Originally part of an eight-monitor installation, this tape produces complex interaction between spoken language and pictures, playing on their confrontation and ambiguity.

The spoken text is a montage of clichés, idiomatic expressions and puns played over two pictures, incrusted side-by-side, on the same screen. Stereophonic voice play responds to the system of two pictures, switching to the left and then to the right. The "Duo" thus becomes an essential component and simplicity has already been disunited. Two meanings should be read into the title – one literal and the other ironical. In point of fact, the language used is vital, full of basic American expressions and set phrases. However, at the same time, as it continues, the spoken word becomes contradictory, twists around itself, returning to the same words which appear different every time as the pictures change. The meaning of the words is, therefore, an ephemeral, unforeseeable event, linked to the chance play of visual association. The pictures must, however, be given their own being as they are not only present to illustrate the dual text. Gary Hill uses electronic manipulation of colour pattern and a sort of encyclopaedic recording of objects. His desire is to classify things, put them into series, maintain control over matter and relationships.

The syntax of the text of Primarily Speaking is discontinuous: some sentences begin but do not end, others do not have a subject. The expressions are juxtaposed whereas they do not follow on, do not answer one another and, nevertheless, they sometimes repeat the same idea, develop or modify it. It is, in fact, these very breaks in the text, the cracks, which open up the folds of the language, just as if we were witnessing processes of the disintegration of reality into a visual vocabulary. So nothing is fixed. Everything is conceived in relation to something else: the relationship between two images with a variable back drop, relationships with sound and between two sides. Symmetrical, asymmetrical, there is a constant imbalance between right and left. It is a cracked and dissolute ego that Gary Hill is representing. His text intermingles "I" with "you" and "it". The deconstruction work brought to the fore in Primarily Speaking opens up perception and the intellect to the element that cannot be controlled, the element of chance.

Paul-Emmanuel Odin