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Gary Hill «Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine)» | Suspension of Disbelief (installation view)
Gary Hill, «Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine)», 1991 – 1992
Suspension of Disbelief (installation view) | Photograph: Mark B. McLoughlin, New York | © Gary Hill
 


 
 

Works by Gary Hill:

Crux| Primarily Speaking| Viewer


Photograph: McLoughlin, Mark B. | Archive / Collection: ZKM, Karlsruhe
 

 Gary Hill
«Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine)»

Images of two naked bodies, the more dominant, female, the other, male, flow across a line of some thirty monitors suspended on a steel beam seven feet above the floor in «Suspension of Disbelieve». The video recorder has lingered lovingly on these nudes, almost nuzzling the skin as it probed their surfaces, and so it delivers the body to the gaze with an impression of both intense intimacy and immediacy. Yet as these forms glide across the screens their passage is constantly interrupted, fragments are spliced, segregated, relayed and replayed in rapid succession by means of a switching mechanism which speeds the flow to the point where it becomes impossible to focus clearly on one image, to stabilize and fix it. [...]
That access is granted only to surfaces, to the external and ephemeral, is thus reinforced by the very nature of the medium. The limited size of the average monitor, together with the relatively poor resolution currently possible with most equipment, plus the constant motion of the light particles, together mitigate against viewers ‹entering› the image in ways akin to those by which they inscribe themselves into filmic space.

(source: Lynne Cooke, »Gary Hill: Beyond Babel«, in: Gary Hill, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien, 1992–1993, p. 89.)