Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 2019) was a US-born, British conceptual artist who lived in London, United Kingdom. Her practice spanned a broad range of media, including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. A key figure in British art across four decades, she was best known for her innovative large-scale multimedia installations, and for works that took as their subject matter aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded, including paranormal beliefs–an approach which she referred to as "paraconceptualism".

Early life and education Hiller was born in Tallahassee, Florida, on March 7, 1940, Susan Hiller was raised in and around Cleveland, Ohio. In 1950, her family moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where she attended Coral Gables Senior High School, graduating in 1957. She attended Smith College and received a B.A. in 1961. After spending a year in New York City studying photography, film, drawing and linguistics, Hiller went on to pursue post-graduate studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation Fellowship, completing her Ph.D. in 1965.

After doing fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, with a grant from the Middle American Research Institute (1962–1965), Hiller became critical of academic anthropology; she did not want her research to be part of the "objectification of the contrariness of lived events [that was] destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of "evidence" that would help anthropology become a science". It was during a slide lecture on African art that Hiller decided to become an artist. She felt art was "above all, irrational, mysterious, numinous … [she] decided [she] would become not an anthropologist but an artist: [she] would relinquish factuality for fantasy". This decision to begin an art practice was an effort, as the artist later recalled, to "find a way to be inside all my activities." developing a practice that was innovative for its time and included a variety of media and performance-based work. She later cited minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism and her study of anthropology as major influences on her work, as well as aspects of feminism. In the early 1970s, Hiller created participatory "group investigations", including Pray/Prayer (1969), Dream Mapping (1974) and Street Ceremonies (1973). These works originated in her conviction that "art can function as a critique of existing culture and as a locus where futures not otherwise possible can begin to shape themselves." Such cultural artefacts included postcards, dreams, Punch & Judy shows, reports of UFO sightings, reports of near-death experiences, horror movies, bedroom wallpapers, street signs, ceramics, and extinct languages. Using the techniques of collecting and cataloguing, presentation and display, she transformed these everyday pieces of ephemera into artworks that offer a means of exploring the inherent contradictions in our collective cultural life, as well as the individual and collective unconscious and subconscious.

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 (Clinic, 2004) 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). Borrowing strategies from Minimalism to apply a "rational" framework to these products of the unconscious, the artist mounted the work Sisters of Menon in four L-shaped frames that, when installed on the wall together with four individually framed pages of her own commentary, make a cruciform. Hiller also published Sisters of Menon as an artist's book. She insisted on blurring the boundaries between cultural definitions of "rational" and "irrational", at the same time reinstating the validity of the unconscious as a source of knowledge or truth.

Hiller described her practice as "paraconceptual", a neologism that places her work between the conceptual and the paranormal. In describing Hiller's work, art historian Alexandra Kokoli notes that 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. 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.

Hiller died in London on January 28, 2019, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 78.

Key works Conceptual Painting (1970–1984) - Existing canvas works by Hiller that were cut up and reassembled into painting "blocks", their surfaces transformed into volumes. Relics (begun 1972) - Hiller burned her earlier works and exhibited the ashes in vials and other scientific containers, as an act not of destruction but of transubstantiation. A new burning was carried out each year for the rest of her life. Enquiries/Inquiries (1973–5) - Two parallel slide-projector sequences featuring texts taken from British and American collections of facts. Also an artists' book. Dream Mapping (1974) - A "group investigation", in which participants slept in fairy rings in a field for three nights and produced dream maps each following morning. Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76) - An installation consisting of 14 panels featuring more than 300 "rough sea" postcards and charts analysing the cards' linguistic and visual features, along with an accompanying artist's book. Now part of the Tate Collection and considered a classic work of conceptual art, it was highly controversial at the time for blending the austerity of conceptualism with elements of romanticism and popular culture. 10 Months (1977–9) - Daily photographs charting Hiller's growing belly during her pregnancy, arranged into panels of 10 lunar months, accompanied by texts from Hiller's journal on ideas of pregnancy, subjecthood, and language. Sisters of Menon (1972/79) - 4 L-shaped panels, arranged in a cross shape, displaying pages of Hiller's automatic writing. Work in Progress (1980) - Earlier works on canvas whose weaves were unthreaded during a week-long performance at Matt's Gallery. The threads were then reworked into knotted, looped, and braided abstract shapes. Monument (1980–1) - An installation consisting of photographs of memorial plaques in Postman's Park, one for each year of Hiller's life, in front of which is a park bench where viewers can sit and listen on headphones to a mediation on notions of remembrance, representation and heroism. What Every Gardener Knows (2003) - a musical sound work for garden spaces based on the binary system of Mendelian genetic theory. Homages (begun 2003) - various bodies of work made in homage to canonical cultural figures–Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Gertrude Stein–which comment on the unacknowledged history of occult and esoteric belief within modernist thought. Enquiries/Inquiries, Gardner Arts Centre Gallery, University of Sussex, Brighton, with The Arts Council of Great Britain 1979; texts as illus. Sisters of Menon, Coracle Press for Gimpel Fils. London 1983; facsimile of handwritten texts and charts as illus. hand-painted board covers. After the Freud Museum, Book Works, London, 1995. Reprinted 2000; 79 b/w illus. cover, text by Susan Hiller Witness, Artangel, London 2000; 21 b/w and col. illus. Split Hairs: The Art of Alfie West, self-published, Berlin, 2004, co-authored with David Coxhead, 9 col. illus. The J. Street Project 2002-2005, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, and Berlin 2005; 303 col. illus. Intro. by Susan Hiller, afterword by Jörg Heiser (text in English and German) Auras and Levitations, Institute of Contemporary Arts with Book Works, London, 2008; 70 b/w and col. illus., text by Susan Hiller. The Dream and the Word, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012, 80 pp, text by Susan Hiller.

Teaching, writing, and curatorial projects Hiller was widely influential as a teacher for a younger generation of British artists and was named by the critic Louisa Buck as one of the key progenitors of the young British artists' movement that emerged in the UK in the 1990s. During the 1980s, she lectured at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. British artists who were taught by Hiller include Sonia Boyce, Zarina Bhimji, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, and Jane and Louise Wilson.

Following her departure from the Slade, Hiller served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Fine Art at California State University, Long Beach in 1988; Visiting Arts Council Chair at UCLA, Los Angeles in 1991–92; Professor of Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast 1991–98; and Baltic Professor of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle 1999–2002.

In 1976, she co-authored with David Coxhead the art-historical book Dreams: Visions of the Night, about the representation of dreams and dreaming across a variety of cultures and artistic traditions.

In 1991, she edited the cross-disciplinary volume The Myth of Primitivism, deriving from a series of seminars she had organised at the Slade. Bringing together newly commissioned essays by a variety of artists, art historians and anthropologists–including Rasheed Areen, Guy Brett, Lynne Cooke, Jimmie Durham, Edgar Heap of Birds, and Signe Howell–it explored the fusion of myth, history and geography which leads to ideas of primitivism and looked at their construction, interpretation and consumption in Western culture.

In 2000, Hiller curated the Hayward Touring exhibition Dream Machines. Taking its title from the Dreamachine created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville–who Hiller had got to know in the 1960s–the show reflected Hiller's longstanding interest in artworks designed to induce reverie and explore altered states of consciousness. Gathering together historical and contemporary artworks, the exhibition was largely responsible for reigniting interest in the Dreamachine amongst a new generation of British artists after a period of relative neglect. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Hiller and Jean Fisher.

Collections

Hiller's works are included in numerous international public and private collections, including the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; British Museum, London; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Serralves Foundation, Porto; Colby College Museum of Art, Colby, Maine; Ella Fontanals Cisneros Foundation, Miami; Frac Bourgogne, Dijon; Henie–Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Henry Moore Sculpture Collection, Leeds; Inhotim, Brumadhino, Brazil; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Moderner Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Art South Australia, Adelaide; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Art fellowships and awards 1968 Karolyl Foundation, Vence, France (residency) 1969 Ministère des Beaux Arts, Morocco (residency) Jörg Heiser and Ellen Seifermann. Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst on the occasion of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 10 December 2011 – 19 February 2012.