GARY HILL

Two 50-inch plasma displays and custom-made wall mount, computer, interactive software, sensors and speaker (color, sound)

Unique (exhibition-specific for the Louvre, Paris, France)

Note:  This work was commissioned for the “Contrepoint” exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, November 12, 2004 – February 10, 2005.

Excerpt by Marie-Laure Bernadac in Contrepoint:  L’Art contemporain au Louvre.  Paris:  Connaissance des Arts, 2004, pp. 18 – 19:

Regarded as a master of video art, the American artist Gary Hill questions conventional language codes by playing on the relationship between words, images and sound.  Most of his work revolves around writing, the experience of language and its physicality.  In 1988, he made Incidence of Catastrophe, inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s writings, and Disturbance (among the jars), based on extracts from Gnostic treatises found in Egyptian urns in 1945, read by three poets (Bernard Heidsieck, Joseph Gugliemi, Claude Royet-Journoud) and a philosopher (Jacques Derrida).

It is therefore quite natural for him to have decided to stage his installation in the room housing Mesopotamian cylinder seals and explaining the birth of writing, thereby putting the work within the work, so to speak, or the technological future of writing within its origins.  Using virtual animation techniques, he strives to develop a cosmology out of the language of forms, signs and symbols, which acts as a counterpoint to the tablets of cuneiform writing.  This exploration of the origins of signs raises the question of the universality of languages, of the technological evolution of media and of the differences in interpretations, translations and readings that implies for the spectator.