Today’s art world is well populated with examples of the supernatural and the excavation of hidden histories, but the opening up of this territory is in great part due to the pioneering role of Susan Hiller who, for over four decades, has used her art to explore what she describes as “unstable zones”, where the irrational holds sway and where matters cannot easily be explained or have been overlooked altogether. Hiller initially studied as an anthropologist and from the 1970s when she and her friends slept inside fairy circles of mushrooms and compared their resulting dreams, through to her more recent pieces based on audio accounts of near-death experiences, movie depictions of the paranormal and mysterious auras posted on the internet, the work of this American born, London-based artist has been dedicated to cataloguing, chronicling and investigating the marginal and the irrational in rich and myriad forms, and in the process often redefining what a work of art can be. Now a major survey at Tate Britain (until 15 May) and an exhibition of new work at Timothy Taylor Gallery (3 February-5 March) confirms that Hiller continues to be without equal in her ability to give rigorous and astonishing artistic form to the most bizarre phenomena.
The Art Newspaper: You seem to use scientific systems of classification and listings to question and to undermine certainties rather than to reinforce them.
Susan Hiller: I don’t think I use scientific methodologies, I would say I deliberately misuse them. Children love to sort and classify, and it isn’t science but play, and given my roots in minimalism it’s obvious I would always favour an orderly, non-hierarchical form of presentation.
Nonetheless, much of your work finds you assembling and cataloguing, whether it’s gathering self-portraits of people emitting auras taken from the internet or, in your J-Street Project, travelling through Germany to find and film every street with the prefix ‘Juden’.
SH: Yes, but I am cataloguing them against the grain and in ways that they would never be catalogued, as you said, “scientifically”. It seems enough to re-contextualise the magical and to present it in an orderly, visual way to reveal something a bit shocking or ghostly, almost invisible. The list of streets with the word Jew in them is quite a disturbing catalogue and in more recent work what interests me is revealing the way artists like Duchamp and Yves Klein disguised their allegiances to the occult, and how modernism is full of secret things that were never spoken of. Right now I’m working on a new piece which is a homage to Gertrude Stein, revealing her roots in automatic writing which she always denied, but which in fact she studied for a PhD.
Much of the subject matter you have used has been very risky territory for a woman artist to be engaging with: dreams, auras, hyperkinetic movement—it seems that you were almost deliberately courting this emotive subject matter.
SH: I had absolutely nothing to lose. I just did what I wanted to do and what I was interested in doing and it was not of interest to the art establishment. What it was like here in the art world before feminism needs to be talked about: anything you did as a woman artist that was, say, personal or energetic rather than perfectly crafted, people just made fun of you. The gender bias goes very deep and has complicated ramifications and one of the reasons why I have had to develop a kind of intellectual position—which I never really wanted to do when I started out as an artist—was to defend myself against this. When I started working with postcards I came up against so much ridicule that I gave the work a very academic look, but it’s not that at all.
Now, many of the supernatural subjects you have spent years exploring in your work have a much wider currency and it isn’t considered to be so strange to take them more seriously.
SH: Everything comes around again and people are now more interested in what, for a long time, was considered [the] lunatic fringe or new age popular culture [or] lost meanings. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I think that some of these things have been repressed, especially the spiritual or occult. Because we are afraid to talk about them in normal ways, we either get very worked up or very superstitious: we are caught between the ideology of rationalism and new age ideology which I would call superstitious, because one needs evidence and proof and it is hard to come by. When I realised that so much of modernist art relied on these theories of the occult and the supernatural I felt that here was an important hook to hang an investigation on because many of these artists have already passed into acceptability and had not been quite honest about what their sources were. It’s almost a fudging of history and this has been interesting to me for the last couple of years, so I have produced work which may be critical in the sense of revealing something which is not well known, but is also celebratory.
Works such as Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp, 2007, also convey the appeal and excitement of this subject matter and way of thinking—and give a sense of what drew Duchamp and others to this subject matter in the first place.
SH: I am very interested in connecting up the individual, the so-called artist genius, with the collective and I believe that the inspiration for many artists—again unacknowledged—comes out of popular culture. The fact that so many people seem to be interested in auras makes a fascinating relationship with somebody as esoteric as Duchamp. I think people are afraid of the unexplainable but that there is also a yearning for some kind of spirituality and a hope for the future. There is a problem in society, as there is no place for spiritual yearnings to go.
You have always used the latest technology to convey your ideas: you were one of the first artists to use multi-screen projections as well as the latest in audio equipment and the internet…
SH: There were a lot of artists who used the internet before me but I think they saw themselves as web artists and I’m not a web artist, I’m just an artist. I try to be true to the original material that I start with, so in certain cases the web is important, and in other cases audio, photography or video is. I also use technology because I think technologies bring with them certain psychological and psychic possibilities. Western society became interested in the occult with the advent of the modern era of technology, starting with the telegraph and the telephone followed by an upsurge of interest in telepathy and invisible sound waves and vibrations.
In a way you seem to use new technologies to harness age-old feelings and sensations.
SH: I really want to make work that seduces, draws people in and involves them, technology is doing that all the time to all of us anyway, so why shouldn’t artists use it? Artists are part of society and they are producing and taking out of themselves what we all share and putting it out there to look at, and to be talked about. People like that, it’s important. We wouldn’t have art if it was just about buying pictures.
What do you think about current scene, where the market—albeit in a somewhat reduced state—still seems to hold sway.
SH: I was lucky because in the 1970s—the period that I emerged in—the market was not a big thing. I lived poor for so many years and there was no shame attached to it. The general mood was very utopian in those days and it was such a boost to a couple of generations of people who would never have done theatre or music or art or been able to write a book if they hadn’t had that public support. I think it’s really shocking that we’ve now come to this awful situation where nobody is going to get much help: if the kids now going to art school are going to have to get jobs, how are they going to have any energy left to create? In a way we are riding off the social generosity of the 1970s which allowed so many wonderful artists, in all media, to emerge. Of course it’s also important to sell the work…but I’m much more interested in selling work to public institutions because I like the public to be engaged in the work.
Biography
Born: 1940, Tallahassee, Florida; lives and works in London
Education: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; Tulane University, New Orleans
Selected solo shows: 2011 Tate Britain; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 2009 The Jewish Museum, San Francisco 2008 The Jewish Museum, New York; Matt’s Gallery, London 2007 Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden 2004-05 Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK 2002 Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark 2001 Gagosian Gallery, New York 2000 Artangel commission at The Chapel, London 1998 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1996 Tate Gallery, Liverpool