[Bio c. 2019]
Susan Hiller
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).
[Bio c. 2010] Article provided by Grove Art Online www.groveart.com
British installation artist of American birth. She studied Mesoamerican archaeology and anthropology, tribal art and linguistics, and conducted anthropological fieldwork in Central America before moving to London and taking British residency in 1967. From the early 1970s Hiller included social, anthropological and feminist concerns within her persistent questioning of traditional artistic notions of authorship, subject-matter and methodology, which she articulated using painting, sculpture, sound, printed texts, video, photography and drawing in numerous large-scale installations. Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–6; exh. Brighton, U. Sussex, Gardner A. Cent., 1976) consisted of 305 ‘rough sea’ postcards collected by the artist from England, Scotland and Wales, with accompanying charts and notes exploring the relationship between the linguistic description and visual depiction of ‘rough seas’. Photographed anonymously, the uncredited postcards were seen by Hiller as cultural artefacts, and her role as that of a collaborator who relocates them in an (installational) art context with her detailed document recording the entire process. Later works include the installation Monument (41 colour photographs arranged on a wall, sound tape, park bench for viewers’ use, 3.05•6.10 m, 1980–81; three versions, e.g. Leeds, C.A.G.), based on memorial plaques, and Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on your Wall (1983–4; London, Tate), consisting of low band U-Matic colour videotape and 12 C-type photographs on Agfa-lustre paper heat-sealed under Perspex, each c. 508•406 mm, with ink or pencil scripts.
Bibliography
The Revenants of Time (exh. cat., London, Matt’s Gal.; Sheffield, Mappin A.G.; Glasgow, Third Eye Cent.; 1990)
Created 2019-02-19 12:04:17 PM. Most recently updated 2019-02-19 12:04:17 PM
| Role | Project |
|---|---|
| Artist | Ethnographic Terminalia: New Orleans |