Past Exhibitions

Hill's Soundings is quite literal, focusing exclusively on the interior drum of a speaker system conveying hypnotic phrases such as "sounding the image, imaging the sound…touching down, touching sound." We see a speaker, but never the speaker. Our sympathies gravitate toward the mechanical device at the center of our gaze, as it valiantly attempts to convey the artist's words while being twirled, pushed, covered with sand, burned, lacerated with nails, and submerged by water. The implicit struggle between soundtrack and seductive image is dramatically enacted.

Video Trajectories, an exhibition presented in the MIT List Center’s Bakalar Gallery, was organized by MIT Professor Caroline A. Jones (October 12-December 30, 2007).  Selections from these works—considered masterworks from video art history—are being presented to a broader public on The Media Test Wall. Gary Hill’s Soundings, 1979 is the fifth and final presentation in a five-part exhibition series. 

Video is used as a medium by different kinds of artists. All the video artworks in this series were made by artists coming out of theater or dance communities, Conceptual art, Minimalism, performance art, sculpture, sound engineering, and avant-garde music. Some focused on the strange new medium of video itself. Like audiotape, videotape could be recorded, played back, and re-recorded almost instantly. Like photography and film, it faithfully (if electronically) represented anything put in front of it. But unlike film, there was nothing to "see" on the tape itself—it was dependent on the electronic apparatus to be scanned and seen. Moreover, video art was born in the context of a fully commercialized mass medium—television.

Particularly in the U.S., early video artists crafted their tapes with a strongly dialectical eye on "the boob tube." Above all, artists of the 1970s wanted television viewers to wake up to the media world in which they were already living, and to develop an active rather than passive relationship to the medium. Artists working with early video technology attempted to intervene in the intimate psychological relationship that could develop between the average person and his or her television set. Later in the 1980s, home video systems gave every family of means the ability to "be on T.V." but by the 1990s the intimate phase of video art's history was over. Video became increasingly spectacular and it has evolved into present day technologies that allow the projection of high-resolution signals onto a screen, a wall, or the vaulted ceiling of a Renaissance church. Video Trajectories stays with pre-spectacular video, allowing earlier phases of the medium's surprising infancy to come into view.

About the Artist:

Gary Hill (born in Santa Monica, California, 1951) lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Hill began his career as a sculptor, but has worked with sound and video since the early 1970s, producing single-channel video works and mixed media installations. Solo exhibitions include those at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, Switzerland; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Gary Hill: Projecting Rome, projected installations at the Coliseum and various venues in Rome, Italy. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and received the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the 1995 Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy. He was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant in 1998.