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."