interviews

Stuart Morgan interviews Susan Hiller

Conversation w. Stuart Morgan at Oriel, Cardiff in 1997

(unpublished)

SM: Let's talk about ritual-- it has always been at the centre of your work. Take Sisters of Menon, for example.

SH: That work came about a long time ago, at the beginning of my art practice and was based on an experience of automatic writing. It happened when I was conducting a group investigation with a number of other people-- this was one kind of work I did in the early 70s. The particular piece that gave birth to Sisters of Menon was a long-distance postal art event, around an hypothesis about ESP and the nonverbal transmission of images and ideas. It was called Draw Together, because at designated times artists from different countries were going to make drawings, and then we were going to see if the drawings had any relationship to each other. It was a piece which playfully worked against ideas of the artist as a solitary genius; the idea was that everyone was a kind of transmitter for a flow of energy and ideas, and only egotists would grab an idea and call it theirs. It always seemed to me that in contemporary art there are a lot of different people who have an idea at the same time in different places. Say performance art,for example ,would appear in different places at the same time without anyone actually being influenced by anyone else-- but in terms of art history or the way the art market works, one person would be seen as the originator and everybody else would be considered to derive from this and not be so significant. So one day when it was my turn to tune in and do one of these drawings I suddenly started to write , and really it was a very spontaneous thing. I had a pencil and a pad of drawing paper, and what had begun as a kind of aimless scribble turned into a text, or anyway a stream of words in handwriting that wasn't my own. It was astonishing and then became quite boring because my hand was just writing and writing. It wasn't like being in an interesting trance; it was just an occurrence that had an everyday-ness.

Later it was possible for me to exhibit these pages, which I did a year or so after they were produced. I thought of them as drawings. I became very interested in the relationship between writing and drawing. Then, a few years later I analysed them and placed them, and developed a way of installing them together with commentaries. Later still,I made a book called Sisters of Menon.

SM: So you dealt with all this by intellectualising it?

SH: No, not exactly. But I certainly didn't want to leave it in the wonderful realm of the occult, although it's an area I've always been ironically in love with. One might think of the Surrealists and their experiments.

SM: Whoever is talking has a brilliant mind; it's like a computer talking, using very few letters but making as many words as can possibly be made. There seems to be no end to it. They are very fond of you and are trying to make you go with them.

SH: For me, the message of the Sisters of Menon is that we are plural. The writing begins with a question which sort of changes the question the Sphinx asked Oedipus to answer. The Sisters begin by asking, "Who is this one?" And then there's the answer, "We are this one". Recent theories of language suggest that the self is not a unified, clearly bounded unit but that consciousness exists and individuals participate in it. I now think this is what the Sisters' text is trying to say. I love the way it permutates very simple words.

SM: It's also very funny.

SH: There are lots of good jokes. For example, a strange little shape appears in the midst of the words, like an oval with a dot in it, and the Sisters go on to make puns about "eye" and "I".

SM: I know you have talked about this such a lot that you would rather not discuss it anymore

SH: I've thought about it in so many different ways. It's a disturbance, a relatively spontaneous one and it made sense that it would appear in the midst of a different work about communication across boundaries. The text ends by saying, "Come to the-- ..." and then there's a sign that looks like a circle with a cross in the centre. Stuart, you told me you thought this represented an island, which is interesting. Well, originally I thought it meant a church, and I looked for one nearby where these Sisters might be. After that I discovered that the cross in a circle was a symbol for the Cathars and Albigensians, who had lived in the area of France I had been working in. Then it seemed it might have some relation to "Memnon" in ancient Egypt. Then it all seemed to be mental clutter, echoes. So my thinking went in stages, none of these interpretations is inconsistent but they just add to the mystery.

SM: You enjoy mysteries.

SH: Yes, but I've also done some projects people think are very rational. What I want to say about this is that after the Sisters I think I stopped making a distinction between rational and irrational. I mean that the way I look at my work and other people's is that it is what it is, and these distinctions that art criticism makes between rational and irrational seem part of a large cultural distortion.

SM: Figures emerge in your book Thinking About Art who are somewhat disregarded now. Maya Deren, for example, is one who comes to mind. I remember what you said about the end of her book, when she gives in to one of the "loa " [the voodoo gods]

SH: After having made wonderful, important, poetic films, she engaged in a kind of academic project in Haiti, studying Haitian dance. Then she realised that to understand dance she would have to understand voodoo , the religious basis of the dance and music. So she spent a long time there, and as the result of her experience wrote a very great book, published under two names, either Divine Horsemen or The Voodoo Gods of Haiti. Unlike an anthropologist who remains outside what is described, while watching voodoo ceremonies she was so drawn by the music and the dance that she was able to be inside, and had the full experience of being entranced or taken over by one of the major gods.

SM: And that is the point at which we leave her at the end of the book...

SH: It's always stayed in my mind as an example of an artist who risked everything. In her introduction to the book, Deren talks about the situation of the artist in the Western world, which she describes as being like the so-called native studied by anthropologists. Because of this affinity, she felt differently about voodoo than anthropologists and other outsiders, she didn't scrutinise or observe, she participated fully.

SM: It would not be bending the definition too much to say that some of your works involve ritual in the same way. The Punch and Judy piece, An Entertainment, for example was so violent that I saw groups of skinheads running away, unable to take such violence.

SH: What I know is that friends have said it made them remember things about their childhood they didn't realise they knew. The piece had some kind of cathartic effect, to do with memory. I'm sure it has the same function for me. I may have a strange way of working--nowadays most younger artists seem to work almost entirely for a public, with the idea that work is designed, it's intended to go out into the world to be seen -- but my practice is more messy, experimental or private and I'm never sure in advance if there is going to be a public outcome or not. With the Punch and Judy work there was always the possibility of making it into a public presentation of some kind, but I had been filming puppet shows for a long time, collecting little bits of film, before I decided what I would do with the material. I'm sure I was seeking a catharsis because I had a deep sense of the horror of it, so that in making the final piece I decided to greatly exaggerate all the violence by repetition and a tremendous shift in scale. But I don't think, in terms of the effect the piece has, that it's the representation of violence alone that's so important. There are certain painterly devices I use, ambiguous details, intensified colour and a certain kind of sound. And not even just sound, but a specific way of using rhythm or pulse to create strong effects, a kind of overwhelming psychic atmosphere of tension and foreboding. Punch is such a powerful character, he makes the audience complicit in evil while turning it into fun.

SM: Talking of good and evil, you have a theory of right and left , but this always confuses me.

SH: That's because it is the right side of the brain that controls the lefthand. So the puppeteer will have Punch on his right hand but that's the left side of the brain. So then all the other characters fall into a left-hand group: the baby, Judy, all the animals, death, the devil. Yes, it does interest me a lot. Punch and Judy shows were originally performed with marionettes, but they came to England as traveling one-man shows. The whole theatre would be carried on one man's back, and he would set it up in each village. So it became a play with simple glove puppets, which of course is defined by this right hand/left hand thing. With glove puppets the element of fighting was intensified because this is a great thing two hands could do. So each scene is a fight, and Punch always wins.

SM: What does the violent aspect of this have to do with the ritual element I feel is in this piece?

SH: I think it's a ritual to allow yourself to enter a dark space with a willing frame of mind to see it through to the end. I wanted to make a total theatre for grown-ups that would powerfully affect us. Children's enormous gift of imagination can take the tiny figures and make them large, but I had to make them big, big, big because our imaginations have been reduced. We have to be in the centre of the action, and to be uncertain where the next images are coming from, to be confused. I wanted a nonlinear structure where information can come from all sides, any side. I wanted the spectators-- and that includes me-- to be in a situation of not knowing what was important, not knowing where to focus, not being able to master the situation by seeing it as a whole. Images can be on four walls, but you can never see all four at once.

SM: In your earlier video Belshazzar's Feast you used the image of a fire. In a non-linear way it tells a modern equivalent of the Bible story of Belshazzar's feast and the mysterious words that appeared on the wall during the banquet. And of the prophet Daniel who was summoned to interpret them and announced that Belshazzar was doomed.

SH: I never start with a blank canvas. In the case of Belshazzar's Feast the starting point was newspaper articles I found in the mid-80's about people who saw apparitions on television after broadcasting was over for the night. (Now we are getting closer to the millennium, these things are being reported more and more until it seems like a pervasive cultural mood.) I made a piece focusing on these peoples' visual experiences and the fact that newspapers dismissed these events by suggesting there was interference from other channels, or even that messages were being beamed to peoples' televisions from flying saucers. At no point did the newspapers say, "Isn't this interesting; there are phenomena of reverie occurring here, people are looking at their TV screens and seeing those moving blips and using them to trigger visualizations, just as humans have always used fire to suggest projections, pictures, stories." No one said, "Isn't it wonderful that peoples' imaginations can do this." Instead, it seemed more acceptable to talk about flying saucers. So I decided to make a piece about this denial. I suppose there is a slightly frightening aspect to crossing these boundaries into the twilight zone of imagination and fantasy, because we know there is no limit to where you can go with this. My piece invites you to fantasize. It is a vehicle for fantasy. People see shapes in the flames on my video. If their fantasy is too disturbing to them they tend to blame it on the piece, which they think is the source of their projections, rather than themselves. This use of television as a hearth, as a trigger for imagination is part of our human history of how we used the cave fires.

SM: In a sidelong way it seems to be about interpreting art, saying "This is something I recognise."

SH: That's the role of the child on the soundtrack, identifying and trying to sort out the story. He uses references to the story and to Rembrandt's painting of the story, which is in the National Gallery. A reference to narrative is presented in a fragmented way.

SM: You get to the difference between interpreting, seeing, and reading in a literal way.

SH: When the prophet Daniel looked at the shapes--letters of light-- that suddenly appeared on the wall, he said they said "Mene mene tekel upharsin" which are nonsense words, untranslatable, even in the Bible. But he was able to interpret them, which is different, as a message of doom. Often this idea of doom also appears in the visions of the people who saw things on their television sets. They saw faces, puppet-sized of course, announcing the end of the world or whatever. This is what happens when people confront their incalculable fantasies unprepared. It's terrifying. Some people think my piece is scary for similar reasons but of course some think it's very very funny.

SM: Why on earth would they think it was funny?

SH: I supposed because terror and laughter are so close, such extreme emotions.

SM: Much of what we have been talking about is deeply unsettling and flies against everything we have been taught. Perhaps it's a matter of letting go..

SH: I don't know, Stuart. With the quality of heightened imagination you bring to art, it might appear these works are over the top. But perhaps for other people who don't have this hypersensitivity, they might not create such an extreme reaction.

SM: Are you saying I m crazy?

SH: I don't think so. And anyway, my intention and your interpretation don't have to be the same. Wouldn't it be boring if artists made work that illustrated their intentions perfectly? I want to see what these works are about, that's why I make them. I can't see the work until I do. I have some intuitions that I need to actualise, but I don't have an idea of the impact the work can have until I see it.