Two 25-inch color monitors, two-channel synchronizer, two laserdisc players and two laserdiscs (color, sound)
Dimensions variable
Unique (exhibition-specific installation)
In this work the artist synchronized a segment from the dinner scene of his own work Incidence of Catastrophe, 1987-88, with the dinner scene from Luis Buňuel’s Viridiana, 1961, in which there is a moment when the characters pose in the exact positions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1496-97). Thus the visual arts are brought back into the world of film and then through Hill’s intervention the film is brought back into the realm of the visual arts, the gallery or museum. In both sequences, the dinner parties start calmly and then dissolve into chaos. Note that the artist refers to film again in his choice of title which is a play on Greenway’s The Cook, a Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002, GHCR 103, pp. 208.
An example of this work was first exhibited at the Donald Young Gallery, Seattle, Washington, September 12 - November 2, 1996, as part of the exhibition "The Last Supper."
