CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA.- The National Gallery of Australia presents "Gary Hill / Bruce Nauman - International New Media Art," on view through March 9, 2003. Gary Hill / Bruce Nauman: International New Media Art presents works by renowned international artists who are exploring the possibilities of new media. In their art they use sound and video images on monitors or projected on the walls of the exhibition space to transmit clear visual ideas, concepts and issues such as identity and anxiety in the context of modern society.

 

Whereas Nauman has a long track record as a sculptor, performance and installation artist who also works with film, video as well as photography, light, and sound, Gary Hill is a full-blooded video artist who has explored the different possibilities of recording performances and has also experimented with all the technical challenges of the medium for example the manipulation of the image and its reference to language and sound. Bruce Nauman belongs to the first generation of artists using video like the Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, and Dan Graham. Gary Hill, instead, belongs to the second generation of video artists together with Tony Oursler and Bill Viola.

 

The challenge to categorize and analyze the work of Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman in the context of the present exhibition is related to the specific media with which each artist works. Nauman uses a broad spectrum of different media and video is one of them. He is working with film and video until 1970 and not any longer until 1985 when he became interested in the medium again mainly because it enabled him to continue his persistence considering art as an investigation of the self. Following Robert Morgan for Nauman, the self is not a container of expressive needs; "it is a complex organic and social mechanism continually being redefined in relation to physical space."

 

In fact there is a stunning continuity in Nauman’s video pieces from his early performance pieces to the multi-channel installations like Clown Torture (1987) and later, both with regard to the stylistic and thematic components and the re-use of the medium video. Nauman’s videotapes and installations comment the behavior of man in contemporary society and are an expression of the inability to deal with its frustration. There is a confrontational or provocational aspect that characterizes Nauman’s work. Some actions of the protagonists (clowns, mimes, actors, the artist, the absent artist in his studio) in the video installations seem to play an absurd and dangerous game of endless duration and are meant to exhaust the possibilities of an idea and making the viewer feeling bored.

 

Both, his early photograph, Self Portrait as Fountain as well as his video installations Raw Material - MMMM and OFFICE EDIT II with color shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) Mapping the Studio may be seen as an ironic statement of the position of the artist whose mission as an advocate of truth and creator of new ideas has become redundant in modern society. Hill’s attitude is less pessimistic and more related to the physical and conceptual participation of the viewer who may perceive the dialogue between image and language on "high sensory cognition." Compared with Nauman Hills works seem to be more fragmented, less centered and to a greater extent labyrinthine. The artist is himself pointing the direction of the perception and actively articulating the sequence of the visit. The succession of images and language is grasped on a conceptual level and the artist’s presence in various works adds a level of intimacy or even consternation.