It's odd to have a Gary Hill exhibition come to town when this pioneer in video art is finally starting to look old and low tech and deconstruction is going out of style. But the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, has filled its upstair galleries with a condensed greatest hits of this middle-aged contemporary master.
The show, Unfolding Visions: Gary Hill Selected Works 1976 to 2003, comes off as technically very important, like required reading on a syllabus. Because the reigning critical consensus says: "How can you talk about video at all without talking about Gary Hill?" And MOCA makes this point by offering it as a complement and precursor to the brand new, computer generated videos and network game art of Chinese artist Feng Mengbo (
PHOTO COURTESY MOCA
But the show is still difficult. Maybe it's because it's hard to see the novelty in video techniques that were experimental in the early 1970s. Maybe it's because a TV playing in the middle of a gallery looks clumsy now. Maybe it's because many of the concepts Hill helped introduce into visual art -- the labyrinthine nature of language and texts -- have since been explored to death.
PHOTO COURTESY MOCA
Born in 1951, Hill was of contemporary art's first generation. He switched from welded steel sculpture to video in the early 1970s and has almost come to define the "video artist," even though he's said he doesn't relish the designation. Only Nam Jun Paik, the father of video art, ranks above him.
Hill's early works were all "single channel" videos of only a few minutes in length. They explored how video images could be distorted and changed through electronical processing [in the galleries they appear on back to back TVs as Selected Works I and Selected Works II].
PHOTO COURTESY MOCA
By the late 1970s, Hill began adding sound to his creations, and the thematic focus moved away from image and towards language. In Primary Colors, a work of 1981 to 1983, Hill makes a video with two inset rectangular screens, each of which corresponds to a voice. When one voice speaks, its screen changes, sometimes cutting to a new image with each new word, sometimes cutting with each new syllable (MTV began perfecting the same technique of matching visual cuts with beats at around the same time). The two voices engage in a dialogue that makes sense for perhaps a few exchanges at a time, but inevitably degenerates into nonsense. Images meanwhile offer similarly meaningless visual puns: a mention of objectivity turns the insets to black and white; the phrase "hang in there" is matched by a shot of a dangling cow's udder.
Hill was fascinated with an odd characteristic of language, how most is actually is nonsense that fails to communicate. As he pushed this idea further, he interrogated and subverted language more vigorously. In the 1979 video Soundings, he films stereo speakers reverbrating with fatalistic statements about how they are about to be silenced: one is submerged, one buried, one pierced and one burned.
By 1995 he had created the installation Bind, the piece that greets visitors to the exhibition and establishes the theme of smothered and helpless texts. The work consists of an open book bound with steel cables to a small television set so that it is covering the screen. The open pages also face the screen so they cannot be read. Around the edges of the book however, you can see the TV flashing, and you can hear Hill's voice reading passages which are predictably difficult to follow, if, in fact, they can be understood at all.
But perhaps the book itself sums up the point. It's called The Humiliation of the Text, and its back jacket blurb reads: "Jacques Ellul for the first time intertwines sociological analysis with theological discussion in this provocative examination of how reality (which is visual) has superseded truth (which is verbal) in modern times." By this time Hill had pursued language deeper and deeper into its labyrinth, and he'd finally come to the conclusion that such an investigation will only get you lost.
This statement is made most elequently in one of the most acclaimed works of his career, 1992's installation Tall Ships. In it Hill disposes with language altogether, bringing viewers into a 30m-long, dark corridor, where they encounter a dozen spectral figures at regular intervals and total silence. The figures, people of all ages and walks of life, are black and white video projections that seem like holograms. Slowly, like the ships sailing in and out of the Pacific northwest fog that inspired Hill, they advance towards the viewer and then retreat, coming to the absolute verge of communicating through silent gestures and the absolute admission that between every two individuals there is an unbridgeable gap.
Hill was to perform Black Performance at the museum on May 2. But his visit was postponed due to SARS. If local conditions improve, Hill will come to give the performance on June 21. Unfolding Visions is on display through Aug. 24. MOCA Taipei is located at 39, Chang-an W Rd, Taipei (
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
RSS