Quotes:

‘The installations of David Hall…along with many of his videotapes, have concentrated upon the physical reality of TV as a site of exchange, a creator of illusion, a channel of information, or what Baudrillard terms “a screen of ecstatic refraction.” In several of his [later] installations Hall has presented the. viewer only with the back of the television sets. In these works we are simultaneously denied the pleasure of looking at a TV screen, given another view of television, literally the view we never choose to look at, and reminded of the fact that television conceals as much as, or more than, it reveals…’ – Jeremy Welsh, Video Positive Catalogue, Tate Gallery Liverpool, Moviola, 1991.

‘It is mysterious rather than spectacular; an ominous, authoritarian presence… challenged only by the single picture of the moon panning silently across the sky at the centre of its shadow. Nature emerges from the eclipse of technology to deny its physicality. The “aura”…is here given physical manifestation through a construction of democratic mass media [and it] has another meaning as a psychic identity…By placing the moon, ruler of the irrational and the psychic, in the central position around which the technological aura revolves, not only the authority of broadcast television but also the perception of the physical nature of the sculpture itself is called into question…’ – Chrissie Isles, Signs and Interpretations, Signs of the Times cat., Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990.

‘If meaningless is the quality of TV, not of [this] work, then the work’s reproduction of meaninglessness is itself an act of signification, on e with a genuine referent in the shape of the broadcasts which it replays. Meanwhile, if the monitors don’t provide us with meanings, we will provide them ourselves: the aurora of light. as smoke, as solar eclipse, as the specific palette of the electronic painter; the monitors as the black pillar of Kubrick’s 2001, as a prison in which we keep our images, as the night sky against which the moon shines…’ – Sean Cubitt, Videography: Video Media in Art and Culture, Macmillan, 1993.

David HALL’s legacy as one of the founders of video art in the UK will be recognised in this upcoming exhibition featuring his pioneering work in sculpture, film and video – Richard Saltoun Gallery