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July
17,2001
PALETTEN
Mary
Horlock talks with Susan Hiller
MH:
You mentioned that the experimental recordings of the Latvian scientist,
Konstantin Raudive were a starting point for using sound in your
work. Raudive believed he could capture the voices of the dead on
tape. The idea of reclaiming something that has been lost or overlooked
is a fundamental concern in your own work, is this what brought
you to Raudive?
SH:
I first heard about Raudive’s work in the 60’s before
my practice was very well developed . The poetic idea of amplifying
silence and finding it isn’t silent at all but full of sound,
was fascinating. The realization that 'nothing' was in fact 'something'
seemed to support ideas I was forming about how to pay attention
to what was out of sight or beneath or beyond recognition within
our culture, and as an artist to try to picture it for myself and
others….. My interest in making the negative positive was encouraged
tremendously … Also, .Raudive’s approach resonated with
an anecdote from my time as an anthropology postgraduate, about
the linguist Benjamin Whorf who was at one time an insurance investigator.
He told a story about investigating a fire started when someone
tossed a match into an ‘empty’ petrol container….
Of course it was empty of petrol, but full of gas and fumes, and
ignited spectacularly…. This led Whorf to investigating languages
whose catagories of designation are completely different from ours,
leading to entirely different conclusions about the nature of reality…He
concluded that people speaking very different languages literally
live in in very different worlds,, for example, that for the Hopi
a new sun rises every day, that Navaho-speaking people catagorise
colours by intensity rather than hue, and so on. This seemed to
me to support my personal doubts that our culture’s official
view of reality was necessarily the ultimate truth of the matter.
What Raudive was doing seemed to be taking this approach even further.
I was also very attracted to the idea of using or misusing a scientific
methodolgy in pursuit of what science would consider too mad or
abject to bother with… Raudive’s approach seemed incongruous
but in an important way…
It wasn’t until the mid-70’s that I actually heard some
of the amazing tape recordings Raudive made. Like many
other things that our culture relegates to fantasy or delusion,
hearing the voices within the soundscape of noise
produced by amplifying tapes made in supposedly empty,
supposedly silent rooms is somewhat a matter of having
a wish or desire to hear something, and then trying to
make sense of it… Personally I heard the voices clearly but
was never able to make the jump to supporting the hypothesis
that they were the voices of dead people, who were
said to have their own broadcasting station, although I’ve
kept an open mind on that…. But there certainly are voices
on these tapes, speaking what seem to be words in a weird
mix of languages . They are compelling, eerie, and if
perhaps their only existence is as electronic artefacts or
artefacts of the process of recording and amplification… it
really doesn’t matter.
The
first of your works I experienced was the installation Monument
1980, where viewers are invited to sit on a bench, in
front of photographs of memorial plaques, and listen to a
soundtrack of your voice. You call yourself 'an audible raudive
voice..', a voice from the past, played back in the present,
our present. Is the temporality of the spoken word the
key to its appeal?
In
Monument 1980-81, and again in Belshazzar's Feast 1983-4,
we are very aware that it is your voice, the artist's
voice, and a female voice, speaking to us, telling us
stories. How important was this?
On
one level, Monument is a memento mori, like all of Raudive’s
work. In order to hear the soundtrack, you need to
participate in the work by listening privately in public.
I wanted people to be seen by others against a background
of cultural inscriptions representing death-- the
photos you mention. My own voice improvising against a background
of historical material seemed to emphasize, at that
time at least, a kind of gendered exclusion from heroic,
public forms of representation and simultaneously, to
question their relevance. Private and public come together
in Monument in a fairly complex way, The
work emphasizes temporality on all levels, playing around
with different kinds of ‘pasts’–the historical past,
the
past when the work was made and my voice recorded, the past
of just a second ago when you were listening to an earlier
bit of the tape…. And so on. The unacknowledged uncanny
aspect of sound recording, whereby the dead speak to
us, dead musicians play to us, was very important and that’s
why the soundtrack references Raudive in its opening statement.
The
intimacy of my voice speaking in your ear was a direct
physical approach to viewers, a kind of seduction. At
the time of Monument, this was really an unusual way for
an
artist to work, but I had been thinking a lot about the so-called
tyranny of the visual and was looking for a more physical
way to approach my work.If you sit on the park bench
to listen to the Monument tape, in fact you can’t really
see the visual part of the work very well or at all, and
that was deliberate. Touching someone’s ears with your voice
is actually a very intimate contact. In this sense, voice
is physical, voice is body. Body is evoked and transmitted
by voice, and not represented–-this was one of the
radical, political underpinnings of Monument which was positioned
‘against’ representation as some kind of fake immortality…
The
way you use language is extremely evocative. In the Monument
soundtrack you create a kind of aural collage, offering
meditations on representation, memory, gender, heroism.
You call this 'automatic talking'; it flows freely without
making claims to 'explain' the piece. In the soundtrack
to other works such as the video Belshazzar's Feast
you use vocal improvisations, which cannot be translated
into any recognizable language. Is the emphasis not
so much what is actually being spoken, but how?
Again,
I would emphasize the idea of voice as body, the
physicality of it and the intimacy. I would also mention
again that yes, gender was important in my decision to
speak. What I was trying to do was to speak ‘in the negative’
about things that were not already in language. I tried
a few different ways of doing this, In Elan, Magic
Lantern
and Belshazzar’s Feast I combined different modes
of
using my voice, speaking or whispering texts, chanting, etc.
and in the two earlier works, combining this with excerpts
from Raudive’s tapes. My texts were never expository,
they were exploratory and non-linear and they allowed
for internal contradictions. I felt this would open up
new spaces for thinking new thoughts.
It
is hard to separate the aural from the visual in your works,
as they work so closely together. In a piece such as
Magic Lantern 1987 we see circles of light appear and fade
and leave after-images, as the soundtrack shifts from
your singing to samples from the Raudive recordings. We
could link the visual after-image to echoes, to the memory
of sound. Here, there is a strong connection between the
formal and visual elements and the narrative Do the two develop
simultaneously?
All
the elements in a work need to cook together like ingredients
in a recipe, to make something completely different.
In this sense I’m a traditionalist, I’m not at all
impressed by works that don’t offer this unexpected something
else. In making Magic Lantern, I realised that Raudive’s
voices within silence were somewhat analagous with
retinal after-images --which are subjectively perceived,
but indisputably ‘real’. Magic Lantern can’t
be documented
very well, not only because documentation in the
form of photographs can’t give any idea of the soundtrack,
but because at least half of the visual impact of
the work comes from after-images produced by the slide projections,
which can’t be photographed… The piece works with
the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible,
coherent language and supposedly-incoherent utterances
Do
you ever feel sound goes further than image? In Dream Screens
1996, for example, your piece for the Web, we click through
colour screens whilst hearing recollected fragments of
dreams, interspersed with heart beats, pulsar signals, Morse
code. Sound multiplies and diversifies, perhaps in a way
the image doesn't?
I do
feel sound has a more direct effect than images, because
of its physicality. There’s something archaic, regressive
about sound. We hear in the womb before we see, later
we hear a burble of sound before we perceive separate objects…
In Dream Screens, my idea was that the empty or blank
colour fields could be sites of quiet contemplation in
the midst of the proliferation of competing images on the
web. I imagined that people would find their favourite colour
and stay there, dreamily, while listening to the sound.
But what seems to happen is that they click quickly through
lots of colours as if searching for an image, in most
instances. I wanted the soundtrack to spark off subjectively-generated
imagery that people would project onto
the blank screens-–this seems to have worked in earlier
pieces like Elan, where people often sit when it’s exhibited
to look at the ‘empty’ central space while listening
to the soundtrack , but I’m not certain if this works
as well on the web.
In
An Entertainment 1990, you use moving image and sound, in
the form of footage taken from numerous recordings of Punch
and Judy puppet shows. In An Entertainment we are dwarfed
by vast projections of Punch, and the amplified pulsions
of sound–an accordion, clapping, Punch’s screeching–make
it very sinister. Linking An Entertainment to
later video installations like Psi Girls 1999, where
the soundtrack
again has a strong physicality, did you see this as
a real shift from earlier work?
As
soon as I begin to use sound in certain works, from Monument
onwards, I was aware of the physicality it brought with
it. Rhythms, repetitions, what you call puslations have
been very important, and carry their own strong subtexts. I
still make quite a lot of work that doesn’t use sound
at all, so in that sense there’s no break with anything
I did earlier..I think my use of sound has become more
confident the more I’ve worked with it. You need to realise
I don’t make a lot of large works, so development may
seem quite spread out in time.
Witness,
like Psi Girls, focuses on the paranormal. Here, you
had only sound to work with (recorded sightings of UFO’s,
no image documentation) and yet you made it an incredible
spectacle; we have this vast collection of personal
testimonies from all over the world, being spoken simultaneously
through tiny speakers in semi darkness. How did
you come to this presentation?
For
quite a long time I’ve been looking at our culture’s
representation of the uncanny apsects of the socalled paranormal
or supernatural. This focus goes back to some
of my earliest works of the 70’s.It’s what I mentioned
earlier,
a position that questions our official version of reality,
while not replacing it with any other orthodoxy. Formally,
I’ve always taken a cultural artefact as a starting
point and built up a work from that, keeping its original
nature as a sign. In Witness I began with people’s personal
testimonies about these sightings and experiences as
they appeared on the internet --which I gradually came to
realize was functioning as an international confessional.
The idea of embarrassing secrets brought out to
share in public is what a lot of my work seems to be about,
and Witness deals in private experiences of what once
would have been considered mystical or religious visions
of angels or whatever… I tended to be interested not
in the famous examples, but in people who began their stories
by saying something like, "Well, I’m embarrassed to
say this happened to me but I feel I need to tell people about
it….". I’m not questioning the truth or falsity of
the
stories, they are simply social facts which exist. To
place viewers in the position of listening to so many
stories was to invite their cooperation. I wanted to make
an ambience that was intimate and somewhat mysterious, to
make a setting where emphathetic visualizing might occur as
the stories were heard. In fact, when I found what seemed
to me to be the perfect tiny speakers to use, the whole
formal shape of the piece very quickly fell into place,
because it replicates the cross-in-a-circle design of
the speakers on a much larger scale. This shape itself refers
obviously to classic UFO design, and beyond that, to what
is a widespread mystical diagram. The
idea of so many voices all speaking at once is something
like the sense I have of the vast sea of stories we
live within, and the option to listen to individual stories
is a choice left up to viewers as they wander through
this structure.
In
Witness, as in Monument, we are given ‘listening
devices’.
In Monument we activate the piece by donning headphones
and in Witness we pick up one of any number of earpieces.
By so doing we agree to participate: did you want
to make your audience more conscious of their role as ‘listener’.
I want
the viewer to become complicit, to take on the role
of detective, analyst, collaborator, activator or whatever.
The main thing that interests me in my large public
works is to become, when something is ‘finished’, a participant
myself. So I make the works for myself as an other,
if you understand my meaning… The idea is to find out
something new through a focussed experience that only the
work can provide. If I knew ahead of time what it might mean,
how it would affect my feelings and thoughts and the feelings
and thoughts of other people, I suppose I wouldn’t bother.
What I think art provides is something like an instigation
or an enhanced awareness of how we are all collaboratively
and creatively implicated in making a culture….
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