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INTERVIEW WITH GARY HILL 
This interview was conducted for the exhibition Gary Hill taking place at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from January 30 to A pril 26, 1998.
A list of Web sites on Gary Hill is available on the Web site of la Médiathèque du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Sylvie Parent : Your work seems to be defined as either video or video installation. When you started as an artist was it as a sculptor or as a video artist?
Gary Hill : Actually I first started as a video artist and I became a sculptor. I had a brush with television and it forced me to consider video in a different way.
S.P.: I would like to put different aspects of your work into context, precisely the importance of the video as a medium in itself or as it is included in installations.
G.H. : My first involvement with video resulted out of frustration. I had been doing a certain kind of construction sculpture for awhile and I became involved in a small community video production. It was an extraordinary experience to work with the very present, yet mediated aspect of video. So I immediately started...
S.P. : How do you deal with the superimposition of the running time of the video and actual running time in your work?
G.H. : You have this other eye, this other mind, this other thinking process. So it is not just parallel, meshed, a one-for-one situation, reality per se and this electronic view. They unfold upon each other in some sense and, I suppose, in some linear sense. I got swept up by possibilities of the video image and that brought me to speak, to break the image with my voice.
S.P. : The voice is so intimate, it is directly linked to the body, to a very personal experience. How do you explain the importance of the voice in your work?
G.H. : I think personally I am drawn to physicality and the «here and now » approach. I don’t mean simply the «here and now » but my mediation with the physical world is not so much a described thought ; it has more to do with a meaning ground, the physicality of thinking itself, thinking that is conveyed through the voice, the grain of voice. I want to link the various textures of that by breaking them down in some way in order to intervene upon the image so that we can awaken the possibility of the image, because images have become so dead and there are so many.
S.P. : Did you start to create installations at the same time as video, in the 70s ? With the installation, there is a desire to work within the actual space of the viewer, to involve the body of the viewer in a more important way, whereas video has more to do with mental space, it immediately addresses the mind directly. Your installations involve video, but also sculptural elements, the physical space, the body in space.
G.H. : I created installations in the 70s after I made a few videos. The first installation was in 74, so 3 or 4 years later. I remember the first installation. It was very conceptual, announcing the medium that was emerging at that time. It had already been around for 5 years, but still, the idea of installing it in a certain situation was quite recent. I was in upstate New York at a place called the Woodstock Artists' Association and they were very anti-photography ; video was out of the question. Anyway, I sort of manipulated my way into exhibiting a work which consisted of zooming a camera to a certain space on the wall, the size of a 20 inch video monitor. Then I cut through the layers, starting with the plaster through to the outside. Then the monitor was installed which replayed this process. It involved drawing, sculpture, video, feedback, performance, installation. You were going through this space in an almost political, conceptual way. The very first thing I did in video happened when I was given a camera. I looked at myself with the camera, and the monitor monitoring this, and I recorded. I put that on a monitor, then I asked if I could use another camera, and I put myself in front of myself, before myself, in a relationship with myself, which became an installation, but the word installation was not even involved. I was in fact installing a kind of thinking as an installation. I was thinking out loud and turning it inside out. This technology has a tension to it that can be used to mutually record, describe, disseminate, coproduce, and so on.
S.P. : Technology seems to disappear in your work because one gets involved to the point of forgetting the instrumental aspect of the work, how complex it can be. It is comparable to a black out. One gets completely cut off from the world.
G.H. : I’m hoping that there’s something else happening because when I am in a certain mood and I watch television, the same thing happens, you can almost describe it the same way. I can watch Seinfeld and be really involved. For me there is something else happening in a different way, or at least I am trying to make it different.
S.P. : It brakes the relationship with time, for instance with the interruptions, the reversal...
G.H. : I think that calls attention to the question : is it technology or is it phenomenology that involves what thinking is ? It is not just a question of what a human being is in biological or scientific terms.It is a question that needs to be asked now because the human being is no longer a given. There are so many things coming up where we meet the edge, the limits of what it is to be human.
S.P. : I remember an installation you made here a few years ago the Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal.
G.H. : That was a long time ago, in 1989.
S.P. : I was really impressed by the different points of view of our body that you proposed in this work : that our sensorial world was not limited by our eyes, that our body also perceives the space.The world of images only addresses our eyes, as if there is a direct and unique path to the mind, and it is not true.
G.H. : The work called Site/recite done that same year, in 1989, is imagining the brain closer than the eyes. So it literally draws attention to the idea of the complete and total connection of language to being. In other words, imagining the brain organized so that the notion of the eye as a personal being was literally closer than my eyes to the center of myself. It is almost like a map reference to the literal connection of how I am planning myself in relation to the body. That work, which was in the exhibition, Crux, was inspired by a poet-writer who brought my attention to the idea that cameras are the nails of the crucifixion, which is a very beautiful notion, because it inverts it completely. The camera has been turned back upon itself, which brings in the connection to the flesh, the word and so on.
S.P. : The way you conceived the path for this exhibition works the same way as the installations do. You totally transformed the museum’s space so that we don’t recognize it anymore. We discover new spaces. This new awareness and the contrast between each room also works on the consciousness, in the same way each installation does.
G.H. : It’s interesting because we also worked on the color for that same purpose. This idea of the color had to do with a personal dream I had, but it is also in reference to the magic hour, which is the moment before dawn and dusk, for me a deep blue. It is not just a color, because it has this connection to where things become darkness. Where there is light there is color, there is physicality.
S.P. : I have been working a lot on the Internet for this magazine, and I have been looking at artworks produced for the Internet recently. Have you considered working with this medium?
G.H. : I have and I am sure I will again. I was asked to do something with Microsoft. They wanted to start an art magazine, and were going to do a series of works. At least somebody at Microsoft wanted to; others were opposed to the project. I was excited about it, but...
S.P. : The opportunity was not there.
G.H. : If I had a T1 line, and images and sound were racing through my computer, it would become sort of a natural, physical thing because it would be real time, which creates a possibility of that physicality. Right now I am just naturally drawn to what is happening before me, and not waiting. It’s like making music on the computer with a certain program that functions like real time. You don’t think about it anymore, while with others you have to wait for the process, and suddenly your thinking has completely changed. It is the same thing with the Internet : basically there is a waiting zone.
S.P. : I thank you very much for this interview.
INTERVIEW WITH ROSA MARTINEZ,
Rossitza Daskalova: This year (1997) is the year of International contemporary art events, such as Documenta X, La 4e Biennale de Lyon, the 97 Kwanju Biennial, Skulptur Projekte in Münster. How would you situate the 5th Istanbul Biennial within the context of these events? What are the differences and similarities between the Istanbul Biennial and these events? What is particular to the physiognomy of the Istanbul Biennial and what were the main concerns of the panel discussion with the topic Biennials and Mega Art Exhibitions?
Rosa Martinez: The will to present the last developments of contemporary artistic creation takes different shapes depending not only on the philosophy and the aesthetic position of the curators that have taken care of those events, but also on the budget they can use to organize them. The International Istanbul Biennial has in common with them the desire for internationality but it differs in the infrastructures it can use and the sociological context in which it is celebrated. Istanbul doesn't have the tradition of Germany nor the budgets of Documenta or Münster, but it has the energy and the desire to create new dialogues.
The 5th International Istanbul Biennial can be situated in the context of those "peripheral" points that are trying to establish relations with the Western mainstream to deconstruct it and rethink it. The proliferation of Biennials all over the world speaks of how art has become a new tool in the international diplomacy, and how other cities want to have a presence in the cultural map. All these aspects were debated in the panel discussion you mention, that focused among many others on the following questions: if art needs to be today a nomadic experience that feels better in biennials than institutionalized in museums; to whom are the biennials mainly addressed - to the same international elites or to the population of the cities where they are celebrated?
R.D.: How would you place this fifth edition of the Biennial within the framework of the previous editions and future editions? What distinguishes this years event from the others and what is the path it traces for the next Istanbul Biennial?
R.M.: I think the 5th International Istanbul Biennial has received the heritage of the challenges, essays and formulations that the different coordinators, curators and directors have proposed in every edition. Knowing this history, I wanted to give a new impulse to the Biennial not doing only one exhibition in a closed building, but including the city itself in the discourse of the exhibition.
Exploring the conception of Istanbul as a gate between East and West we have used the actual gates of the city (the airport, the train stations or some hotels) as venues to present some proposals. I have also invited the artists to participate in a project called "Ready mades in Istanbul" (consisting of taking snapshots to capture instants, situations or displays of objects that can be understood as installations, performances, sculptures or other artistic proposals). In this way, the 5th Biennial has combined the civil places with other more historical venues such as the Imperial Mint, Hagia Eirene or Yerebatan Cistern. I think this Biennial has contributed to make Istanbul a significant point for the debate of the new developments in contemporary art, and for the response we have received of the local and the international visitors. I think there is already a strong expectation for the 6th Biennial in which the curator will have new freedom to create a new perspective of analysis.
R.D.: In an interview published in Flash Art you mentioned that the exhibition will include art in all media. Web art was featured in Documenta X and le 4e Biennale de Lyon. Moreover, Documenta X showed 100 days/100 guests directly on the World Wide Web. You chose not to present Web art and used the Web site of the 5th Istanbul Biennial only to announce the event and present the conceptual framework of the biennial. What is your vision of the Internet as a medium and as means of communication?
R.M.: I mentioned that I do not establish a hierarchy among the media and I meant that the erasure of the borders among the disciplines is the big conquest of the 20th century so that today’s artists can move quite freely from one support to another. We have not presented any project on the Web site for various reasons: one was the lack of human and technological infrastructures for proper research and the other was that I didn't receive any specific proposal using this support. In any case, I think that the Web is opening new doors for communication, and it is an extraordinary medium for discussion but maybe it is too young to be significant in the art circles. Perhaps, the most significant implication of the Web is that it is erasing the physicalness of art and it is destroying the notion of place because you can be in a virtual space, in a nowhere and everywhere land.
R.D.: What are the predominant preoccupations, ideas, and trends of the art shown at the exhibition?
R.M.: I could synthesize them by saying that we have tried to establish a dialogue with the city itself to present the new voices of many artists and to explore especially the multilayered possibilities and displacements of translation not only linguistically but ideologically and culturally. This means that an artwork is experienced in a different way depending on the context in which it is exhibited.
R.D.: Your conceptual approach is rather related to semiotics and maieutics, viewing art as a play of signs, conception and delivery. You mention the necessity for a transition from the "passive aesthetic of mirrors" to the "aesthetic of prisms". Can you tell us more about this phenomenon?
R.M.: I mean that today nothing can be seen only from one perspective, that there is not only one truth, a unique and correct way to understand and reflect reality. We can fly away from the only way of the dogmatic reason. We must be flexible and see things from various points of view and not only from the Western perspective even if today globalization is imposing over us a "unique thought". So we have to deconstruct it and build new realities.
R.D.: Can you discuss the use of the term translation? Does it imply that art is mediation, communication rather than conception and expression?
R.M.: Translation means that art is also a mediation between a concept and the desire to express it.
R.D.: In your conceptual framework, you say that beauty is not timeless and universal. On the other hand, would you say that the search for the ideal of beauty is timeless and universal, undergoing different interpretations and "translations"? How is this "translation" manifested in the artworks selected for the exhibition?
R.M.: We have understood beauty in a classical sense as a research for harmony, perfection... I think there can be an extreme beauty in the disorder, or to say it better, in other ways of order which are not the academic ones. The translation is manifested through the desire of the artists to communicate their ideas and through all the interpretations the spectators make of the works of art exhibited.
R.D.: You point out that there are borderlines separating art and life. What is the link between life, art and beauty?
R.M.: The main frontier that separates art from life is the absolutist defense of the autonomy of the work of art. The links are established when the artworks are understood as catalysts and as bridges to connect aesthetics with the desire to transform the world, the human relations or a microperception of reality.
R.D.: And, can we speak about life in terms of the artwork? The great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein says that there are two kinds of film: alive and lifeless. Do you agree with that? May one say that there are two kinds of artworks, alive and lifeless, and what are the determining criteria for an artwork that is "alive"?
R.M.: Yes, I agree with that. And I do not think that it needs a very long explanation. You just feel it, sometimes through intuition, which is a form of knowledge. It does not pass through rationality, but instead through a much more holistic perception that includes not only your rationality, but your emotions and your sensibility and even sometimes asks for your participation.
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