Gary Hill at Gladstone Gallery

by Art Fag City on February 6, 2007 Reviews

Gary Hill, Frustrum, Installation view
Image copyright Gladstone Gallery

I had planned on reviewing Gary Hill’s exhibition at Gladstone for The Reeler this week, only to discover that the amount of the thought required to damn the show would be more than it deserved. I won’t bore you here either (especially since its already been covered elsewhere), except to say that it consists of two works; Frustrum, a poorly animated eagle that flaps its arms in front snapping a few electrical wires in its path and a giant pool of oil, and Guilt, a piece whereby Hill mounts coins with his own portrait undergoing scenes of torture on rotating pedastols around the gallery and presents a number of telescopes to view them with. Decoding this mysterious work of art was difficult, but I eventually managed to come up with the following: US occupation in the Middle East bad. Torture bad.

More annoying than the show itself was the act of experiencing it, as someone actually took Guilt seriously enough to inform me that I was obstructing his telescopic view of a coin. In doing so, he could have easily marched up to the work itself and inspected it, but I suppose nothing beats the experience of looking at rotating currency through a real life Gary Hill lens. My friend kindly informed him that we were part of the interactivity of the piece, so if he was asking us to move we weren’t going to. Normally I’d feel like too much of an asshole not to say something to cushion that response, but in this case I just couldn’t muster the effort. The show inspires utter apathy.

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