In the history of visual art the images were often combined with linguistic text, as it is exemplified by the early egyptian mural, medieval religious painting with biblical quotation and the cubist paintings in 20st century. In those works the image and text cooperated complementarily with each other, pursuing the representation of the real. But in the second half of 20st century the poststructuralists proclaimed that the real doesn't exist at all and it is no more than the construction pursued by the signs such as language and image. Facing the crisis of representation the role of image and text in the visual art should have been changed. One of the leading video artist Gary Hill explored in his single channel video works in 1980's the working mechanism of image and text and their interaction, treating them as open signifier, which can be related numerous changeable new meanings. He also concentrates his inquiries on the role and meaning of language within our culture and other human context and destructed the existing mechanism of representation, which based on the solid relationship between signifier and signified. So, in <Why Do Things Get in a Muddle> he questions paradox of the logic, which served to produce the meaning of the world. In <Incidence of Catastrophe> he showed that all the metaphysical basement of our experience are not in itself real but they are just constructed through the semiotic process of image and words. These aspects of his arts are in some degree influenced by intellectual disposition of conceptual art in 1970's years, which revolved around the language instead of images. But his works explored not only the language but also the images as sign. Therefore his approach differ from the conceptual art, which eliminated the retinal aspects from their work. His works also set themselves apart from the ideology critical provocative work in 1980's, which targeted specific political and social issues. As he himself reaffirmed, his work focused on semiotic process and revealed unreliability of the working mechanism of logic, on which all the value system in our world based. In this sense his work in 1980's could be called meta-semiotic work.

Ⅰ. 들어가는 말
 Ⅱ. 열린 기호로서의 이미지와 텍스트, 그 가변적 상호작용
 Ⅲ. 의미와 무의미의 사이에서
 Ⅳ. 재현의 파국: 바깥을 향하여
 V. 맺는말
 참고문헌
 Abstract

• 윤희경(서울대학교 강사) | Yun, Heekyeong