S. Brent Plate

Institute of the Liberal Arts
Emory University
splate@emory.edu

 

 

Gary Hill. Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. May 11 – August 20. Organized by Chris Bruce, Senior Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.

 

[D]esire, alienated, is perpetually reintegrated anew, reprojecting the Idealich outside. It is in this way that desire is verbalised. Here there is a game of see-saw between two inverted relations. The specular relation of the ego, which the subject assumes and realizes, and projection, which is always ready to be renewed, in the Idealich.

 

-Jacques Lacan¹

 

Gary Hill’s video and installation art challenges a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view of perception by showing the mediated nature of the viewing subject’s interaction with the artwork. Hill investigates the relationships between bodies, words, images, and technology. While much of Hill’s work in the past has focused on single-channel videotapes, his recent exhibition at the Guggenheim SoHo (11 May – 20 August) is a display of 13 room-sized installations, artworks within which the viewer’s body must move. Furthermore, by incorporating philosophical and literary texts (e.g., writings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Blanchot) into his videos and images, Hill manages to confront the incessant relationship of words and images in a striking ly original way in artistic practice.

 

Hill’s exhibition spaces are spaces of and about media (sing. medium) in two senses of the word. As the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, a “medium” is, “1. Something . . . that occupies a position or represents a condition midway between extremes. 2. An intervening substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on.” This dual definition makes it possible to consider the term ‘medium’ in aesthetic categories of form and content. Medium as content is “something between.” Medium as form is a “substance through which something else is transmitted.” Hill’s art investigates each sense of the term, and both of them together.

 

Though essays about Hill are pocked with poststructural references, Hill makes no explicit mention of Lacan in his installations or video works. Yet, Hill and Lacan seem to share affinities for what Lacan calls the “function of seeingness.”² That is, they each explore the space of mediation between the viewer and the object viewed. This relation is a see-saw game of desire and projection, and is, finally, constitutive of subjectivity.

 

In the following i take Lacan’s theory of subjectivity and the interrelated notion of “the eye and the gaze” as an orienting point. From there i create a “conversational re-view” of Hill’s recent exhibition. As this exhibition included thirteen installations — each abundantly rich enough in content to summon its own essay — i will concentrate on only three particular installations.

 

The dense opening quote of Lacan serves as a preface to the following reading of Hill’s installations. Within the quoted passage resides the catalyst that is desire, the notion of projection, and a relation between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic. In further comparing Hill and Lacan, i suggest that through the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic one of Lacan’s underlying motifs is to reconceive the relation of the word and the image within the realm of subjectivity. While it is clear that Lacan privileges the symbolic over the imaginary (and hence also, the word over the image), they each remain vital in the construction of the subject.

 

Turning to Lacan’s mediated view of “the function of seeingness,” there is found a distinction between the eye and the gaze. To clarify this distinction, Lacan provides what are perhaps the simplest of his diagrams (91):

 

(IMAGE)

 

The first diagram portrays the geometral perspective set up in Renaissance schema (notably that of Alberti) of a singular point-of-view taking in the whole of the other (object) through the eye. As the agent of vision, the subject is the “Cartesian subject, which is itself a sort of geometral point, a point of perspective” (86). As the still point of singular perspective, the subject is affirmed in her or his position. Lacan’s conception is duplicitous in its combining of the simple, now common-sensical notion of perspective with the modern view of the singular and unitary subject.

 

Entering Hill’s exhibition space, the viewer comes upon a room containing the installation Learning Curve (1993). Here the viewer/subject finds a seat, and the eye is given “something to feed on” (101). Sitting in a chair at a schooldesk, the viewer faces forward (the only way possible) and finds the lines of the edge of her or his desk fanning out a long way away from the chair toward a screen at the far end of the schooldesk. (The desk is approximately 8′ long.) The viewer sits at the “point” of the triangular schooldesk which, due to its size, shifts from being a mere desk to a spatial plane — separating, but also connecting — the seated viewer to the image on the screen. Projected on to the screen from a video projector above the head of the seated viewer is the moving image of a seemingly endless breaking wave. Metaphors of drowning hardly need be mentioned as one quickly becomes captivated by the image of a perfect wave, curling right into infinity.

 

Learning Curve, 1993

 

(IMAGE)

 

Without mention of Lacan, commentator Robert Mittenthal states that, “To sit in Learning Curve is to become part of the piece; one is physically supported by the same object that focuses one’s attention on the pure visual space of the projected wave. The chair forces the viewer into a single-point perspective.”³ The single point of the eye in this installation is matched by the “projection” of the wave. The light is projected from a singular point (the video projector above the head of the seated viewer) and spreads out to the site where the screen is filled by the projected image. Projected lines of light exactly match the lines of the desk, thereby conflating the viewer’s position of seeing with the projector, and with the projected image.

 

Lacan’s comments on the imaginary realm of projection are fitting here: “Each time the subject apprehends himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in his status, in his stature, in his static, his desire is projected outside.”⁴ In Learning Curve, the subject constitutes her or his self in the static schooldesk, and desire is projected to the screen in front. Desire is desire of a wave, the Idealich, the fluid motion, the amniotic fluids. To be identified with a wave . . . To be there . . . To Be, there. . . .

 

While the single-point perspective of Learning Curve and of Lacan’s Renaissance diagram entails a position of mastery — where everything flows from the eye/I — slippage is already occurring. The sight of the other (the perfect wave, the imago) enthralls, captivates, and causes the viewing subject to begin to dissolve because the other is finally only the image of the subject her or him self projected onto the other. For a final entry into subjectivity, the other must become more than a screen for a projected image of the subject. The subject must enter a field of visual relations (the symbolic) where she or he is the one seen as well as the one seeing.

 

Lacan’s theories of subjectivity confound the subject of visual mastery. The single-point perspective corresponds to a singular subject position, and Lacan is out to foil and complicate this notion associated with “modern science.” In so doing, Lacan inverts the first diagram, and the subject is now seen in relation to the gaze (see diagram 2, above). The gaze is a web of which the subject is but one (but not One) piece: “We are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. . . . [The] gaze circumscribes us” (75). Further inverting the first diagram’s effects, the gaze “is that which turns me into a picture” (105), with light moving in the opposite direction. The point of light is projected from the site of the other (the gaze) on to the subject through a “screen.” The subject is constituted by this pre-existing screen, a pre-existing set of symbols which creates a grid for the other(s) to perceive the subject.

 

Hill, in a separate but related installation, Learning Curve (Still Point) (1993), likewise inverts the triangle of vision. Now, rather than a large screen opposite the viewer with lines extended out, the viewer sits at the “base” of the triangular desk. The edges of the desk converge at a video monitor at the end of the long desk. The schooldesk and the seat are similar in each installation, only now the image of the wave is displayed in the small form of a 5″ video monitor, making it difficult for the viewer to identify with and be captivated by the image. Furthermore, the light is also reversed. With the first installation (as with Lacan’s first diagram), light is projected from the point of perspective, the “geometral point.” Now the light originates from the far end, from the “point of light” (due to the fact that a video monitor has replaced a video projector). Here the light is projected onto the viewer from the place of the other. The subject/viewer becomes, in essence, “the screen.”

 

Learning Curve (Still Point), 1993

 

(IMAGE)

 

Further comparing Learning Curve (Still Point) to the gaze, Mittenthal, again without reference to Lacan, suggests of Hill’s installation that “one imagines a California schoolboy daydreaming of surfing, suddenly called upon to answer one of his teacher’s queries.”⁵ The schooldesk becomes the site of “the subject sustaining himself in a function of desire” (85), the desire to be surfing, that is, to be elsewhere. Coextensive with this desire is the element of surprise, and one must wonder why Mittenthal, who neither quotes Lacan nor surfs, brings in the element of surprise in the viewing of these waves rather than the others. Perhaps his imagined response to sitting in this position is tinged with the voyeuristic shame of peering through a keyhole: “the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame” (84). This shame brings the viewer out of her or his self (out of the surfing daydream) into the realm of others, and therefore also becomes a realization by the subject of her or his role within the larger symbolic order.

 

Lacan further complicates the relation of the eye and the gaze by overlapping the first two diagrams, creating a more comprehensive “field of vision.” The eye and the gaze are brought together in a third diagram (106) and placed on opposing sides.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Here the viewing subject is not simply either the master of perception (as in the Renaissance schema), or objectified within the gaze. Rather,

 

Only the subject — the human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence of man — is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. He maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation. (107; emphasis mine)

 

It is, finally, at the site of the screen — at the point of the medium — that the subject’s identity is negotiated.

 

In Lacan’s third diagram we are brought back to the relation of the imaginary and the symbolic: “The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic” (118). In the register of the imaginary, the subject/viewer projects her or his own imago onto the screen. There the projected imago comes into contact with the other side of the screen, on which is portrayed the image through which the subject is seen by others in the symbolic realm. While the gaze circumscribes the subject, the site of the screen becomes the site where the eye and the gaze meet. Out of this sutured relation, this discourse in the field of the other, this sight in the field of vision, identity springs.

 

At this point Lacan shifts his oft-quoted “man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” to say “that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir)” (115). Lacan makes his final turn against the realm of vision and states that this showing is connected with the desire to see, and that desire is fascination (Latin: “the evil eye”). Too much fascination turns to envy (invidia): “the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction” (116). Here it is the symbolic (and language) which will rescue the subject from the power of annihilating envy. And “where can we better picture this power than in invidia?” (115). And perhaps, where can we better picture Lacan’s notions than in video?

 

One would have to imagine a continually spinning swivel chair at a schooldesk intersecting Hill’s two installations to relate the overlapping third diagram. But this wouldn’t quite get us to the point (however still). Fortunately, if we move into the next room, we come upon an installation which provides a clearer manifestation of the subject’s relation to vision. The installation places the subject/viewer in the overlapping third diagram of Lacan, but in an even more fluid way than Lacan imagined (or, was able to chart).

 

This next room is the site of the installation Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) (1990). Beacon is a simple design with complex content. The “beacon” (“a signalling or guiding device; a source of guidance or inspiration”)⁶ is a piece of aluminum pipe, 6″ in diameter and 54″ in length. The pipe is suspended from the ceiling and comes to rest about 78″ from the floor, just high enough for most people to walk under, yet just low enough to cause many to feel they have to duck to pass under it. Powered by a motor, the beacon spins slowly in a darkened room (approximately 20’x40′) providing all the light for the room. The light which is here provided is given by two 4″ video monitors placed in each end of the pipe. The video image is then projected out by projection lenses which cap the ends of the pipe. (Note that in this set-up the image can be seen two ways, by looking into the pipe — though no one would actually do this – – and by looking at the projected image on the wall.) The beacon spins in a circular motion, and since it is placed off-center in a rectangular room, the projected images vary in size, sometimes filling a good part of a wall, sometimes a small square. Finally, four speakers are placed in the corners of the room, with the sound sometimes “following” the moving images, sometimes not.

 

The fact that i have used the word “sometimes” four times in the last two sentences suggests that Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary) gives a sense of chance. Many of Hill’s works provide for chance, yet this chance springs out of a polished and precise technological medium (even the appearance of the polished aluminum pipe itself gives a “smooth” feel). In Beacon there is a motor, a system, and an array of electronics controlling the piece. Hill arranges the installation to allow the blips in the circuitry (the slips, the elisions) to show through. Even so, it sometimes seems the blips may be intentional, wired into the circuitry, and that may be, but Hill allows an even greater interruption (a much greater inbreaking of the Real in Lacanian terms): the presence of the viewer in the space of the installation. The viewer is not a detached viewer here. The viewer is part of the room, part of the installation, and this interaction creates chance elements beyond the technical apparatus of the piece. Similarly, there is no position from which to take in the entirety of the piece, no place for a singular point-of-view. As the beacon spins, projecting its light onto the walls, viewers are caught in the searching path of light, their silhouettes outlined against the wall for others to see. Hill asks in a short writing on Beacon, “What will you do when you are in the light?”⁷

 

And i, as an observer and participant, watched what others did in the light, realizing that i, at the same time, was being watched. When i viewed the installation, there were on average five to ten others in the room at once — so there was a necessary negotiation taking place between bodies and between bodies and the revolving light. Most often people would move aside, attempting to get out of the light for fear of disrupting someone else’s view. The problem was that there were two sides to the beacon and to move out of the light meant an almost continual movement. One could stand directly under the beacon and always remain out of the light (standing at the geometral point, even if it is spinning), but due to the height mentioned above one kept feeling as if the pipe would hit one’s head, which would create an even more intense feeling of being a spectacle. Hence, there were few people who ever did stand close to the pipe. The perpetual escape from the light mixed with the revolving images and the viewer’s desire to see the images meant quite simply that the viewing involved a lot of bodily movement within the space of the installation.

 

There were others who — either due to an exhibitionist streak, or to a resignation that there was no escaping from the panoptic light — merely remained in their positions and allowed the light to cast their shadows on the wall. But of course, from this bold position there was still no way to see the entirety of the installation; one had to choose which image to look at. And then there were the younger ones who would jump up into the space of the light just to be seen, or would create fun shadows of dogs or butterflies with their hands, wanting to show a part of their selves and have an other take notice.

 

But let me leave aside the formal nature of the piece and address the content. What sounds are emanating from the speakers? And what exactly are the images being projected onto the walls? A text is being read. Various voices in somber tones recite a text of Maurice Blanchot. Ironically, the “Imaginary” in the title does not refer to Lacan, but to Blanchot’s short essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” Likewise, the images often correspond to this text. Sometimes there is an image of the printed essay itself, with the camera (like an eye) following along the pages and lines being spoken. Sometimes there is an image of a person reading the text. Other times there is a still shot of a person as the spoken text continues, leaving the simple view of a face moving across the walls.

 

Blanchot’s essay is complex and obscure, and i will only point out a few of the more important elements as it relates back to Hill’s video work. “Two Versions of the Imaginary” chiefly concerns the role of the image within language. The image brings forward places and times which are “absent” in the current perception to remake them as somehow present. In other words, linguistic images are a representation. But it is the relation between presence and absence in the image which for Blanchot provides the possibilities of power and fascination.

 

The essay begins with this enigmatic paragraph (and the quotes i give here are also quotes heard spoken within Hill’s installation):

 

But what is the image? When there is nothing, that is where the image finds its condition, but disappears into it. The image requires the neutrality and the effacement of the world, it wants everything to return to the indifferent depth where nothing is affirmed, it inclines towards the intimacy of what still continues to exist in the void; its truth lies there. But this truth exceeds it; what makes it possible is the limit where it ceases. Hence its dramatic aspect, the ambiguity it evinces, and the brilliant lie with which it is reproached.⁸

 

The image is a two-sided coin (perhaps even an effaced one), or a two-sided screen: showing limits as well as giving the experience of limitlessness. This, i would suggest, is Blanchot’s version of the suture between the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic.

 

In the subject’s perception, according to Blanchot, to see an event as an image is not to be infinitely removed from the originary thing itself. Rather, “to experience an event as image is not to free oneself of that event . . . it is to let oneself be taken by it . . . to that other region where distance holds us, this distance which is now unliving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things” (87). Just as a cadaver is typically thought to come “after” the being itself, the image, if all it did were to imitate a “real” thing, would be subordinated as a secondary event. But for Blanchot, contrarily, the image is “not the same thing distanced, but that thing as distancing” (80-81). The perception of the image exists in an in-between place, a mediated site.

 

Blanchot’s two versions of the imaginary are intertwined and stitched together. One version brings us to Lacan’s imaginary, the site of “universal unity.” The other version, through its emphasis on limits, recalls Lacan’s symbolic: “what makes [the image] possible is the limit where it ceases.” Subjectivity is created through splits and gaps enlisting desire and the need of mediation, a mediation working internally and externally.

 

Concluding my own stitched together review, i return to the site of Hill’s installation Beacon. The installation is an experience, a passing through (ex-peri: “pass through”), both in the sense that one must cross the room to continue the rest of the exhibition, and in the sense that one passes through a series of mediations while in the room. Among these mediations there is, of course, the need for negotiating space with other bodies in a darkened room. Then there is the negotiation with the revolving light; inevitably, the image is projected onto the viewer’s body for all others to see, the subject is caught in the gaze. Correlatively, the interception of light by the body leaves a dark spot (scotoma; blind spot) on the wall in the midst of the image, leaving others with a fractured, incomplete view. There is also the space of the viewer existing between the two images on opposing walls. While the images originate at the same point (the pipe) they are cast to opposit e ends of the room. From there the two images develop a relationship with each other — there are times when the book is shown on one wall while the person reading is imaged on the other wall — and, as Hill states, “perhaps one forms the Other’s projection across time.”⁹ Across time and space, the viewer occupies the space between.

 

Clearly, in Hill’s art, what you see is not what you get; there is a space opened up for mediation and negotiation. That space is a space the subject/viewer enters. In the midst of these interventions the subject’s body takes on the place of mediation. In Lacanian terms, the body becomes the site of identity, the image and the screen, a site projected on to, and a site projecting itself. It is a space between text and image (between spoken words and projected images) and between the symbolic and the imaginary (between others in a room and one’s own bodily negotiation to remain out of the light).

 

Notes

 

1. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Norton, 1978) 174.

 

2. Four Fundamental Concepts 82. All further quotes given in text.

 

3. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being: Gary Hill’s Learning Curve,” Gary Hill, Exhibition Catalog, Essays by Chris Bruce, et al. (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery/University of Washington, 1994) 92. < p> 4. “The see-saw of desire,” In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) [Fr. 1975] 171.

 

5. “Standing Still on the Lip of Being” 93.

 

6. American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

 

7. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary),” Gary Hill 25.

 

8. “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” The Gaze of Orpheus: and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981) 79. Further quotes from this essay are given in text.

 

9. “Beacon (Two Versions of the Imaginary)” 25.