Letters: Watching a Book, Reading Video

George Quasha, co-author of An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings, responds to Collette Copeland’s feature “Rooted in the Experiential: A Conversation with Gary Hill” from Afterimage 37.3. Collette Copeland’s response to Quasha follows.

Dear Colette Copeland,

Thank you for the careful and positive review of our book An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Wrtitings (in Afterimage 37.3 (November/December 2009)]. . . . I haven’t read the interview, since I let my subscription to Afterimage lapse a while back, and this will motivate me to renew. I’m sure it’s a good interview, and I look forward to it.

I hope you don’t mind my briefly addressing your reservations, which of course are small points in the overall. But the issue you raise—about the difficulty of discussing time-based work in a reader-friendly way—is important to me, and one which I thought we had dealt with rather well in the book, in fact innovatively. Your point about wishing there were more visuals is, of course, a matter of taste and, as you say, you like visual books. The fact is that there are 980 visual illustrations in the book, which is one reason why it got so darn long and is, as you point out, a five-pounder. They allowed us many more than we expected, but then the text is longer than they expected (or we for that matter). Anyway, obviously more is better from the point of view of visualizing the work, but no amount of stills will really do the trick. My only wish is that you had mentioned the fact of the large number of visuals—980 is not exactly typical—because readers will think the book rather text-heavy, which perhaps it is, but it really is image-heavy too. It’s just heavy.

For some reason you and some other readers were apparently not impressed by the part we thought was innovative and which I feel does address the problem of a book about time-based work, namely, that I insisted that, if I was going to spend months writing about the single-channel work (and this is the first real study of this whole foundational aspect of Gary’s work), all of the work discussed would have to be available online. Perhaps we understated this fact in the book, because not everyone credits it—that on p. 13, for instance, we say that the works discussed can be viewed along with reading the text at www.garyhill.com. I think we’re in a new phase in the historically troubled issue of discussing time-based work, its notorious unavailability (that is, without heroic efforts to see it). No more! Everything can be viewed now in an (admittedly lower resolution) instantly available version, if artists are willing to upload it. This could go a long way toward filling in the big blanks in education among media-minded young artists (I’m often surprised at how ignorant of work like Gary’s many young video artists are—and I think this has in part resulted from the difficulty of access).

A couple of other small points, in case you’re interested in my response. I was surprised that you felt a reader would be disadvantaged by not having read Blanchot or Heidegger. They’re only mentioned in the places where they are specifically relevant to the content of Gary’s works, and there’s no way around such mention; I would have thought that enough information about them was on the page to make that not an obstacle, especially since one of the points was that Gary’s own non-specialist use of them was hardly as an advocate or by way of reference. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

My other point is more of a longing: namely, that someone would take note of the fact that we offer a rather innovative notion about Gary’s work (and by implication, of certain other artists): that, while he obviously has a strong conceptual side, he’s really what we call a principle-based artist, a distinction that I tried to spell out most clearly in the Prologue. This is in keeping with our view that Gary is most profoundly a language artist in a very complex sense of what language is. Of course some will view this as a prejudice on the part of a poet/artist—and I acknowledge that possibility—but Gary does agree with it.

Anyway this isn’t meant as criticism but as point of discussion of issues which I see that you take very seriously. I’m really grateful for your review.

With thanks and best wishes,
George Quasha

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Hi George,

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to the review I wrote about An Art of Limina. I’m sorry that you didn’t get an opportunity to read the conversation/interview with Gary, as well as the exhibition review. The book review was the third part of the feature on Gary’s work.

I confess to struggling with the book review. It was the last of the three articles that I wrote over a six-month period. The struggle was partly due to the fact that I quoted your essays extensively in the questions that I posed to Gary in our interview. Thus, I had to avoid redundancy in the book review. You will find that some of your ideas about Gary’s work constitute the framework of my questioning.

I’m glad you told me about viewing his works online. I did not realize that this viewing option was available. This is an important facet that readers should know about.

In my writing, I always try to frame an opposing argument, which I think strengthens the overall position of the essay. I thought the book was impressive. My criticisms were small in comparison to the overall importance of the book.

Best,
Colette Copeland