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28/9/2001

Hill and Avedon

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg

Gary Hill
Selected Works 1976 - 2001

November 10, 2001 ­ March 10, 2002

Video art is still a comparatively young discipline. In the 1960s, the medium was pioneered by such artists as Dan Graham, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell and Bruce Nauman. Works by Paik and Nauman have already featured in major exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Gary Hill, whose piece Searchlight is already in the permanent collection of the Kunstmuseum, is a member of the second generation of video artists. An American, living in Seattle, he began his artistic career as a sculptor. The Kunstmuseum now presents a representative survey of Hill’s video pieces. The early videos of the 1970s, which concentrate on formal experimentation, are included alongside technically sophisticated video installations, most of which date from the last ten years. In these, Hill deliberately treats technological apparatus as sculptural form. Videos run on television sets that have been liberated from their cabinets. The naked cathode-ray tubes look like eyes; the screen becomes the retina, on which a film is playing.

Hill’s interest centres on issues of the perception of image and language. He explores the connections between body reality and the articulation or reception of visual and linguistic signals. Hill acknowledges the epistemological models devised by the French structuralists, most notably Foucault, Blanchot, Barthes and Derrida, as a major influence on his work. As specialists in the humanities, as linguists and as philosophers, these thinkers set out to organize things in ways that were no longer defined by consciousness or subjectivity but by systems involving rules and codes. Gary Hill’s video works often manifest a linguistic chaos worthy of Babel. Different texts are recited simultaneously. A story is presented in written and spoken form, in such a way that the two levels differ both in content and in timing. Text-image combinations include permutations of the spoken word with letters and with written key phrases. Optical alienation effects are an important feature of Hill’s early ‘mono-channel’ pieces. Realities are broken down almost entirely into abstract structures, with an effect strongly reminiscent of the visual language of early psychedelic music videos. Many of the video installations are positively harsh and physically effortful ­ as with Reflex Chamber and Wall Piece, in both of which the projected image is punctuated by staccato strobe flashes. Here, Hill is deliberately exploring the outer limits of perception and endurance. Alongside these, there are works of impressively deep, almost meditative calm.

Examples include Viewer and Searchlight, from our collection, or the piece Tall Ships, which was acclaimed at the documenta 9 exhibition. In this, wraithlike human figures emerge from darkness and seem to make contact with the viewer before vanishing into the void. Many of Hill’s works unmistakably reveal his interest in performance art. Since 1971, in association with a variety of other performers, he has created almost thirty performance pieces; the most recent is Remembering Paralinguay, a joint work with his partner Paula Wallenberg-Olsson. Both in video and in performance, Hill treats language literally as a material. This can be seen, for instance, in his frequent use of palindromes: words or phrases that can be read either backwards or forwards. He has learned to speak even complex sentences backwards without apparent effort. The Wolfsburg exhibition is the first major European retrospective of the work of Gary Hill, a recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize. It will contain thirteen complex video installations and a wide selection of Hill’s mono-channel pieces of the 1970s and 1980s.

Richard Avedon
in the American west

September 29, 2000 - January 6, 2002

From the very start, the Kunstmuseum has assumed the mission of taking a fresh look at the classics of modern photography and presenting them to an interested public. Richard Avedon, born in New York and one of the leading photographers of the century, has been a restless and unsparing chronicler of our time for more than fifty years. "No one," wrote John Lahr in the London Times, "has ever given any nation a more comprehensive, more disciplined photographic document of itself." Avedon rose to fame in the 1950s with his unconventional photographs for Harper's Bazaar, in which he introduced a new naturalness and spontaneity into fashion photography, making his models dance, laugh and disport themselves with abandon, either in the studio or in the street. He introduced a new emphasis into portrait photography by unveiling unexpected facets of well-known and unknown individuals against a plain white background. "A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is truth," says Avedon. His impressive psychological portrait sequences place him among the century's leading recorders of the human image.

This exhibition shows, for the first time in Germany, the street. He introduced a new emphasis into portrait photography by unveiling unexpected facets of well-known and unknown individuals against a plain white background. "A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is truth," says Avedon. His impressive psychological portrait sequences place him among the century's leading recorders of the human image.

This exhibition shows, for the first time in Germany, the full sequence of 124 portraits of the working class people of the American West, which Avedon took between 1979 and 1984 on a commission from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas: "The photographic series In The American West [...] was a gesture of liberation. I wanted to take time out from the unceasing demands of my studio to photograph a way of life that I wasn't familiar with."

Avedon's photographs confront us with miners, unemployed people, drifters, farmers, cowboys, and convicts, often at life-size or over. Most of those photographed try to give as little of themselves away as possible. They appear to show no feelings beyond scepticism and reserve. In the bar, or at the rodeo, or working in the stockyardÑwherever Avedon has found themÑthey may have been emotionally involved, cheerful, uninhibited, stressed or sad: but in front of his camera, they appear totally inward. There is barely a trace of the theatrical expressiveness or the extravagant gestures that Avedon elicits from the actors or writers who sit for him. These portraits of miners, drifters, oilfield workers, farmers, waitresses, saleswomen, are expressive nevertheless. Their hard physical labour, the harshness of their everyday lives, their struggle for survival, has etched their features and their souls as a river gouges out a canyon. Their faces become landscapes, and their bodies territories, on which they carry their garments around with them. Unlike celebrities, Avedon's people of the American West have nothing to lay aside. They have only their share of the human condition and their simple dignity. These are not Ôfamous people, seen in human terms' but human beings who mostly exist on the lowest levels of the social pyramid. Unlike August SanderÑwho embarked on his series of People of the Twentieth Century in 1929 as a photographic social survey, and chose his subjects as representatives of occupations and social classes Avedon stresses the names of his people: Ronald Fisher, beekeeper; Boyd Fortin, rattlesnake skinner. By supplying a name, an occupation or age, a place and a date, he says to us: "They really exist; I have met every one of them before they stood in front of my camera."

In its minimalist plainness and its concentration on the physical presence of the subjects, In The American West evokes images of the myth of the West, only to destroy them. For this project, Avedon travelled the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains as far as the Sierra Nevada in the west, Calgary, Canada, in the north and the Mexican border in the south. He tells us: "This is a fictional West. I don't think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne."

Image: Gary Hill.

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Porschestrasse 53
D-38440 Wolfsburg - Germany
Phone 0049 5361 266 90
Fax. 0049 5361 266 966

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