ART REVIEW : Gary Hill’s Compelling, Confusing Video Show : MOCA’s Survey of This Important Body of Work Loses Something in Setup

In Gary Hill’s 1991 video sculpture “Between Cinema and a Hard Place,” 23 television tubes trailing hundreds of feet of tangled coaxial cable spill across a low-slung platform and onto the floor, rather like electronic entrails ripped from the belly of a postindustrial beast. Whatever the content of the images that flicker across the assorted screens, it’s the bodily connotation of the sculpture that registers most immediately.

These aren’t TV monitors and certainly not consoles we’re watching. Instead, they’re television’s guts.

The survey of the Santa Monica-born, Seattle-based artist’s work that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art includes nine video installations (one of which was unavailable for preview) and six single-channel videotapes, all made since 1981. Together, they chronicle Hill’s effort to ground consciousness within physical, palpable experience, using video as a modern metaphor for awareness.

The show includes such wonderfully compelling installations as “Crux” (1983-87), “Suspension of Disbelief” (1991-92) and the new “Remarks on Color” (1994). Alas, it is nonetheless ineffective in presenting this important body of work. MOCA, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment, has made it unnecessarily difficult to follow Hill’s trajectory.

Hill’s earliest installation attached the video medium directly to the artist’s own body, while paradoxically keeping most of that body from view. “Crux” was made by strapping five portable cameras to the artist’s torso and extremities, with the lenses aimed down at each foot, out at each hand and up at his head. Hill, rigged in this fashion, set out to explore the grounds of a ruined castle in a wooded area of Upstate New York.

For the installation that resulted, five monitors are attached to a gallery wall in a monumental, cruciform shape. The reference to a crucified figure is plain, even though the images on the screens show only the artist’s head, hands and feet; glimpses of an earthly journey through an autumnal, ruined place are seen in the background.

Like carvings of the crucifixion from certain regions of Southern Mexico, which also show only these five extremities affixed to a cross, the body is pointedly absent from Hill’s “Crux.” Its absence conveys an unexpected power: You know the physical body is the source from which these arduous pictures of worldly experience were made, but only the loci of human consciousness and suffering are apparent.

This bodily reference is compounded in “Suspension of Disbelief.” The sculpture exploits the idea of television as a medium for communication, by making it the site for a sexual fusion between male and female.

An aluminum beam is suspended between two walls, slightly more than six feet off the floor--just above the physical height of a standing viewer. Thirty black-and-white television tubes are set edge to edge along the length of the beam, their electronic innards visible from behind.

The imagery on the screens consists of tight, quick-cut scans of nude, reclining bodies--one male, one female--which are interspersed with (and seem to melt into) one another. The horizontal linearity of the sculpture, in which your eye “reads” the imagery as it might words on a page, by scanning rapidly from left to right, ineluctably invokes language as a system of bodily consciousness.

Language, like the human body, is a central feature of Hill’s art. Sometimes it’s signaled by pictures of people reading, as in portions of the installation “Circular Breathing” (1994) or in several single-channel tapes; sometimes it’s implied in the sculpture’s composition, as in the video image projected onto an open book in 1990’s electronic spin on Miss Muffet’s tale, “And Sat Down Beside Her.”

More profoundly, a discreet suggestion of “the word made flesh” is inescapable in “Suspension of Disbelief,” just as it is in the earlier “Crux.” Hill, more convincingly than any other video artist, has made use of the way in which the television screen is replacing the printed page.

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“Remarks on Color,” a single-channel video projection continuously shown in MOCA’s auditorium, is the newest piece in the show. A young child with blonde hair and wearing a blue dress reads from a red book, sounding out phonetically the abstruse ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famously impenetrable theory of the logic of color concepts. Her dutiful (and uncomprehending) recitation, subsumed within the red-yellow-blue color scheme, makes for slyly funny child’s play.

Unfortunately, the survey, which was organized by the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, is rather confusing. Inexplicably, four of the nine video installations identified in the catalogue checklist turn out not to be in the MOCA show. (Substitutions have been made.)

It’s not unusual for exhibition checklists to change when a show goes on tour; however, unlike a survey of traditional painting or sculpture, which has scores of examples from which to choose, a survey of video installations inevitably has a smaller body of work on which to draw. Here, nearly half the curator’s apparent first choices are absent--two for reasons of space, one because it was recently shown in the area and another because it’s not completed, according to a museum spokeswoman.

Worse, the show is laid out at cross purposes with itself. Audio is a critical component of most of Hill’s work, but the gallery space allotted to the survey at MOCA is insufficient to meet the most basic demands of the art.

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The tapes and installations, packed in cheek by jowl, create a collective cacophony that makes it nearly impossible to experience any one of them as a discrete entity. Sound from the work next door--or even echoing down the hall--distractingly intrudes. (Pay extra close attention, for example, or you’ll miss the quietly crucial audio element of “Searchlight.”) MOCA’s planning for the show has served the art poorly.

Given the recent presentation of Hill’s work at the Long Beach Museum of Art, as well as a current show at the Lannan Foundation featuring two installations by the artist (including the haunting “Tall Ships,” which was a highlight of the 1992 Documenta exhibition in Germany), the MOCA survey could have been the anchor for an unusually thorough overview locally of a significant artist’s developing achievement. It’s not impossible to get a handle on Hill’s work at the MOCA show, but it’s an awful lot harder than it should be.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through March 12. Closed Mondays.