Only irreducible elements can be seen: bones, the skulls of birds and human beings, bark, stones, leaves of trees, crystals, crumpled sheets of paper, crushed shells… To quote Gary Hill, this universe is like a "cosmology of death". All this debris, all these fragments -mineral, vegetable, animal and human - are placed side-by-side on the same horizontal plane, on the very fringes of the same obscure and indiscernible background, in the darkness which surrounds them, like so many scriptural elements.

We are immersed in an original situation where a piece of bark or a stone takes on the same significance as a letter or a word. From the image- quite misty and indistinct like a piece of film without thickness – fragments emerge by means of constant variation of the focus which moves from one to another and points its finger at one element, then another, with the incisive, irreducible clarity of a flint shard. All the objects are placed on a table – on the pure Horizontal, on the circle of the world, on a tangible, primary foundation.

How, then, is our awareness linked with the outside? Perhaps Gary Hill situates it in speech. In fact, it is speech which provides the uniting factor in Site Recite (A Prologue): a text, related continuously throughout the tape, by the marvellously resonant voice of Lou Hetler. Initially written for the Crux video installation (1983) this text is undoubtedly one of those which have most haunted Gary Hill; he finally took it from Crux and revised it to create Site Recite (A Prologue) in 1989. It is an elusive text. The words open up the space and image and rush into it.The interaction between the meaning of the words and visual penetration is dazzling and interlaces the visible and readable elements.

A Prologue : the title has several meanings. It indicates the world before Logos, Gary Hill's search for the origin of meaning. Site Recite's final image is an enigma, however. It is a shot of the mouth out of which the speech has been emerging since the beginning – an "impossible" point of view. This image disintegrates the myth of interiority before our very eyes. Site Recite (A Prologue) is still a prologue inasmuch as this tape can be considered as one of the stages (among an infinite number of others yet to come) that will enable us to discover Gary Hills future project, the interactive videodisk Which Tree (a focal project in the artist's work which will give full expansion to the metaphor of the brain seen as an electronic circuit).

Paul-Emanuel Odin