaning. The final scene shows the reader in the form of Hill physically and mentally destroyed. Cowering naked in the fetal position, he lies in his own excrement on a white-tiled floor, babbling unintelligible sounds. The pages of the book have grown into monumental walls with colossal letters that menacingly surround and imprison the naked body.
"Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place"
(1990)
Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place consists of sixteen video monitors separated from their chassis and electronics by extended wires. Varying in size from 1/2-inch to 23 inches, they are positioned and viewed within a deep horizontal inset (measuring 16 x 54 x 66 inches / 41 x 137 x 167 cm.) cut into a wall at waist to chest level. Their arrangement as such is one of accumulation, a pile up, a kind of debris – bulbs that have washed up from the sea or perhaps stones that have broken down to smaller and smaller particles. Each one displays an autonomous fragment of a body (perhaps a reclining figure, a man reading, a corpse, etc.) as actual size (i.e. a 1-inch monitor displays a portion of a palm of a hand, or an unrecognizable terrain of skin; a 4-inch monitor displays part of a shoulder or an ear; a 15-inch monitor emits the stomach, and so on). Each image involves little movement, being a never-ending closed loop with no beginning and no end, suggesting a wavering gaze or the murmur of the body. All together there is a polyrhythmic sense to an otherwise still figure uttering barely articulated phrases and guttural noises amongst the sounds of papers rustling and skin rubbing on skin.
"Wall Piece" (2000)
In Wall Piece, the image of a man repeatedly flinging himself at a wall and speaking a single word with each impact is projected on the wall of a completely darkened space. During recording, a single flash of extreme high intensity strobe light (the only light source) “captured” the body at the moment of contact. These singular moments were then edited together to form a linear text and a sequence of a body in various positions up against a wall. In the installation, the same kind of strobe light used for the recording is mounted on the floor and focused on the projection. It flashes at approximately 60 cycles per minute, going in and of synchronization with the recorded flashes of light. At times, the light presages the image, echoes the image, or when in unison, obliterates the image.
Campus Map
Organizer
CAFA School of Design
Co-organizer
CAFA Visual Art Innovation Institute
CAFA Art Museum
CAFA College of Continuing Education
Undertaker
CAFA School of Design
Department of Academics, CAFA Graduate Society
