“Perhaps as much as any artist using image/sound media, Hill’s work in video is about, and is, a new form of writing.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett reports on her blog Art To Go that Seattle based video artist Gary Hill has donated “four of his critical video language suites from the 1980s” to the Seattle Art Museum.
Included is Hill’s 1987-88 43+ minute piece Incidence of Catastrophe which was inspired by Maurice Blanchot‘s novel Thomas the Obscure. Like Hill, Blanchot’s work is in “constant engagement with the ‘question of literature’, a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing.”
From just watching the short clip it is evident that this is a significant piece. A haunting assault on the text by waves of interpretation and technologies. In the end the waves recede, the text remains, the viewer/reader violently responds, everyone waits for the next round.
I can’ wait to see the whole thing.
Hats off to the Seattle Art Museum, the new building, the expanded collection, the Olympic Sculpture Park, throw in the just ended exhibition at the Asian Art Museum Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art and now the acquisition of Hill’s work. This is civic pride stuff.
Also of note: This is a huge week for the art world. It is Art Basel Miami Beach time and this year the video lounge (pdf) will be curated by SAM’s modern and contemporary art curator Michael Darling. The theme will be Video and the Pacific Northwest. One event Darling has planned is called “Storytelling,” and it will include the work of Gary Hill.
Opening quote from Hill’s bio at Electronic Arts Intermix