Our Initial Reactions

Billy Travis

As for my initial interpretation of the piece, I believe that it is making a statement about the dichotomy between nature and technology. It was named after a clover, which is a naturally-occurring plant, but was also constructed from man-made materials. Additionally, the footage on the screens depicts people walking through the forest. We follow faceless people through the woods and are uncertain as to whether their actions have any impact on the environment. Technology and nature seem to be common themes within the world of art, so perhaps this piece is meant to make us think about the relationship between the two ideas and whether or not they are truly able to coexist. In my opinion, this is a very unique and interesting piece. Overall, seeing it for the first time was a good experience since I may not have found it on my own.

Haily Williams

Monitors and a cart stand in the middle of an entryway, at first glance you may think its an information screen or maybe even someone showing the Blair Witch Project. Once I got closer to it though and actually gave it a good long look, I realized the screens almost look homemade, with its wire’s exposed and loud buzzing, showing a great deal of care for the installation. It’s placed in an entryway which annoyed me before and I’ve avoided this route due to the load buzzing but now know it’s a great short cut to class. The video playing is of multiple people walking in the forest but the perspective stays behind the figures.

After finally stopping to examine and understand the piece better I instantly got a very unsettling feeling while watching the mystery figures from behind. With its fourth screen hidden, it also made me very curious, maybe it’s turned that way on purpose. The way it seems like someone is following these people unknowingly and invading their space is a very familiar and uncomfortable feeling. I may be an easily paranoid person so my reaction might not be the one the artist intended, but I still enjoy the Clover installation due to the fact that it actually causes a reaction I wasn’t expecting.

Max Schuelke

Immediately the piece is very surreal and uncanny. Though the technology for the time was modern, nowadays the monitors used might be considered “retro” which was my first thought. The monitors were removed from their shells so that they could be fitted closer together which gives them a sort of industrial vibe. The aesthetics made me think of mounted loudspeakers you might see in a dystopian film, broadcasting the words of the dictator from every street corner. As I took in what was playing on the monitors it felt much more melancholy. The monitors each display a man walking through the woods through a camera mounted on their backs. The walks through unknown woods gave me a sense of peaceful loneliness. Each person seemed to be walking towards the center of the monitors, never to meet, perhaps the video reset before they did. The perspective from behind their head added to the strangeness of the piece. If it had been the first-person perspective it would have felt as though I myself were walking in the forest. If it had been 3rd-person, from ahead or further back, it might have felt more impersonal and much more like watching someone else walking. The closeness to the person made it feel like empathy as if I were walking through the woods in their shoes, but unable to see the face, I could only feel my own emotions for them. Their casual garb made them more relatable as well.

About the Artist

Mesh, Gary Hill, 1978-79

Gary Hill grew up in Santa Monica, California and moved to New York at 18 to study at the Art Students League in Woodstock. While living in Woodstock he studied under the painter Bruce Dorfman in the Art Student’s League and was exposed to the New York Painting and Sculpture exhibition. The works he saw inspired him to make sculptures using welding rods, wire mesh, and canvas and he started to experiment with sounds. In 1970 to 1972 Gary had his first solo exhibition called Gary Hill: Painted Constructions. In 1973 he started experimenting with video. His first video installation was Hole in the Wall at the exhibition “Artists from Upstate New York” from 1973 to 1974. He currently lives in Seattle, WA.

He began his work in the 60s with sculptures using metal wire and experimenting with sounds generated with the wires. Later he began to branch into electronic sound and video cameras, both of which he incorporated it into his pieces. His works vary in medium, from painting and sculpture to sound and video. Many of his pieces, Clover included, utilize television monitors removed from their casings to display videos while being incorporated into a greater sculpture. Clover is a sculpture made of a welded table 30 inches by 30 inches and 64 inches tall upon which four monitors face outwards, each displaying a different video of men walking in the woods. This piece was heavily influenced by the technology of the time. Clover was created in 1994, and video and television were becoming increasingly accessible to people in the 1990s.

Gary Hill, Learning Curve 1993

A Similar Artist

Nam June Paik was another artist from the ’70s that used televisions as an art form similar to that of Gary Hills. Paik had a very painterly style that he used to convey his concepts, while Gary seems to focus on a more surrealistic style. Creating figures and shapes with his TV’s, Paik also liked to make interactive pieces, he would let the viewers change the image on the screen or even have someone wear his TV’s. Hill, on the other hand, focuses on specific objects, he creates a store or language with his video’s not a painting or single image. One has to think that Gary Hill took inspiration from June Paik’s medium and then grew from that creating his own individual works of art.

Nam June Paik, The More the Better, 1988

Our Video Statement

For our video, we wanted to draw on some of the themes from Clover while adding our own twist to it. We decided to do a similar perspective to that in Clover and have multiple videos from that perspective running simultaneously. We decided to diverge from the video in some aspects. A major theme of Clover is that each person seems to be walking towards a center, but since we only had one screen, we decided each person would walk from a different point towards a common destination.  Clover represents a contrast between technology and nature and we wanted to include that by having some of our paths in the video be in different locations, one in an elevator, one down a set of stairs and one through a path under trees. We filmed the video taking turns being the subject and holding the camera and shot a number of different scenes before choosing 3 paths that we really liked. We wanted the paths to each represent something different. We wanted each of our locations to give a different vibe. Outside we tried to recreate the mysterious woods quality in the original piece while still being close to clover to end it in a timely manner. The elevator clashes with the rest as it gives a sense of stillness, while in reality the subject is still moving. Once we had nine good shots, three of each subject, Billy put them all together into the complete video.

Walking down the stairs posed an annoying problem in that it was really hard to hold the camera steady. In the end, with practice, we were able to get some good footage, but it was tough. The original piece had the cameras mounted on the subjects’ back so that the frame was perfectly steady with their head, but we didn’t have the resources to mount the cameras and had to make do.

Production

Haily Williams – Research, Filming, Actor, Writer

Billy Travis- Video Editor, Research, Actor, Writer

Max Schuelke – Research, Filming, Actor, Blog Editor

Work Cited

Quasha, George. “An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings.” Academia.edu, Gloria Moure, 2009, www.academia.edu/28928186/An_Art_of_Limina_Gary_Hills_Works_and_Writings.

“GARY HILL.” Gary Hill Clover Comments, 1 Jan. 1994, garyhill.com/work/mixed_media_installation/clover.html.

Thompson, Robert J., and Steve Allen. “Television in the United States.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 18 Oct. 2017, www.britannica.com/art/television-in-the-United-States. 

Images:

“Gary Hill Bio.” Gary Hill , garyhill.com/about/bio.

“Nam June Paik About.” Gagosian, 12 Apr. 2018, gagosian.com/artists/nam-june-paik/.