Traces and afterimages. A conversation with Gary Hill
by Helena Ferreira

From Gary Hill: Unspoken Dialogues, 2017, Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, Lisbon 2017

Gary Hill is an intermedia artist who has been exhibiting internationally since the 1970s and, since then, has been shaping the contemporary artistic panorama through a deeply experimental approach to the physicality of the medium, establishing a unique relationship between art and technology. Using screens, projected image installations or sculpture, Gary Hill is known for his poetic insights into language, the body, identity and image, raising concerns about materiality, performativity and liminal experiences. In his body of work we can see the reinvention of the technical and technological possibilities of the medium highlighted by his innovative video, performance and installation works, using electronic image production systems.
The following conversation was conducted via email and includes Gary Hill’s additions and revisions.
We are noticing that the phenomenology of projection has a parallel dimension in ambivalent (torsional) language — words and syntax with an apparent double meaning, as though a verbal event turns on its axis and shifts its semantic force.¹

Helena Ferreira: Screens and projections have concomitant meanings in the realm of image- installation art — I say image-installation to signal any kind of image (moving, still, electronic, animated) that can be installed in a three-dimensional space or surface, or even become an object or a sculpture. But I believe we can in some way outline some differences. Let’s assume that, in general, a screen is a surface (of any kind) over which the image appears projected, reflected or emanated, where the key point focuses on the materiality of that surface, its portability, scale and ubiquity. Taking this view as a starting point, a screen surface can be almost anything. On the other hand, projection has a certain complexity supported by the projective apparatus that includes a light source, the image and the space that encloses the first two; all of which are subject to interferences, during the process of projection, hence determining the final result.
Whereas projecting an image entails formulating and composing the image in a particular location, focusing on the luminous phenomenon, which transports the viewer to a given time-space, an image emanated from a monitor raises questions about the surface and the materiality of the display. When determining the way you want viewers to experience your work, do these concerns arise in your working process? How do you differentiate or establish relationships between these two forms of installing the image in space? For instance in Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine), which it is not a projection, the monitors take up all the space that in turn becomes part of the installation.

Gary Hill: You brought up an exception in the work Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine) (1991-92) in the sense that it is silent; I mean I’m not using language/voice to manipulate the image. The language here is one of drawing, of continually drawing and erasing a line of images that struggle to construct two intertwined bodies moving to different rhythms to and from spanning the width of the entire space. The 30 screens (CRT²) being attached to an aluminum beam are not separate but integral to the sculptural or architectural component. Here the screens are continuously having to be refreshed every two frames (the optimal length I found to produce just enough afterimage and just enough erasure). The images/bodies are given a sense of urgency— if they were to stop moving, they would cease to exist. At the time I likened it to the children’s toy known as an Etch A-Sketch in which you kind of had to keep “drawing” to keep the markings from disappearing.
In general I’ve utilized both methods and in very different ways depending on what a specific work calls for... In Switchblade (1998- 99) the editing structure linked the two surfaces together—the monitor functioned something like a blow up. A projection of close-ups of various scars and body markings, alluded to in the segmented spoken text, are cut together, or rather woven together in two frame increments alternating between two to six-scenes (I use ‘scenes’ to refer to a real time recording). As more scenes are added or taken away the images slow down or speed up accordingly, since they are sharing time as multiplexed scenes. In front of this projection is a CRT monitor displaying just one of the scenes from each segment in black and white that has been selected from the multiplexed scene(s). This image, too, varies in speed depending on how many scenes there are at any given time and pulses two frames at a time akin to a variable strobe.
In some earlier works an embedded critique of television sits just below the surface that reveals itself over time. In Situ (1986) creates a kind of viewing platform/space using an easy chair in which the cushion can be seen to have shrunk, which mirrors the facing television furniture with its CRT looking to have shrunk and fallen from its frame. I tend to think of it as a dried-out eyeball shrinking from the skull long after death. The entirety of the work involves electric fans and a copier suspended from the ceiling that ejects still images derived from the program material. It’s a kind of systems performance with all the mechanisms switching on and off synchronized to what is seen on the display — intercutting between the rather occluded space of reading a Blanchot novel to the very public moments of the Iran/Contra affair starring Ronald Reagan. It all gets very dense quite quickly and the questions of surface and image source are either insignificant or are deeply woven into the fabric of the work.
Another case in point, in Tall Ships (1992) — as well as Beacon (two versions of the imaginary) (1990); And Sat Down Beside Her (1990); I Believe It Is an Image in Light of the Other (1990-91); The Storyteller’s Room (1998) — I utilized four-inch CRTs with cheap surplus projector lenses looking for a different kind light, focus and brightness and in some sense to undermine the bigger/higher resolution is a better idea of projection, particularly at the time. On the other hand, the only reason that I was experimenting with this was due to a chance occurrence. I had left a first generation Portapak camera on that was mounted on a tripod close to a wall. When I returned home, in the dark one could see a small image being projected by the plastic eyepiece of the camera. I tend to feed off what some people refer to as “happy accidents”. 

HF: You are talking about a kind of creative process of construction or better yet deconstruction, in which the technological devices, analog or digital, screens or projections, function almost as raw materials of different substances...

GH: The emitted light from CRTs has so much more substance than a projection or a flat screen display even when considering current technology. In fact, there are no projectors or flat screen displays that have 100 percent black — no light, that I am aware of. Perhaps due to my background in sculpture, I ended up concentrating on taking CRTs apart and splaying their innards as a kind of deconstruction, or at least underlining their object-like quality, and still, each work had slightly different connotations or metaphorical impulses. In Disturbance (among the jars) (1988) the monitors were literally referring to the jars that the Nag Hammadi Library was thought to have been discovered in; with Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place (1990) there is a direct relationship between the sizes of the 16 CRTs and various parts of the body making the notion of containment highly visceral; And Sat Down Beside Her incorporates a CRT as a hanging lamp over a table—the “projected” light passes through a small lens, mounted as the fourth leg of the table, before illuminating an open book on a chair with a woman’s face reading through the text; and in Clover (1994), we see four men walking with their backs to us. Each one in their own monitored space with a camera attached to their back framing their shoulders and head as they make their way on a forest path—here the CRTs function as that vacuum in which we see people walking towards a center that is absent. If one imagines viewing the installation topologically, a four-leaf clover shape appears.
To summarize, the differentiations of screens and projections are secondary to the conceptual underpinnings of a given work. I see myself working within a kind of cybernetic milieu rather than as an image-maker, and typically the working process rarely involves images for their own sake. Things tend to happen between media and/or image supports whatever they are. It’s a question of intermedia or even synesthesia at times.
Thinking about surface, the work Cut Pipe (1992) projects the image of hands manipulating a speaker onto the surface of an actual speaker. As I speak a highly self-reflexive text, my hands are feeling my voice and changing the sound of my voice by pushing, scratching and touching the speaker’s membrane. In this particular case the location of the ‘surface’ becomes very ambiguous—is it the membrane of the speaker that mimics the projection surface or the membrane of the inner ear or, is it that, “the outline separating the mouth and words was prerecorded”?³. The ‘cut pipe’ could be seen as a sort of cross-section of the layers of media/material of its own construction.

HF: In my opinion, the visiting piece Inasmuch As It Has Already Taken Place (2014), for instance, goes even further as far as the materiality and functionality of the screen monitor are concerned. In your words, you see these monitors as “disembodied simulations” that result in a “trace or afterimage”⁴ of its previous form (Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place, 1990). Is this desire, to call upon the material presence of analog devices, somehow related to the type of presentness invoked in Viewer or Stand Apart? Are those pieces, from 1990 and 2014, mirroring each other over and over in time, in the search for a dialogical identification between past and present technology?

GH: To be clear there are no monitors, wires, electronics or even electricity in the work. I wasn’t thinking along the lines of analog versus digital and/or past/present technology. Nevertheless, I can see how these ideas are invoked. I think it had more to do with how one sheds certain identities and meanings that are always associated with what one does or for that matter even a specific work sometimes referred to as a signature work. I was thinking of the idea of excavating one’s work and/or dislodging it from a certain historical identity it has accumulated along the way. And frankly, I’m so tired of hearing the words video art that I wanted to kind of poke it a bit, so I made a ghost. Currently, I’m playing around with projecting onto the surface of glass blown CRT shapes that would sort of ‘arc’ the gap between projection and screens but of course only metaphorically.

HF: That connection between screens and projected images, is also, somehow, emerging from a language of representation that not only brings us to a different time and space but also enables the viewer to establish an intimate awareness of the body through the performativity with the work. Since the “halo-like quality”⁵ of Tall Ships, we can witness several other works where video-projection or light projection is installed in space in a very meaningful way. In recent works such as Painting with Two Balls (after Jasper Johns), Cornered and Dream Stop the projected images are displaced, multiplied, suspended and deformed to a point that the image is sometimes almost unrecognizable, whether for its distorted or overlapped layout. Looking at these artworks, it seems that projection is sort of a working material, a substance that creates, builds and structures the objects and the space around it. How do you relate the projection technology, and the viewing experience it provides, with the exhibition space?

GH: It has a twofold meaning: there is the self-conscious attempt to work with projection as material, but at the same time I am conversing with the history of painting and with a pastiche of cultural signs. In some ways this referencing replaced my normal thirst for utilizing language. I’m not using new technology in the works you mentioned. I am still in the studio struggling to assemble things that aren’t always meant to go together and many times this is where things happen that could not have been out thought out beforehand. Certainly there are far more advanced technologies—i.e. projection mapping and laser projection and all that those conjure up — it’s just that I haven’t crossed paths with any of that at a moment that coincides with an applicable idea that gives me the impulse to do that, at least not yet.
Considering light projection from another angle, Midnight Crossing (1997) and 23:59:59:29 - The Storyteller’s Room (1998), incorporate the ability of strobe lights to do single very fast pulses of hyper bright light that create long afterimages. It becomes interesting when these afterimages are superimposed with extreme low brightness images that are projected. It works on memory in improbable ways that are difficult to describe. And when they are linked to isolated “islands” of spoken phrases that accumulate over time, the process of memory itself becomes a kind of narrative in and of itself. In other words, there is a mix between an image ‘printed’ on the eye/brain and one that is being ‘seen’ in the actual space. I find this to be an interesting extension of the ‘post-screen’ concept. Perhaps one could think of it as pre-screen (before image). 

HF: That idea of joining materials, not easy to combine harmoniously, seems fairly evident in Language Pit (2016), to the extent that it brings together different electronic devices such as micro cameras attached to speakers, in order to create very peculiar audiovisual solutions, which are also associated to narratives and words that seem to have different, opposite or unrelated meanings. Can you tell us a little more about this work in progress?

GH: I suppose it’s a continuation of a number of works I’ve done utilizing the speaker cone as a visceral object. This goes all the way back to Mesh (1978) in which sixteen small three-inch cones are attached to wire mesh all the way around a space. They are reproducing square wave oscillators whose pitch changes is based on the wire mesh gauge. Given their size and proximity to the mesh material, the sound stays “attached” to the surface rather than becoming part of the room ambience. Soon after that I did Soundings (1979) which involved a series of speaker cone manipulations using sand, water, fire, steel spikes and voice and again these were all underlining the physicality of the speaker before one could say its reproducing sound in the typical sense, in other words the sound never really leaves the surface in a meaningful way. In some sense I was treating the surface of the speaker as projection screen and went on to do this literally in Cut Pipe (1992) in which I projected the image of a speaker I’m manipulating with my hands directly on to another speaker that is reproducing the sound. Perhaps in this sense Language Pit is trying to merge the physicality of the image and sound screens by having the voice directly manipulate a live camera through the speaker’s surface or skin. The text, although still being developed, was written and modified the morning after the US elections. At the same time I was in the middle of wrapping my head around non-gender/non-binary pronouns so at this point its peculiar mash up to say the least.

HF: In what way the elections had an impact on the spoken text produced for Language Pit?

GH: Simply put, I was devastated. I literally became ill and still do when I re-member this fact that I so badly want to forget. Rarely do I allow current events to muddle the space I see myself working from but it does happen on occasion and this is certainly one. Surely there are phrases that would not have come without it and I will keep many but I will make it less in the face, less associated with the specific event so the text can breathe a bit outside of that context.

HF: The reference that you do, on the one hand to the surface of the speaker as a projection screen, on the other, to the surface of the speaker as a skin, brings us to the question of the liminal, in what is the embodiment and the incorporeality of the material with which you work, that is many times between the visceral and the superficial. In fact, I believe that there is a close relationship between the notion of liminality and the notion of screen, mentioned by Kate Mondloch, when she states that screens are entities with a double meaning, that is, they function “simultaneously as immaterial thresholds onto another space and time and as solid, material entities. (...) its physical form shapes both its immediate space and its relationship to viewing subjects.”⁶
Do you see the screen, whether material or immaterial, as a crucial liminal concept, so to speak, that provides a way to produce singular interpretative processes, according to individual inner experiences? As liminality is a borderline state where “something is about to undergo a phase of transition or turn into something else”⁷, to what extent do you consider that screens provide a possibility of questioning the visible reality stemming from the reciprocal interchange that occurs between image, perception and interpretation?

GH: I don’t know... I guess I suggested this before but my methodology, if I have one at all, isn’t concerned so much with screens and images or a window on my internal world as it is with erasure and interrupting the flow of images, derailing them — anything to stop the glut and/ or get the viewer’s attention outside the box, outside the frame, and that’s done primarily with sound (spoken text) and radical editing of time. There are a couple of lines from Primarily Speaking (1981-83) that come to mind: “... never mind the images/they always return/if not new ones will replace the old ones/it’s their destiny/even those permanently lodged/sooner or later lose their grasp/it’s the nature of the beast...”. My focus is not the image per se, it has more to do with nurturing an event that I sense is about to happen, that suddenly gets an impulse to exist and it invariably evolves into intermedia involving text/speech, some kind of viewer intervention and perhaps a closed-circuit situation. Again, I see the after image from a strobe light burst as liminality par excellence.

HF: Whether with spoken text, written words, whispered phrases, or subliminal messages, your work often refers to the materiality of language, in a way that draw us to reflect upon its relation with the formation of images. In your works, I find that language reaches a corporeal dimension, precisely in that moment when the poetic dialogue, generated within the realm of interactivity and performativity, is intensified by the encounter with aesthetic experience. Is the body a metaphor of the language in an attempt to reconstruct the experience as a process of inquiry, which connects ideas, and principles, rather than providing for a mere visual experience? How would you describe the reciprocity between image and language in the intimate dialogue that occurs when viewers engage with the symbolic, non-linear and multi narratives presented in your work?

GH: For the most part I think artists and writer/thinkers are like two ships passing in the night. I know there are those of either who do the other but...
I spent a little time with Derrida while working on Disturbance (among the jars) (1988), with George Quasha, and we were quite wrapped up in the question of whether Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure had anything to do with the Gospel of Thomas from the Gnostic Gospels. I had recently completed Incidence of Catastrophe (1987-88), which is rooted in that novel, and gave it to Derrida to view. Later, when I asked him his thoughts about it, he had very little to say, as if it went in one ear and out the other. It’s times like those when I wonder if people truly understand anything, at least the way someone wants them to understand it.
Back to your question...
Early on, the act of speaking and using my body more directly saved me from the vortex of images; of being sucked into the surface and all the available eye candy that makes you feel like you ́re in control of something that is “state of the art” but really it’s all spectacle; and the way I broke the surface that you’ve referred to is with the speaking voice and maybe that’s why my use of language has always been a visceral one. I’ve probably overplayed it at times like the way I pronounce words in Happenstance (part one of many parts) (1982-83); it has something to do with getting inside the language perhaps similar to the way La Monte Young writes about getting inside a sound.

HF: The title of a recent artwork SELF ( ), is very interesting and curious and approaches a matter that is highly topical in terms of seeing and self-representation, which is, nowadays, reaching greater relevance if one thinks about the number of portraits that emerge in the virtual world conveyed by the massive digital production of photography. The notion of ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are recurrent subjects in your body of work, which demonstrate your concerns with the perception of our own body and the way
we produce representations that combines physical, emotional and mental attributes. SELF ( ) seems to imply a sort of bounce back of the gaze that does not comply with the expectation of seeing ourselves in a selfie; it functions as an abstract, disturbed and shattered image of the onlooker’s portrait. In which way does this “self-made abstraction” activate a more “complete gaze” upon us, as opposed to an “empty gaze”?

GH: I like that idea (“bounce back of the gaze”)... perhaps it’s even more likened to a pinball machine and the gaze is ricocheting and we’re not sure where it’s going to land. I see these geometric objects as the interface to a gaze that backfires in a way. The idea was to have the objects look something like medical equipment. I’m always a little uncomfortable around that equipment that is usually framed by a certain sterility. There’s a brief moment when you don’t know what’s happening, all you know is you’re being seen and it’s not the you you’re accustomed to thinking, it’s you e.g. your face. So there is a little discomfort, even a little paranoia — who’s behind me; where is this eye. But I think what continues to attract me to the series is that there is an air of humor involved, albeit a kind of dark humor.

HF: I feel that is a very singular interpretation of seeing and being seen that comes from an experience as simple as being attended by a doctor and surrounded by medical equipment for body screening. In fact, there seems to be a return to screen practices of other times and/ or other domains, where artists somehow remediate past and present mediums, in order to elaborate on new forms of experience images. More and more, artists have been rethinking and reshaping screen devices, by playing with their materiality, texture, surface and engagement with the virtual world, as well as with the way we encounter and relate to them. Do you consider that contemporary art is making room for thinking about post-screen practices? A practice that goes beyond the virtual window; a practice that scrutinizes the screen as concept and device, as material and substance; a practice that requires a particular approach on how we see, feel and experience the world mediated by screens.

GH: I suppose that’s what I am engaged in with a few of the works you mentioned (Cornered, Painting with Two Balls, etc.) I started with the idea of projecting a painting where the frustum of the projected light defines the support shape of the painting. But it really only makes sense to me with the pieces being closed-circuit and ‘live’ if you will — they might be termed cybernetic paintings — the viewer sees themselves viewing and at the same time is immersed in actually changing the surface of the ‘painting.’
I’m well aware of the continuing development of projection and screen technologies, perhaps the most interesting being flexible display material that could eventually be worn as clothes, for instance, but I’m still very much drawn to primitive raw sources of light. There’s something very primal about a burst of light; it seems very similar to neurons firing as language is getting formulated.

1. George Quasha And Charles Stein, “Projection: The space of great happening”, in Robert C. Morgan, Gary Hill (Art + Performance). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 153.
2. Cathode Ray Tube.
3. Excerpt from Processual Video (1980).
4. Gary Hill, “Inasmuch as it has already taken place”, Gary Hill. Retrieved from http://garyhill.com/work/inasmuch-as-it-has-already-taken-place.html. Accessed September 1, 2016.
5. Gary Hill, “Tall Ships”, Gary Hill. Retrieved from http://garyhill.com/work/ tall-ships.html. Accessed September 1, 2016.
6. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 4.
7. George Quasha and Charles Stein, “HanD HearD/liminal objects”, in Robert C. Morgan, Gary Hill (Art + Performance). Baltimore, Md: John Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 126.