Incidence of Catastrophe

Gary Hill was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, and lives in Seattle. He attended a summer course at the Art Students League in Woodstock, NY, in 1969 and began his career by participating in a series of artist-in-residence programs in New York State. His work has been supported by numerous grants, including ones from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. After an initial period of medium-specific experimentation, Hill’s body of work evolved into an ongoing deconstruction/reconstruction of ideas and images central to Western culture. These include notions of language and textuality as well as the concept of the body as an intermediary between nature and culture/technology. His first tapes explored formal properties of the emerging medium, particularly through integral conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements. Hill’s works are characterized by their experimental rigor, conceptual precision and imaginative leaps of discovery. “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? and URA ARU, originally stirred by explorations concerned with the acoustic elements of language, led me via the metalogues of Gregory Bateson to fundamental questions on the directionality of thought with respect to time.” (Gary Hill) Perhaps as much as any artist using image/sound media, Hill’s work in video is about, and is, a new form of writing. It is informed by, and at times can even be seen to vindicate, post-structuralist perspectives about changing relationships between speech, writing and language; Hill “writes” masterfully on Maurice Blanchot in Incidence of Catastrophe, and Jacques Derrida writes on Hill’s “writing”. But in its correlation to the “French” theoretical discourse, these works are neither theory-driven nor aridly academic. Brilliant videotapes, such as Primarily Speaking and Happenstance dazzle with their perspicacious and illuminating language play; stunning structural achievements such as Why Do Things Get In A Muddle? and URA ARU awe with their elaborate execution; and Incidence of Catastrophe, a work many consider to be Hill’s tour de force, simply overpowers with its intellectual ferocity.