Looking into the vitrine of Susan Hiller's From the Freud Museum (1992-6, Tate), the eye lights upon rows of carefully crafted brown cardboard boxes, similar to those used by archaeologists to house their finds, containing a mysterious mixture of objects, images and texts. One box holds a pair of china cow creamers lying beneath a photograph of the American outlaw Jennie Metcalf, her demure dress and hat incongruous next to the gun she brandishes. Moving along, the attention is caught by another in which two books on the historical links between Arabs and Jews sit side by side.
From the Freud Museum originated when Susan Hiller was invited to make an installation at the museum in London dedicated to the founder of psychoanalysis. In a vitrine placed in the room that had been Sigmund Freud's bedroom during the last year of his life she placed 23 units, each within a box. Over the following few years the number of boxes reached a total of 50, individually titled and labeled (always displayed in a vitrine}, titled From the Freud Museum. In her book After the Freud Museum, Hiller described how her 'starting points were artless, worthless artifacts and materials - rubbish, discards, fragments, trivia and reproductions'. By inviting us to examine what would usually be categorized as ephemera, unworthy of our attention, Hiller questions the value systems shaping our culture. From the Freud Museum may suggest that 'rubbish' and 'fragments' are, in fact, our collective 'unconscious', as significant as Freud's collection of precious objects. For critic James Clifford, this 'beautiful and unsettling work... supplemented Freud's masculine, European worldview in a way that firmly prized open that tradition'. But, as with all Hiller's art, there is a refusal of the idea of a single, dominant, "objective' interpretation; From the Freud Museum may be invested with myriad individual meanings by its many viewers, and the artist also included allusions to her earlier works and mementoes in the piece, giving it a personal resonance.37
Hiller first became known during the 1970s when, living in London, she developed an innovative artistic practice including group participation works such as Dream Mapping (1974); the museological/archival installations Fragments (1978), Enquiries/Inquiries (1973,3975} and Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972/6); and pieces incorporating automatic writing, extrasensory perception, photomat machines, wallpaper, postcards and other denigrated aspects of popular culture. All Hiller's art has its starting point in existing artifacts from our society. She excavates the overlooked and rejected and holds it up to the light and has cited her previous study of anthropology as a major impact on her art, in addition to Minimalism, Fluxus and aspects of Surrealism.
Three other large installations by Hiller are currently in Tate's Collection. The earliest, Monument ('1980/81), incorporates 41 color photographs of commemorative plaques honoring Londoners who died while trying to rescue others; the photographs are arranged in a diamond-shaped cross pattern behind a park bench with headphones; the visitor may take a seat and listen to the artist's fragmented meditation on death, heroism, immortality, gender and representation. In this way, the visitor participates in the work, and temporarily becomes part of Monument, being observed by other visitors. Hiller's use of sound in Monument was a new development. The intimacy of the artist's voice contrasts strongly with the photographs' picturing death as romantic, heroic and public, and its texture extends and inflects the meaning of the words spoken. On the tape the artist suggests that sound recording has an unacknowledged, uncanny aspect because it allows the dead to speak to us. The plaques photographed by Hiller were also an attempt to guarantee a kind of immortality. But there is a distance between the historical individual and their representation post mortem, as Hiller says on the soundtrack of Monument: '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.'38
Belshazzar's Feast/The Writing on your Wall {1983/4} was the first video installation to be acquired by Tate. At its initial exhibition the Duveen Galleries were transformed into an unusually informal space, as audiences sat on the floor. The video programme at the core of this work was broadcast in Britain by Channel 4 in 1986, and the installation itself simulates a live transmission seen on a television set in a living-room. In Betehazzar's Feast Hiller investigates the state of reverie sometimes invoked by television viewing; the effects she created in the video programme may induce this state in the viewer, and so the work highlights the powers of human imagination, like the prophet Daniel, who could interpret but not read the mysterious writing on Belshazzar's wall, the viewer may find that the images and the segmented soundtrack hint at revelation, yet remain indecipherable. The artist whispers newspaper reports of alien beings seen on blank television screens when broadcasting has ended and 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 accompanying visuals are a stream of manipulated images of fire. Shifting colors and shapes stimulate the viewer to sit in contemplation and summon images out of the electronic flames.
Hiller worked on the video installation An Entertainment for several years, filming numerous Punch and Judy shows across Britain, and completing the piece in 1990-1.ra It consists of four cross-edited video projections encompassing the walls of a square room. At the time it was made, video projection was a new tool for artists and Hiller invented ways to achieve frame-perfect synchronization. She also enlarged the images to a monstrous scale, creating an overwhelming environment of sound and image. Experiencing An Entertainment involves being dwarfed by puppets and surrounded by garish comic-book color and screeching noise. The mythic themes and brutal slapstick comedy at the heart of this popular 'entertainment' for children are condensed and exposed.
Susan Hiller's work has been a great influence on younger British artists and her stature has been recognized by mid-career retrospectives at London's Institute of Contemporary Art (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996), by numerous solo exhibitions and monographs, and by inclusion in major international group exhibitions. |
