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Susan
Hiller
from: Tate Women Artists
Alicia Foster, Tate Publishing, London 2003
Susan
Hiller has lived and worked in London since the early 1970's, when
she first became known for an innovative artistic practice including
group participation works such as Dream Mapping (1974);
the museological/archival installations Fragments (1978),
Enquiries/Inquiries (1973 & 1975) and Dedicated to the
Unknown Artists (1972/6); and works using automatic writing,
e.s.p, photomat machines, wallpaper, postcards and other denigrated
aspects of popular culture.
Hiller
cites Minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism and her previous
study of anthropology as major influences on her work. Her stature
has been recognised by mid-career retrospectives at London's Institute
of Contemporary Art (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996) as well as
by numerous solo exhibitions and monographs, and by inclusion in
major international group exhibitions. Hiller's work is widely acknowledged
to be an important influence on younger British artists.
Four
major works by Susan Hiller are currently in Tate's collection.
They are all large-scale installations using a variety of media.
The earliest, Monument (1980/81), consists of 41 colour photographs
of commemorative plaques honouring Londoners who died while trying
to rescue others; the photographs are arranged in a diamond-shaped
cross pattern behind a park bench with headphones. Viewers may sit
on the bench and don the headphones to hear the artist's fragmented
meditation on death, heroism, immortality , gender and representation.
In this way, viewers become participants in the work, completing
the Monument tableau as seen by other viewers.
The
artist's voice speaking in your ear creates an intimacy which contrasts
strongly with the photographs' romanticised, public representation
of heroism and death. Hiller's use of sound in this work was a new
development, and she has emphasized that the physicality of her
voice extends the meaning of the words spoken. On the soundtrack
the artist suggests that there is an unacknowledged uncanny aspect
of sound recording, which allows the dead to speak to us. The photographic
representations also attempt to guarantee a kind of immortality.
As Hiller says on the soundtrack, "You can think of life after
death as a second life which you enter into as a portrait or inscription,
and in which you remain longer than you do in your actual living
life."
Belshazzar's
Feast/The Writing on your Wall (1983/4) was the first video
installation to be acquired by Tate, and its initial exhibition
created an unusual informality in the Duveen Galleries, with audiences
seated on the floor. The video programme which is the core of this
work was broadcast all over Britain by Channel 4 in 1986, and the
installation itself simulates a live transmission seen on a television
set in a cozy living room.
Hiller's
Belshazzar's Feast is an investigation of the phenomenon
of reverie sometimes produced by television viewing. Her video programme
creates effects that enable viewers to enter a zone of liminality,
and in this sense the work is a demonstration of the power of imagination
which we all have. Like the prophet Daniel, who could interpret
but not read the mysterious writing on Belshazzar's wall, viewers
glean hints of revelation from the segmented soundtrack. The artist
whispers newspaper reports of alien beings seen on television screens
after closedown, while interspersed with this she sings in an improvisational
style, and a child describes from memory the Bible story of Belshazzar's
feast as depicted in Rembrandt's painting in the National Gallery.
The visuals are a seductive stream of manipulated images of fire,
referring to Marshall McLuhan's suggestion that the television set
has replaced the hearth as the focus of the home. The shifting colours
and moving shapes of Hiller's imagery create an almost-hypnotic
effect, stimulating viewers to experience their own ability to generate
images which are projected onto the electronic flames.
Death,
time and memory are inherent themes in a large video installation
called An Entertainment which Susan Hiller completed in 1990/91.
This work consists of four cross-edited video projections encompassing
four walls of a square room to create a child's miniature Punch
and Judy theatre turned inside-out and enlarged to grotesque size.
Viewers are placed at the very centre of the violent action, tiny
in scale compared with the enormous puppet images looming over them.
Vivid comic-book colours and screeching sounds create a nightmarish
environment.
When
this work was first shown, video projection was a new tool for artists
and Hiller invented ways to achieve frame-perfect synchronization
across four walls, creating a truly immersive environment of sound
and image. The artist began work on An Entertainment several
years before its completion, filming segments of live action from
numerous Punch and Judy shows across the country. By manipulating
and comparing variations in this play for children, An Entertainment
uncovers its ancient mythic and ritualistic themes as well as the
brutality of its slapstick comedy.
In
1994 Susan Hiller installed a work at the Freud Museum in London,
in a vitrine located in the room which had been Sigmund Freud's
bedroom during the last year of his life. Initially the work consisted
of 23 units, each taking shape within a brown cardboard box similar
to the collecting boxes used by archaeologists. Over the next few
years the work was extended until it consisted of 50 boxes, each
individually titled and labeled, always displayed in a large vitrine,
and titled From the Freud Museum (1992/6).
Inspired
equally by Freud's own collection of antiquities and the history
of psychoanalysis, Hiller's installation is a personalized act of
re-collecting, incorporating elusive traces of memory, allusions
to her earlier works and personal associations in a free flow of
implicit narratives which viewers can write or rewrite in their
own terms. Her serious but unsettling technique of juxtaposing knowledge
derived from anthropology, psychoanalysis and other scientific disciplines
with materials usually considered to be of no great weight, has
a long history in her practice. In From the Freud Museum, Hiller
handles the scientific, museological display format in a very particular
way. She does not claim objectivity, which she considers 'a fantasy
our culture is heavily invested in' [ftnt page 210, Thinking about
Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller] but instead, the mundane is
rendered special. She presents things which are around us but which
we often overlook because they do not rate highly enough in the
value system of our culture. In From the Freud Museum she
does not materially alter the objects but creatively and skilfully
contextualizes them.
The
common denominator in all Susan Hiller's works is their starting
point in a cultural artefact from our own society. Her work is an
excavation of the overlooked, ignored, or rejected aspects of our
shared cultural production, and her varied projects collectively
have been described as "investigations into the 'unconscious'
of our culture."
From:
WHACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Exhibition catalogue, forthcoming 2007
Susan
Hiller b. 1940, Tallahassee, Florida
Lives and works in London and Berlin
The
work of Susan Hiller has long been recognized for its excavation
of everyday phenomena that lie within the recesses, byways and
blind spots of our cultural surround. In a distinguished career
of more than 30 years, Hiller has drawn upon sources as diverse
as dreams (Dream Mapping 1974), postcards (Dedicated to the Unknown
Artists, 1972-76), Punch & Judy shows (An Entertainment, 1990),
archives (From the Freud Museum 1991-7), horror movies (Wild Talents,
1997), UFO sightings (Witness 2000), and narratives of 'near death'
experience (Clinic 2004). Hiller makes powerful and seductive
works out of ephemeral, sometimes seemingly unimportant items,
works which do not merely enumerate or catalogue but instead involve
the audience as witness to the lacunae and contradictions in our
collective cultural life. Using sound, video, text, photography
or drawing - whatever her basic materials demand - her works open
up an area of instability where fixed meanings are dissolved and
where the audience is directly implicated in the emergence of
new meanings which become visible only through the work and our
experience of the work.
Susan
Hiller graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts,
in 1961. She went on to post-graduate study at Tulane University
in New Orleans, with a National Science Foundation fellowship
in anthropology. After completing fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala
and Belize, she became critical of academic anthropology's adherence
to scientific claims of objectivity, and dissatisfied with the
distance she perceived it fostered between the observed and the
lived in culture. During the latter half of the 1960s, Hiller
traveled extensively throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia,
finally settling in 1969 in London, where she began to develop
an art practice in an effort, as the artist later recalled, to
"find a way to be inside all my activities." 1
Hiller's
participatory ''group investigation" works of the early 1970s
such as Dream Mapping and Street Ceremonies originated in her
conviction that "art can function as a critique of existing culture
and as a locus where futures not otherwise possible can begin
to shape themselves" 2 Sisters of Menon, one of two iconic Hiller
works in this exhibition, began in 1972 "as a kind of aimless
scribble [that] turned into a text, or anyway a stream of words
in handwriting that wasnÕt my own." 3 This spontaneous experience
of automatic writing was a landmark in her extension of identity
from individual to collective. The voice of the "Sisters
of Menon," who refer to themselves variously as "I"
or "we," surfaces in the text, claiming authorship:
"We are the sisters of Menon/everyone is the sister/I am
the sister/love oh the sisters.... I live in the water/I live
in the air-we are your sisters...." 4 Hiller has described
this work as a meditation on the multiplicity of individual consciousness
and the self: "Identity is a collaboration". 5
Hiller
initially regarded Sisters of Menon as a set of drawings and did
not exhibit them as a work until 1979, when she began to analyze
and annotate them. Borrowing strategies from Minimalism to apply
a "rational" framework to these products of the unconscious,
the artist mounted the work in four L-shaped frames which, when
installed on the wall together with four individually framed pages
of her own commentary, make a cruciform. In addition, she published
Sisters of Menon as an artist's book. In her structural approach
to the work's display, Hiller insists on blurring the boundaries
between cultural definitions of "rational" and "irrational,"
at the same time reinstating the validity of the unconscious as
a source of knowledge or truth. As Lucy Lippard wrote of Sisters
of Menon, "her automatic writing, in which the unfamiliar rises
to the surface of consciousness, is a metaphor for the unarticulated
or unintelligible speech of women." 6
From the mid 1970s onwards , Hiller continued
to engage with Minimalism, using "a non-hierarchical orderly
way of arranging things" rather than focusing on "aesthetics
or aestheticising." 7 For 10 Months (1977Š79), she took photographs
of her pregnant body and kept a journal documenting the subjective
aspects of pregnancy.. The final work comprises ten gridded blocks
of twenty-eight black-and-white photographs, each block corresponding
to a lunar month. The images are accompanied by excerpts from
her journal entries for the same period. These components are
installed on the wall in a stepped pattern that descends from
left to right, As Lisa Tickner observed, "The sentimentality
associated with images of pregnancy is set tartly on edge by the
scrutiny of the woman/artist who is acted upon, but who also acts:
who enjoys a precarious status as both the subject and the object
of her work.... The echoes of landscape, the allusions to ripeness
and fulfillment, are refused by the anxieties of the text, and
by the methodical process of representation." 8 The work
proved controversial when first exhibited in London." 9
In analyzing these works, Alexandra Kokoli
notes:: "Originating in a distinctly feminist engagement with
visual culture, HillerÕs work unearths the repressed permeability...
of... unstable yet prized constructs, such as rationality and
consciousness, aesthetic value and artistic canons. Hiller refers
to this precarious positioning of her oeuvre as 'paraconceptual,'
just sideways of conceptualism and neighbouring the paranormal,
a devalued site of culture where women and the feminine have been
conversely privileged. Most interestingly, in the hybrid field
of 'paraconceptualism,' neither conceptualism nor the paranormal
are left intact:...as ...the prefix 'para' -symbolizes the force
of contamination through a proximity so great that it threatens
the soundness of all boundaries." 11
Endnotes
1 Lucy Lippard, Preface to Thinking about Art :Conversations with
Susan Hiller ed. Barbara Einzig, Manchester University Press,
Manchester, England; 1996, p.ii.
2 Susan Hiller interview with Lisa Liebman and Tony Whitfield,
Fuse ,November/December 1981, Toronto, unpaginated
3 quoted by Guy Brett in The Sunday Times Magazine, 11 March,
1984
4 Sisters of Menon, 1972-79. Note: the work as shown in this exhibition
is an exact replica of the original, which is too fragile to display.
5 Ibid.
6 Lippard, op.cit, p.xiv
7 Roszika Parker, unabridged version of interview "Dedicated to
the Unkinown Artist", Spare Rib Abthology, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1982
8 Lisa Tickner, Block, Middlesex Polytechnic, London, issue 3,
1981, centerfold.
9 Susan Hiller, informal talk for the Women's Art Movement's "Quantum
Leap" event in Adelaide, Australia, published in Artlink, Adelaide,
September/October 1982, unpaginated.
10 Susan Hiller, 'Women, Language and Truth' (1977), in Thinking
About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller rop.cit., 43-44.
11 Alexandra M. Kokali,, "Susan Hiller's Paraconceptualism," in
Technologies of Intuition, ed. Jennifer Fisher, Display Cult/XYZ
Books, Banff, Canada, forthcoming
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