• Wall Piece

The new book on Gary Hill's art is an excessive book. It is 639 pages and I have carried it repeatedly in the rain and become very, literally, tired of it. It is also a very good book, I am coming to admit.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, so this is not a review. It is a recommendation, I guess, for anyone deeply interested in art, philosophy, Hill—Seattle art's antithesis to Chihuly: world-famous, successful, respected, brainy as hell—video, and language. It makes the case very convincingly that Hill is a language artist as much as any other kind of artist. He is often called a video artist, which is pretty insufficient, and this book elaborates on why.

In addition to being an excessive thing—Hill, at a talk Thursday at the Henry Art Gallery, called it "an elephant of some kind"—the book is an eccentric thing. It was co-created by Hill and his longtime friends George Quasha and Charles Stein, who are philosopher-poets. It is not definitive, or art-historical in any regular sense. (A 2002 catalog raisonne was edited by Holger Broecker.) In an introductory essay, Lynne Cooke argues that cinema and art history are fairly "infertile sources" for considering Hill; much better are "literary and philosophical discourses."

Quasha and Stein sometimes refer to Hill as "the art identity 'Gary Hill'" and use words such as "psychosm" and "prolegomena." But they also probe Hill's art in warm and welcoming and evocative ways, and there's a lot to probe, and so all the mental masturbation adds up to some very good orgasms along the way. The book is also a way to get a handle on Hill, which is notoriously difficult to do. He has made a lot of art, and there is no one place to go to see and consider it all.

At the Henry right now his Wall Piece is on view (pictured at top). In it he throws himself at a wall while he recites a text he wrote during a period of particular depression, he explained at his talk. With every word he throws his body on the wall. The sentence that sticks with me is, "It wants to bring me to my knees." (The whole text, many parts of which are difficult to understand in the video, is printed in the book.) That sentence means eight body-slams. It also means that a strobe light in the gallery flashes eight times, only mostly synchronously with the flash of light that's hitting Hill in the video itself. An excerpt from the book on Wall Piece:

What might be called repetitive startle—a seemingly self-contradictory notion, since the startle response presumes the unexpected—embodies the "neurotic" language bind of involuntary psychological pattern and its attendant undesirable emotion. Here an almost Beckett-like driving urge to express depressed questioning of life's value is countered by arbitrary interruption, cross-currents of action, speaking, and illumination; the slam of the body, the burst of the word, the disjuncture of light. The strobe that created the image in the first place, illumination the body each time it hit the wall by flashing at the point of body contact, runs against a second strobe in the installation flashing about once per second, laid on top of the projected image in a cross-rhythm. This second strobe sometimes sustains, sometimes off-sets, sometimes obliterates the image. As the body hits the wall, each time configuring differently, a word torques into audibility, a twisted echo of the thwarted body... The word is made flesh, quite newly—incarnation as act of self-aggression, perhaps in some sense echoing all boundary-breaking violence, right down to the sexual act and sperm's penetration of the egg.

Whew. But, yeah.

One of my favorite moments in the book is Quasha recalling a recurring dream in which he is trying to get his arms around something but just can't. He can't know the thing, take it in. Years after this dream begins he sees an alabaster Jean Arp sculpture in a gallery and seizes the moment. When the guards aren't looking, he picks it up—it's maybe a foot in diameter—and rolls it around in his palms. He never has the dream again. This anecdote is the start of an essay about Hill's piece Cut Pipe, in which the artist's hands are touching and touching a loudspeaker seemingly inserted inside a cut pipe...

I could go on and on. Instead I'll simply say, check out the book if you have the dough (75 bucks), try to avoid having to carry it for any distance (it's a book to be read over time, not all at once)—or just watch Hill's videos here. I particularly recommend his 1980 Around & About.