The art of Susan Hiller is not easy to get to grips with. There is almost six decades’ worth of it, for a start. And it's varied; it helps to know that she studied film and photography, archaeology, linguistics and anthropology, though not all at the same time and not in that order. She rejected anthropology’s claims on rational distance if not the taxonomic impulse. And all of that is in Hiller’s debut show at London’s Lisson Gallery; her first in the city since the major career survey at Tate Britain in 2011.
As Hiller, says, her work is clearly an act of archaeology but she digs into unusual spaces, mostly systems of belief and dis-belief, and in unusual ways; bouncing between medium – from assemblies of found objects to pioneering multi-media work.
Hiller has a peculiar and continuing fascination with extra-scientific phenomena – or perhaps consolations of a spirit-world now outlawed by rationality, or just plain outlawed. Works such as Mary Essene (1975–81), Alphabet (1985) and this year’s Facing The Real (2015) deal with paranormal activities like telepathy, unconscious transmission and automatic writing. The Photomat series, started in the 1970s, are ghostly grids of photo booth portraits covered with indecipherable scrawl; images from some other side.
The show also includes Belshazzar’s Feast, the writing on your wall (1983–84), the first video installation piece bought by the Tate and shown here in its campfire version; Wild Talents (1997), which riffs on horror movie portrayals of the occult; while Resounding (Infrared) of 2013 matches stories of flying saucer sightings with images of verifiable cosmic wonders. The exhibition also includes Hiller’s series of homages to other artists – Joseph Beuys, Gertrude Stein and Marcus Stein – though these pieces too touch on the mystic, what Hiller calls her ‘paraconceptualism’.
The centrepiece of the show is On the Edge (2015), 482 postcards of 219 costal locations in the UK, mostly savaged by waves and storm-racked; miniaturised, mailable claims on the sublime.
In On The Edge, 482 postcards are presented side by side, displaying 482 views of 219 craggy, seaside locations around Britain.
These pictured early works explore the nature of portraiture, seen alongside the automatic workings of photobooth cameras and evoking notions of the ’ghost in the machine’.
First-aid cabinets contain phials of holy water, referencing Joseph Beuys’ ability to endow ordinary materials with sacred values. Pictured: Emergency Case: Homage to Joseph Beuys, 2012
First-aid cabinets contain phials of holy water, referencing Joseph Beuys’ ability to endow ordinary materials with sacred values.
Hiller’s blown-up postcard works of raging seascapes are imbued with an unsettling other-ness.
Hiller describes her work as ’a kind of archaeological investigation, uncovering something to make a different kind of sense of it’.
Belshazzar’s Feast, 1983 was the first video installation piece bought by the Tate. Right: the piece in campfire version
INFORMATION
’Susan Hiller’ is on view until 9 January 2016. For more information, visit the Lisson Gallery website
Photography: Jack Hems. © Susan Hiller. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery
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