Gary Hill Mediations, 1986

https://filmow.com/mediations-t251258/ The videos of Gary Hill have consistently utilized his own writings and others’ texts to explore our confidence in this extension of the still photograph. In Mediations (toward a remake of Soundings) 79/86 he takes this genre to another level with a video image of a speaker being filled with sand while it tries to speak. The muffled words we hear—Hill’s own writing—are recorded coming from the increasingly dysfunctional speaker. In this piece the hands of the artist himself manipulate and distort our access to words he presumably needs us to hear. The image we see extends the meaning of his text, but it also creates a visual analog for the value of indirection and distraction in art.
—Rod Slemmons, Museum of Contemporay Photography, Chicago, Il. Mediations Mediations