Seeing (Oneself) React (in) Matter

In 1980, Gary Hill, having had to leave his apartment unexpectedly, was forced to move into his teaching office at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was replacing Woody and Steina Vasulka, who had already left for Santa Fe. In his small office, the artist says¹, all he could do to avoid becoming claustrophobic was to work. And so he had an “idea” – or rather a desire, a need? –: he wanted to know what would come of dividing a text into syllables, associating each syllable with a photographic image taken in his office. A video work, 4 minutes and 45 seconds long, came into being from this principle: Around & About.

During the creative process, the very simple starting “idea” turned into a rich plastic exploration of the possibilities of collaging images. The artist presents his project as arising from a “what if²” scenario, which one might render as: “What would happen if I did this?” or, quite simply, “What if…”. It is in this way that Patricia Ribault considers technics as power³. This is an approach comparable to that of children who, driven by their curiosity, and by means of objects, technical or not⁴ – toys, dishes, household tools… –, do nothing but discover the world of possibilities⁵, while discovering themselves. A dynamic of reflexivity is then set in motion between the human and technics, which reveal each other. From this angle, that of reflexivity, technics closely resembles art: we imagine, with Bachelard, clay taking shape, contained in the hands, yet simultaneously “acting as container⁶”. What is at stake, in short, is the “reflexive effect of matter⁷”, which shares a form of plasticity with the human idea and intention:

“What if…”: the beginning of an idea, which forms itself in forming, which re-flects in re-garding; a back-and-forth from matter to imagination, by way of touch⁸.

What is expressed here is a form of “reflexive plasticity” of the same order as the one at work in the artist’s intention, as depicted by Michel Guérin⁹. This becoming of intentionality is not experienced as fatalism or drama, quite the contrary: the artist knows that if he manages to make experience play in the direction of the work, his starting intention will be sublimated, carrying him toward regions he had not foreseen, at least on the intelligible level. This is why, Guérin tells us, the artist accepts that his intention be “relayed, glossed, even rectified¹⁰”, in an attitude that establishes itself as an “artistic deontology¹¹”. It is as if, to put it in our own words, it were the artist’s duty to take care to keep and nourish the direct bond with the active matter of the world, from which forms emerge when it is targeted by the gesture of the living, all within an immanent framework.

1. As he recounts on his website: https://garyhill.com/work/video/around-about.html, accessed February 10, 2025.↩︎

2. Ibid.↩︎

3. Patricia Ribault, «Du toucher au geste technique : La « technè des corps » ». Appareil [en ligne]. 2011, vol. 8.↩︎

4. With Marcel Mauss we know that technics resides first of all in the body. See in this regard Marcel Mauss, Les techniques du corps. Paris : Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2021.↩︎

5. Patricia Ribault, « Du toucher au geste technique : la « technè des corps » », in Appareil, op. cit.↩︎

6. Patricia Ribault, « Du toucher au geste technique : la « technè des corps » », in Appareil, op. cit.↩︎

7. Ibid.↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. Michel Guérin, « Qu’est-ce qu’un médium artistique ? », in Appareil, op. cit.↩︎

10. Ibid.↩︎

11. Ibid.↩︎