Why do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) stages a conversation between two characters: Cathy and her father. The young girl and the scene are a reference to Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland. Their discussion is about entropy , the growing and irreversible disorder involved in passing from one stage to another. The dialogue comes from a text, taken from Gregory Bateson's theoretical work Steps to an Ecology of Mind , where the concept of a metalogue is developed. The artist gives a definition of this in the opening sequence: "When a conversation about problems between people mirrors the problems themselves a metalogue is happening." 

Gary Hill creates an interplay of reflections between the discussion, its subject and the image, using many entropy and non-entropy processes made possible by the video medium. The most important is reversibility. With the exception of a few sequences, the whole tape was recorded in the opposite direction of playing. The dialogue was spoken backwards so that it would be heard in the right order. The actors had to learn to speak most of their text in this unusual way. The only sequences spoken and recorded in the conventional way are those where the subject and the key words are defined, in particular "muddle" and "tidy". The switch of direction is reserved for the confrontation between the two protagonists and their respective logic, producing a growing entropy or disorder in the conversation. The actors' movements and gestures were acted in the normal direction of time and space, so they are seen in the opposite direction of the universal logic of time, of weight and the traces, which determine our perceptions and thoughts. For example, before Cathy replaces the objects on the table, the spectator can see their imprint in the dust. But when the actress puts down the telescope tripod, an action that wasn't suggested by any traces, the spectator is surprised. Repetition of the unexpected increases the destabilisation of usual landmarks and installs incertitude into the possible developments of events in the story.

Entropy and negative entropy are also found in language manipulations. The second part of the title is transformed by another process of changing direction and order: the anagram Come on Petunia becomes Once upon a time.

In the same way, the backward and forwards action of the tape plays with words so that "flesh" becomes shelf". This last process was used systematically in Ura / Aru (The Backside Exists) in 1985-1986: in this tape, every word pronounced and written on the screen is immediately heard and seen backwards. This game of real reversibility, of both movement and sound, suggests that an order carries a meaning, but may hide others. The changes of shooting angle and scale oblige us to slide from one logic to another. The camera swoops in and out, the actor's face turns round in the screen like watch-hands around a dial, and a close-up travelling shot of an array of personal objects is followed by an outward zoom which encapsulates all the small objects, and changes the poetic, dreamy atmosphere into an objective reality. 

The production puts Bateson's metalogue into the universe of Alice in Wonderland. Cathy's costume draws on the iconography of Alice, conceived by the first illustrator of the story , John Tenniel. The relationship between the adult world and a child's learning process contextualises this metalogue. It is symbolised by the chess game just as in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to the adventures of Alice in Wonderland. To bring an end to the bogged down discussion, the father moves the action onto the chessboard, a metaphor for the discussion. Shortly before the end of the tape, he ends the game with his daughter by knocking over a Rook and at the same time ordering the little girl to go to bed. Cathy's response is to mock parental authority by prolonging the game and transforming the rules: she rooks using the Queen and the Rook, while, conventionally, this manipulation of pieces is made with the King and the Rook. This transgression by the new Alice makes a creative and entropic disorder.

Entropy and its dialectic opposite have been explored in Anglo-American culture, in literature and plastic art. This approach to creation recalls principally the Land Art of Robert Smithson, whose writing makes references to Edgar Poe and the Beat Generation authors, as well as to science-fiction. His work uses these critical processes of a single-voiced reality, in a large number of forms: in his texts and in the exhibition and creating conditions for his sculptures (earthworks and non-sites). He imagined projecting the film Spiral Jetty (1970) in reverse, as a manner of going back in time, a kind of return to the supposed origin, as a way of deconstructing a given reality.

Using the technical process of rolling and unrolling the tape, and using video recording as a memory, Gary Hill crafts time like a substance, jerking forwards then backward. He integrates the temporal quests of science fiction, literature, story telling and religions. Further, through the many entropy and negative entropy processes he has used, Gary Hill expands the metalogue.

Thérèse Beyler

1 Gregory Bateson, American ethnologist, anthropologist and biologist.
2 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York, 1972; Vers une écologie de l'esprit, trad. fr., Paris, Le Seuil, 1977.