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” (http://www.susanhiller.org/)
Quotes:
1. "Artists have a function. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. We're part of a conversation. It's our job to represent and mirror back the values of the culture in a way that people haven't seen before."
MLA Cite: Cooke, Rachel. "Susan Hiller: 'I've Had Just the Right Amount of Attention, Enough Not to Live in Total Despair' Interview | Art and Design | The Observer." Latest News, Sport and Comment from the Guardian | Guardian.co.uk. The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2011. Web. 16 Sept. 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/30/susan-hiller-tate-britain-interview>.
2. “What I think art provides is something like an instigation or an enhanced awareness of how we are allcollaboratively and creatively implicated in making a culture….”
MLA Cite: Horlock, Mary. "Mary Horlock Talks with Susan Hiller." Susan Hiller Homepage. Web. 16 Sept. 2011. <http://www.susanhiller.org/>.Interview is on artist's website under Interviews link. Cannot find original source site.
Images:
1. Genuine Essence: Homage to Joseph Beuys 1969 - 2009
felt-lined wooden cabinet, 45 cm x 35 cm x 15 cm; containing 60 bottles of various sizes
filled with water I collected from sacred sources around the world
“I met Joseph Beuys only once, when Sandy Nairn introduced me to him at the ICA in 1974. Everyone knows about his work or rather his attitude towards art, life, and everything else. The little bottles of water in my piece refer to the way he made symbolic use of matter-of-fact materials, sacramentalizing everyday activities and storing up energy in ordinary objects.
When I collect water from a holy well or sacred spring, I'm in the process of trying to turn banal tourism into a quest or pilgrimage. The waters supposedly produce powerful effects for believers, but what I treasure is the special mental space created by searching for them and thinking about them. These little bottles of waters are more than just souvenirs; they are containers of an idea about the potentials hidden in ordinary things and experiences.” (image and descriptions are from the artist’s website)
2.
Untitled 1999 5 parcels (various sizes), barrow (pushcart), audio 97 x 122 x 48 cm “Note: I found the wrapped items in the muddy gutter of a street in London's East End a few years ago, apparently discarded during demolition of a building that once housed a tiny shop-front synagogue. Three of the items are remnants of ritual objects (bima curtain, torah cover, etc); the fourth is a large ledger from the synagogue's now-defunct burial society into which I've inserted an old monograph about the numerous 'small synagogues that once served London's Jewish immigrant community. All the parcels are labelled and described in a museological style. A fifth parcel (not shown) contains a cd player which, at intervals, ritualistically sings a fragment of the morning prayer thanking God for restoring the soul. By analogy, the truthfulness of my labeling of the wrapped parcels, and their significance, has to be taken on faith, because what's inside isn't visible.” (image and description from the artist’s website.)
3.
The Secrets of Sunset Beach 1987 10 handprinted R-type photographs, each 56.5 x 46.5 cm
“The Secrets of Sunset Beach ...relocates what might be a rational. Observable and stable reality within the context of a changing atmosphere. The knowability of the world in any simple terms is questioned, as photography is used here not to fix identifications but to suggest how things might be seen in a different light. Or rather, this use of photography recovers from within the very banality of that metaphor the recognition that light itself is always changing, re-drawn, reweriting the environments, the atmospheres we assume to be fixed...
Susan Butler, WASL Journal, 1989”
(image and description from artist’s website)
4.
Sentimental Representations: In Memory of My Grandmothers 1980-1981 (Part I- for Rose Ehrich) rose petals in acrylic medium, ink, photocopies, mounted on 72 boards overall 113l.7 x 80.2 cm
“"...In Sentimental Representations, Hiller uses 'pages' of dried rose petals suspended in acrylic medium, with typed texts, neatly arranged to compose what resembles a conventional painting. This painting is the first section of a two-part work commemorating the lives of the artist's grandmothers, both of whom were named Rose. Hiller has described the thoughts and feelings that accompanied the laborious and time-consuming making of the work as 'opening a closed book'. This 'closed book' can provide us with a new understanding of the relationship between tradition and innovation, between art and craft, and between gender and language, as Hiller's subtle manipulation of materials deliberately blurs the distinction between something visible and tangible, its representation in art, and its symbolic content."”
David Brown: Beauty & Other Works, exh,cat.1981
(image and description from artist’s website)
Interview: The Guardian: “Susan Hiller: 'I've had just the right amount of attention, enough not to live in total despair' On the eve of a major Tate survey, veteran radical artist Susan Hiller talks about her uncompromising journey from anthropology to art.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/30/susan-hiller-tate-britain-interview
Gallery Link: http://www.timothytaylorgallery.com/artists/home/susan-hiller
Artist’s Site: http://www.susanhiller.org/
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