SUSAN HILLER AT THE TATE BRITAIN
SUSAN HILLER AT THE TATE BRITAIN, March 2011
Susan Hiller (born Florida, USA, 1940) is an American artist who relocated to London some thirty years ago after a brief flirtation with academia, leaving a PhD thesis on anthropology unfinished. Hiller possibly found academe too constricting, too rational for the purposes of creativity. Hiller’s work is concerned with the unconscious which was purportedly discovered by Sigmund Freud, but also seeks to relate the unconscious to art & creativity, religion, magic, the paranormal and other modes of modern discourse that perhaps exists now in an era of uncertainty when religious precepts are being overturned yet not quite convincingly replaced by the next thing. In this sense her work hardly seems more informed than does the poetry of W.B.Yeats, informed as it was by all sorts of Occult experiments, alternate, esoteric wisdom and experiments. Items such as planchettes, ouija boards all referenced by Hiller in the various installations and exhibits presented here.
Hiller completely renounces traditional ways of making art. There are no drawings, no oil paintings, acrylics or watercolors on show here. Each installation seeks to re-draw the boundaries of art, yet Hiller has also, to some extent, forgotten what the roots of art are, those roots being traditional practice. That’s not necessarily a problem, yet Hiller, at times, almost seems to be sawing off the abstract branch she’s sitting on. For instance her installation Psi Girls juxtaposes five films featuring youthful female psychics who can move objects at will or set things alight or cause temporary spontaneous combustion. The five film excerpts are all given a colour wash rather than being presented in their original colour or black and white formats. An entirely new soundtrack has been inserted which seems to be a percussion track of some kind. The work is entirely bizarre; no attempt is made to mediate the bizarreness between artist and audience. It’s all left to hang weirdly distended as some social comment or odd sideways joke. But really Hiller is examining two connected things. Firstly, the art of cinematic special effects; secondly feminine otherness which become entwined in this explosive piece. Hiller will hardly be forgiven by purists but do we care?
Hiller is very much in love with British popular culture; fairground attractions, postcards, Punch & Judy shows whose primordial narratives, she believes, offers us ways to view the unconscious mind in terms of Freud’s achievements. She’s made an amazing collection of postcards from around Britain all united under the rubric ‘rough seas’. (Some of the seas seemed rougher than others; in fact some seemed of Tsunami proportions.) She’s made this collection and presents it as an unfolding social document which is at once a record and also a plausible geographical/ historical mapping of rough seas and British coastal resorts. There’s something indefinable about this work which retains some uncanny or hilarious element, as if the pattern Hiller’s creating aims at something other or external. Indeed the uncanny is what Hiller’s work is all about.
She believes, for instance, that sound recordings allow us to communicate with the dead, just as photography and film making allows us to visualise the dead, not in memory, but on a white screen. That is true, both photography and sound recording have an unmistakably uncanny element which may have something to do with human beliefs in eternity and the immortality of the soul, which can now be captured forever (or as long as the film stock survives). In her work Magic Lantern (1987) Hiller juxtaposes the flickering lights cast upon the screen, their after reflection with the ghostly voices one Russian investigator hears in tape recordings of silence in empty rooms. We hear what are purportedly the words of Winston Churchill then an unknown 'ghost' from the Black Forest in Germany speaks. At one point the voice whispers the name James Joyce. This has to be a weird parody or a send up, but whichever it is, it happens to be very funny indeed.
The other exhibitions such as the Victorian memorials to heroic people who died in the service of rescuing others are also offbeat but absolutely human in their simultaneous emphasis on unsentimental nostalgia and memory. The Punch and Judy show is also unbelievably potent as the images play out and Judy cries 'wicked, wicked, wicked' as Mr Punch beats the baby's brains out with his truncheon/club. Her cry becomes an expressive potent symbol of the entire exhibition.
The Susan Hiller exhibition is highly recommended to those who want to see and experience the cutting edge of conceptual art.
Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, London
Susan Hiller (born Florida, USA, 1940) is an American artist who relocated to London some thirty years ago after a brief flirtation with academia, leaving a PhD thesis on anthropology unfinished. Hiller possibly found academe too constricting, too rational for the purposes of creativity. Hiller’s work is concerned with the unconscious which was purportedly discovered by Sigmund Freud, but also seeks to relate the unconscious to art & creativity, religion, magic, the paranormal and other modes of modern discourse that perhaps exists now in an era of uncertainty when religious precepts are being overturned yet not quite convincingly replaced by the next thing. In this sense her work hardly seems more informed than does the poetry of W.B.Yeats, informed as it was by all sorts of Occult experiments, alternate, esoteric wisdom and experiments. Items such as planchettes, ouija boards all referenced by Hiller in the various installations and exhibits presented here.
Hiller completely renounces traditional ways of making art. There are no drawings, no oil paintings, acrylics or watercolors on show here. Each installation seeks to re-draw the boundaries of art, yet Hiller has also, to some extent, forgotten what the roots of art are, those roots being traditional practice. That’s not necessarily a problem, yet Hiller, at times, almost seems to be sawing off the abstract branch she’s sitting on. For instance her installation Psi Girls juxtaposes five films featuring youthful female psychics who can move objects at will or set things alight or cause temporary spontaneous combustion. The five film excerpts are all given a colour wash rather than being presented in their original colour or black and white formats. An entirely new soundtrack has been inserted which seems to be a percussion track of some kind. The work is entirely bizarre; no attempt is made to mediate the bizarreness between artist and audience. It’s all left to hang weirdly distended as some social comment or odd sideways joke. But really Hiller is examining two connected things. Firstly, the art of cinematic special effects; secondly feminine otherness which become entwined in this explosive piece. Hiller will hardly be forgiven by purists but do we care?
Hiller is very much in love with British popular culture; fairground attractions, postcards, Punch & Judy shows whose primordial narratives, she believes, offers us ways to view the unconscious mind in terms of Freud’s achievements. She’s made an amazing collection of postcards from around Britain all united under the rubric ‘rough seas’. (Some of the seas seemed rougher than others; in fact some seemed of Tsunami proportions.) She’s made this collection and presents it as an unfolding social document which is at once a record and also a plausible geographical/ historical mapping of rough seas and British coastal resorts. There’s something indefinable about this work which retains some uncanny or hilarious element, as if the pattern Hiller’s creating aims at something other or external. Indeed the uncanny is what Hiller’s work is all about.
She believes, for instance, that sound recordings allow us to communicate with the dead, just as photography and film making allows us to visualise the dead, not in memory, but on a white screen. That is true, both photography and sound recording have an unmistakably uncanny element which may have something to do with human beliefs in eternity and the immortality of the soul, which can now be captured forever (or as long as the film stock survives). In her work Magic Lantern (1987) Hiller juxtaposes the flickering lights cast upon the screen, their after reflection with the ghostly voices one Russian investigator hears in tape recordings of silence in empty rooms. We hear what are purportedly the words of Winston Churchill then an unknown 'ghost' from the Black Forest in Germany speaks. At one point the voice whispers the name James Joyce. This has to be a weird parody or a send up, but whichever it is, it happens to be very funny indeed.
The other exhibitions such as the Victorian memorials to heroic people who died in the service of rescuing others are also offbeat but absolutely human in their simultaneous emphasis on unsentimental nostalgia and memory. The Punch and Judy show is also unbelievably potent as the images play out and Judy cries 'wicked, wicked, wicked' as Mr Punch beats the baby's brains out with his truncheon/club. Her cry becomes an expressive potent symbol of the entire exhibition.
The Susan Hiller exhibition is highly recommended to those who want to see and experience the cutting edge of conceptual art.
Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, London
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