Inspiring
Memory, subconscious, rituals, subtlety, memory and memorial
Susan Hiller
What I like
about Susan Hellers works is the impact of something geometric or reassuringly
familiar ‘objects’ with an underlying meaning that is more intriguing.
The layers and
thoughts that have gone into this.
The importance
of memory, personal experience and unconscious thoughts/automatic writing to
the creation of a work.
I like the
blatant distance that the artist also puts between the viewer and her work.
Burning works that no-one will see. The use of familiar (to me) scientific type
storage jars, that now seem other-worldly and dated which adds a nostalgic/lost
time dimension to the works.
I’m still not
sure how much I wish to take into account a viewers subjective history when
they see a work and how this will affect their interaction with a piece.
How much to
manipulate an experience of a piece of art based on how much information you
give away.
I think this is
what steers me clear of mainly figurative pieces, playing with what I want to
convey, or wrap up in layers of symbolism and meaning.
Bio
Susan Hiller was born
in 1940 and grew up in and around Cleveland, Ohio until 1952 when her family
moved to South Florida where she attended local schools and Coral Gables High
School. She was awarded a scholarship to Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1961. After a year in
New York studying film and photography at The Cooper Union and archaeology and
linguistics at Hunter College, Hiller went on to do postgraduate
work at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science
Foundation fellowship in anthropology. She conducted fieldwork in Mexico,
Guatemala and Belize but became uncomfortable with academic anthropology's
claim to objectivity; she wrote that she did not wish her research to become
part of anthropology's 'objectification of the contrariness of lived events'. During
a lecture on African art, she made the decision to leave anthropology to become
an artist.
Susan Hiller has been based mainly in London since the early
1960’s. After several exhibitions of her paintings and a series of
collaborative ‘group investigations’, in the early 1980’s she began to make
innovative use of audio and visual technology. Her groundbreaking
installations, multi-screen videos and audio works have achieved international
recognition and are widely acknowledged to be a major influence on younger
British artists.
Each of Susan Hiller’s works is based on specific cultural
artifacts from our society, which she uses as basic materials. Many of her
works explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of
automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79; Homage to Gertrude Stein,
2010), near death experiences (Channels, 2013), and collective experiences of
unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Dream Mapping,
1974; Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983-4; Dream Screens, 1996;Psi Girls, 1999; Witness,
2000). In describing this area of Hiller’s work, art historian Dr. Alexandra
Kokoli draws attention to its palpable political subtext: “Hiller’s work
unearths the repressed permeability ... of ... unstable yet prized constructs,
such as rationality and consciousness, aesthetic value and artistic canons.
Hiller refers to this precarious positioning of her oeuvre as 'paraconceptual,'
just sideways of conceptualism and neighbouring the paranormal, a devalued site
of culture where women and the feminine have been conversely privileged. Most
interestingly, in the hybrid field of 'paraconceptualism,' neither
conceptualism nor the paranormal are left intact ... as ... the prefix 'para'
-symbolizes the force of contamination through a proximity so great that it
threatens the soundness of all boundaries."
With a practice extending
over 40 years, Susan Hiller is considered one of the most influential artists
of her generation. Her work is found internationally in both private
and public collections and her career has been recognized by mid-career survey
exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (1986)
and Tate Liverpool (1996), and, most recently by, a major
retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain (2011).
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