Between Cinema and a Hard Place: Gary Hill's Video Art Between Words and Images

So what is left but the business between hands. On the one, to dig (deeper); on the other, to bury (deeper) . . . And if the right hand did not know what the left hand is doing. . . .

—Gary Hill ¹

WHAT IS VIDEO ART? Rather, where is video art located? Or, perhaps, what are its borders? What are its influences, confluences, and confusions? What limits it and defines it? How does video art speak about itself? For my purposes here, I would ask, who is Gary Hill? Or again, where is Gary Hill? Or, still again, what is Gary Hill between?

Hill's video art does not sit easily within an art historical perspective, nor does it rest well within an already unstable history of video art. The history and nature of video art is problematic because it is "between cinema and a hard place," as the title of Hill's 1991 video installation suggests. Hill—and other video artists—can undoubtedly be shown to be influenced by art movements such as conceptualism, Dadaism, performance art, as well as the history of film, but what will be of concern here is the unique and singular location of Hill's art. What is significant with regard to Hill's art is that his influences stem from poetry and philosophy as much as they come from anything within an art historical field. Therefore, to place Hill's art necessitates a perspective from which linguistic elements are taken into account as well as those of the visual arts.

To begin to show the distinctive nature of Hill's video art, the first half of this article is an analysis of his video installation, Between Cinema and a Hard Place. This installation acts as a self-referential questioning of the status of Hill's own video art and serves to show why an approach to Hill's practices must come from nonvisual as well as visual fields. Once a relation between Hill's video art and the verbal fields of poetry and philosophy are established, I turn to examine his art within the context of other visual arts, showing parallel developments between video art and the related media of television and film.

On a broad level then, this article suggests that an understanding of Hill's status as a "video artist" must take into account particular relations between language and image both intrinsic and extrinsic to his art. I argue that it is within these relations that Hill's singular place is constituted within the discourse of video art and the broader discourse of art history. Furthermore, the idea of "influence" from one field to another is shown to be too banal, and what must be accounted for are the radical disruptions that occur when a particular sign-system is transposed into another sign-system, in other words, when a text is taken up in a visual artwork, or vice versa.

Between Cinema and a Hard Place

Each of [Hill's] works is found to be singular and sweeps the general technique called video along in an adventure that renders it irreplaceable, but irreplaceable among other irreplaceables, other unique effects of signature, even if it puts to work many other things, many other "arts" that have nothing to do with video. . . .

—Jacques Derrida ²

The sense in which Gary Hill's videos are conceptual or image-text art done in video form is the sense in which the boundaries of a medium have long ago disappeared, but for our institutional need to categorize.

—Maureen Turim ³

Hill's video installation, Between Cinema and a Hard Place (1991), is a self-questioning self-referential art piece. ⁴ The installation is technologically, philosophically, and imagistically complex. Formally, it comprises twenty-three video monitors of various sizes (stripped of their casings): twelve thirteen-inch color, five nine-inch black-and-white, and six five-inch...