Gary Hill
«Crux»

Hill strapped five video cameras to his body so that the actions of each limb and of his head were recorded as he embarked on a solotary journey through semi-wild terrain whose destination seemed at once to be, and to be blocked by, the expanse of water which he entered as the piece ends. This suspended gesture of immersion provides a provocatively ambiguous conclusion, marking as it does the onset of dissolution or decontruction and / or the beginnings of a process of renewal and restituition. In the actual installation, which places five monitors in the form of a cross, this image of the lone individual undergoing some kind of primary / primal experience becomes transformed into that of the martyr / pilgrim. For, ironically, it is this very configuration which dismembers the geroic wanderer, turning him into a decentred, gragmentary subject who is at once present and yet absent.

(source: Lynne Cooke, «Gary Hill: Beyond Babel», in: Gary Hill, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien, 1992–1993, p. 77.)