Gary Hill’s projective installations explore an uncanny presence produced in representation.

Constructed in encounters with an explicitly mediated image, Hill’s projective installations begin in the projection of ‘real time’ recordings that engage directly with the time and space of the visitor’s looking.

projection and physicality

In Viewer (1996):

Slightly larger than life-size colour images of seventeen day labourers, facing out from a neutral background, are projected onto a wall, about 45 feet long, by five video projectors attached to the ceiling. (…) The men stand almost motionless, their movement limited to involuntary stirring – an incidental shuffling from foot to foot, slight movements of the hands, and almost imperceptible changes in facial expression. There is no interaction among them, each man standing quite alone and gazing out from the plane of projection toward the viewer. (Quasha and Stein 1997: 10)

The ‘performer’ is explicitly met in mediation: fully visible and absent. In this removal, however, Viewer works to upset the ‘distance’ constructed in representation. In such projections, Hill has noted, ‘I want the body - literally and metaphorically - in your face’ (Hill in Sans 1999: 73). In this respect, Hill notes, ‘physicality has always been an important element (….) it questions conceptual structures used to make work and undermines the cognitive aspect by a sheer visceral presence’ (Hill in Sans 1999: 71).

This ‘physicality’ is found not simply in the image, which in any case emphasizes flatness, immateriality, but in these projections’ affect on the time and space of viewing. In such video work, Hill remarks:

the play with sculpture is very present, but even more so is the play on the word ‘projection’. These are literally video projections and at the same time they are projecting out a certain look, perhaps a desire - any number of emotions. And we ‘project’ our view back to the projection and amongst ourselves in a space that continually inflects these words in many directions. (Hill in Sans 1999: 73)

times of viewing

In such a space, Hill’s projections create a paradoxical opening up to the viewer’s ‘performance,’ as the ‘real time’ of viewing becomes the measure of Viewer’s operation, even as these images emphasizes their removal in recording and representation. In their documentation of Viewer, George Quasha and Charles Stein recall that:

When we came into the room what we happened upon was the view. A room with a view, inside. The view is people looking out from where they are, in to where we are, here, in the middle of the space. It seems, perplexingly, that the view itself is viewing - viewing us … In an environment that is saturated with viewing, at a certain point it’s as though the space itself views - a topological displacement of agency (original emphasis, Quasha & Stein 2001: 18)

Indeed, this is a displacement of ‘agency’ amplified in the implicit exchange of view between the recorded and the live.

Here, too, Viewer’s gesture of ‘looking’ plays on the visitor’s perception of ‘presence’. Consistently with this, Hill observes video’s production of ‘a reflexive space of difference’ (Vischer 1995: 14), its ‘capacity of having a presence and a distance at the same time’ (Hill in Vischer 1995: 9). In these circumstances, Quasha and Stein suggest, the ‘performance’ of Viewer lies in the visitor’s awareness and activation of the space before the projection, for ‘the real ‘event’ is the performative space itself - a site, the very declaration of which allows the complex awareness of an engaged viewer. The event is an emerging awareness’ (Quasha & Stein 2001: 24).

multiplying times

Where Viewer emphasizes this spatial complexity, Standing Apart (1996) approaches a further division of the image. Challenging the ability of the viewer to stand apart from ‘its’ projection, Standing Apart, and its companion installation Facing Faces (1996), thus enmesh the viewer into their time-structure while amplifying a doubling and division of the sign.

In approaching Standing Apart, the visitor finds themselves at the apex of a triangle defined by asymmetrical but seemingly identical projected images, while, for Facing Faces, the visitor encounters a doubled portrait of the same figure on monitors installed, similarly, at head-height. Standing Apart, Hill notes:

involves two separate (slightly larger than life) colour images of the same man projected onto two separate walls that meet at the corner … the effect is that one image seems to gaze out directly at the viewer, while at the same time, the second figure is looking at the first figure. About every two minutes the images switch positions: the second figure now gazes straight out at the viewer, while the first figure gazes at the second. (Gary Hill Studio 2002)

Although mirroring the viewer’s viewing, Standing Apart introduces a disunity and multiplication into the experience of seeing and being seen. Firstly, the installation articulates the complexity of ‘recording,’ as the ‘real time’ recording of the figure is played back in the ‘real time’ of the viewer’s looking. In this respect, Standing Apart plays on and amplifies the paradox of ‘real time’ recording. Thus, Hill points out, the very meeting with such recordings renders the present time complex, as the encounter ‘happens in “the present” but the present has now gained a complexity that quite literally includes the replayed past’ (Quasha and Stein 2000: 258). For Quasha and Stein, this complexity is amplified in the apparent ‘presentness’ of the figures themselves, which calls into question the capacity of the viewer to stand apart from the past it replays. In this piece, they suggest, ‘the time of the portrait is truly other to the time of the viewing’ and yet, in the encounter, ‘this life-size projection of a living, breathing entity imposes a time of its own which is unrelated to the static time of portraiture … Its time becomes our time as we view it … We are aroused to the intrinsic movement of being here - and being there’ (original emphasis, Quasha and Stein 1997: 34). Here, too, the viewer’s awareness of acting out, in the ‘present tense,’ ‘other’ times is further amplified in the projected figures’ relationship to each other, as the viewer’s act and time of looking is re-enacted in their simultaneous and alternating attention. In these ways, Standing Apart engages with time-structures that are neither unified, singular, nor simply in the present tense, as the experience or awareness of the ‘acting out’ of other times becomes part of the fabric of the work.

aura and projection

In Viewer and Standing Apart, the quality of ‘being present’ appears as a paradoxical effect of this multiplication: a presence performed in the absence of the figure; in the acting out of the ‘past’ times in the ‘real time’ of looking. As a result, these projective installations emphasize a phenomenon of closeness, however distant the figure is seen to be. It is a closeness that reflects upon and amplifies the media’s transportation of vision: its claim to presentness, even as it foregrounds the divisions and differences in which it functions.

In turn, Viewer and Standing Apart reflect this mobility, this articulation of locations and places. Thus, Quasha and Stein note, in its emphasis on difference and distance, Viewer appears to traverse ‘real’ and ‘mediated’ spaces:

No one’s fooled when a video projector casts the image of a person upon the wall - and yet, it has its own reality, its own intensity of view. What shows up in this hypersensualized space is how these quite simple and ordinary people, whose living and breathing images are projected on the wall, are in fact quite powerful presences - unavoidably engaging and almost eerily present presences. Yet they are merely projections. (original emphasis, Quasha and Stein 1997: 19)

the resurgence of presence

Like the ‘auratic object’ which presents itself as ‘more than what it is’ (Pearson and Shanks 2001: 95), Hill’s projections do not simply ‘mediate’ ‘presence,’ for presence is not an ‘originary point,’ an authentic or autonomous quality to be depleted in its reproduction and repetition. Indeed, where ‘presence’ is always already performed in the space of difference, in the divisions of the sign, so Viewer’s uncanny ‘presence’ is staged in the divisions of aura: as a presence seen in the division of the sign; in the repetition of the same in difference. Such a construction or performance of presence in mediation presents immediate consequences for the ‘real’ viewer. Indeed, where Standing Apart questions the visitor’s capacity to separate themselves from their sense of this projected figure’s ‘being there,’ so this installation questions the ‘presence’ and integrity of the ‘real’ self whose view it mirrors.

To read more on the relationship of Gary Hill's work to these notions of aura, presence and performance, see Nick Kaye, Multi-Media: video - installation - performance, London: Routledge, 2007.

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