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If there is any contemporary artist who could be said to be dealing with Fortean themes, it is Susan Hiller.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1208757,00.html
"There are people who are prepared to believe almost anything. There are those who hear voices from the other side, believing that there are messages for us in the ether. Others believe they have seen flying saucers, and have encountered beings from distant planets. Extra-sensory perceptions and paranormal powers may be unproven, but someone somewhere is working on them. The collective unconscious is big in some quarters. Some poor souls even think that art can redeem us.
Who is to say what goes on in an artist's mind? Studios are always haunted, by someone or other, or some unbidden thing. The persistence of unproven or improbable beliefs has provided the material for much of Susan Hiller's work. There is, thankfully, more to her art than the spooky or the deluded. Much of her thinking is focused on the creativity of the human mind itself, the tricks it plays, the sometimes curious ways in which it reveals itself through its preoccupations. This, naturally enough, includes the activity of making art itself.
Recall, a survey of Hiller's art now at Baltic in Gateshead, revisits works from throughout her career (starting in 1969), and in doing so creates its own sense of déjà vu. On Baltic's ground floor is An Entertainment, her dramatic, brilliantly orchestrated 1990 projection of a Punch and Judy show, a work filled with screams, violence, darkness and abuse. Seeing this work again doesn't just remind me how good it is, but also how fearful I was as a child of Mr Punch, wife-batterer. "That's the way to do it!" An Entertainment opens Hiller's show as a sort of vision of hell. Up on the top floor, Hiller was installing a new work, Clinic, just hours before the opening. In an otherwise empty, light-filled gallery, the voices of people who had returned from near-death, out-of-body experiences recount their journeys. Their curious tales, no less than Punch and Judy's formulaic roundelays of beatings and squeals and denials ("Oh, no I didn't!"), say something about our unconscious wishes and fears. I find them both oddly depressing. Who says art should lift the spirit?
The show, curated by James Lingwood, fills three floors of Baltic. There are experiments in automatic writing, recorded witness statements about strange encounters, dreams and mythologies and folklore, totems and fetishes, movies and archives. Among all this there is also the story of an artist's development, her dialogue with her media and subjects. You have to work at Hiller's art, listen as well as look, read as well as see. Hiller has worked in all kinds of media - from painting and drawing to video and other kinds of installation, from presenting collections of found and fabricated material to work made for the internet. She is less concerned with consistency than discovery. This is one of the good things about what she does.
One of the first things writers bring up about Hiller is that she trained as an anthropologist (and did several years field-work in Central America) before turning to art; and that her work - with its oral histories, its density of collated material, her observations - is in some way a continuance of her former discipline by other means. For her, everything, including her own work, is material to be organised, ordered, presented. An American based in London for most of her working life, she began her artistic career as a painter. She ditched painting, but cut up her early works, presenting their remnants either as numbered and filed blocks of sliced-up canvas, or burning them and presenting the ashes of incinerated paintings in laboratory glassware. These early paintings really did become, as Picasso said of his own work, a sum of destructions.
The glass burrettes, stoppered jars of cremated paintings and blocks of carefully cut-up paintings look very much of their time. The collected notebooks of an exercise in dream-mapping, in which Hiller and some friends went off to a farm in Hampshire and attempted to document their dreams (a sojourn that, according to Guy Brett, was abetted by mushrooms - and I don't think he meant morels), can be taken as a kind of post-hippy encounter session. Seeing the array of open notebooks now gives me the shivers, a flashback of my own misspent youth. I wonder what really went on down on the farm, whether it was a last gasp love-in or an encounter session? I guess you had to have been there to see the point.
If Hiller's early work looks now very much of a period, her work from the mid-1980s onward is much more in command of its material and its various media. This is to be expected, though some artists never really do develop, and get stuck with their premature success. In Magic Lantern, from 1987, discs of pure colour are projected on the wall. They meld, overlap and superimpose, as though to demonstrate the properties of optical mixing. The soundtrack, heard on headphones, plays excerpts from Konstantin Raudive's 1950s recordings of ethereal voices picked up on a tape that captured the silence in empty rooms. Raudive, a Latvian novelist and translator, devoted many years to recording peculiar phenomena, which have since found their way into several pop samples (including the Smiths' Rubber Ring: "It is happening again. It is happening again ..." ), and have recently been used as the basis of an entire album by, among others, DJ Spooky. It would be nice to think Hiller got there first.
In the Raudive tapes, voices emanate from bursts of noise. In optical mixing, as opposed to the mixing of pigments, the overlay of red, yellow and blue light should give us white light. Are there ghosts here, too? The problem is that Raudive's recordings are so powerful, and peculiar, that it is hard to concentrate on Hiller's slideshow, except as a sort of hypnotic experience. The sound overtakes you, with Winston Churchill muttering amid the static.
Throughout Hiller's work one is put in a position where it is necessary to step back from the allure of the material itself in order to see what she is doing with it. In the 1997 video installation Wild Talents, clips of movies featuring children displaying paranormal gifts - including Brian de Palma's Carrie, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and David Lean's Blithe Spirit - are in themselves so entertaining that what Hiller is trying to do is in danger of passing us by. In any case, the re-presentation of film footage has become such a commonplace artistic strategy that it is difficult to get excited by it, unless in the hands of someone who really manipulates it as marvellously as Christian Marclay or, occasionally, Douglas Gordon. In Wild Talents, a monitor set up on a chair in front of the movie projections shows old footage of, I think, a procession to the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, where in the 19th century a young farm girl allegedly saw and spoke to the Virgin Mary. Wild Talents is about belief, about the real and the faked. But isn't it also about a wish for such things to be true - a wish as necessary for the movie-goer as for the devout?
We might regard the forest of 400 dangling earphones in the installation Witness (2000) as a constellation of flying saucers. Each emits a recording of an eyewitness account of a UFO sighting, gathered from around the world. The sound comes in waves. The voices merge and are alone. Standing outside this dangling world, with its sizzle of tinny voices, one views it almost as a model of some sort. Walk among the earphones and one is transported. The stories themselves matter less than their cumulative effect, the fact that these people believed what happened to them. There is something lonely and lost about these accounts, this wish for the stories to be believed. So it is that Hiller also wishes us to "believe" in her vitrine of artefacts and notes in After the Freud Museum (1991-7), a Tate-owned work that has so many stories, jokes, wordplays and object poems that it, too, convinces as much by its density and inner complexity as by the voracity of individual items. There's a whole world in there. You've got to believe in something, haven't you?
· Susan Hiller - Recall is at Baltic, Gateshead, until July 18. Details: 0191-478 1810
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1208757,00.html
"There are people who are prepared to believe almost anything. There are those who hear voices from the other side, believing that there are messages for us in the ether. Others believe they have seen flying saucers, and have encountered beings from distant planets. Extra-sensory perceptions and paranormal powers may be unproven, but someone somewhere is working on them. The collective unconscious is big in some quarters. Some poor souls even think that art can redeem us.
Who is to say what goes on in an artist's mind? Studios are always haunted, by someone or other, or some unbidden thing. The persistence of unproven or improbable beliefs has provided the material for much of Susan Hiller's work. There is, thankfully, more to her art than the spooky or the deluded. Much of her thinking is focused on the creativity of the human mind itself, the tricks it plays, the sometimes curious ways in which it reveals itself through its preoccupations. This, naturally enough, includes the activity of making art itself.
Recall, a survey of Hiller's art now at Baltic in Gateshead, revisits works from throughout her career (starting in 1969), and in doing so creates its own sense of déjà vu. On Baltic's ground floor is An Entertainment, her dramatic, brilliantly orchestrated 1990 projection of a Punch and Judy show, a work filled with screams, violence, darkness and abuse. Seeing this work again doesn't just remind me how good it is, but also how fearful I was as a child of Mr Punch, wife-batterer. "That's the way to do it!" An Entertainment opens Hiller's show as a sort of vision of hell. Up on the top floor, Hiller was installing a new work, Clinic, just hours before the opening. In an otherwise empty, light-filled gallery, the voices of people who had returned from near-death, out-of-body experiences recount their journeys. Their curious tales, no less than Punch and Judy's formulaic roundelays of beatings and squeals and denials ("Oh, no I didn't!"), say something about our unconscious wishes and fears. I find them both oddly depressing. Who says art should lift the spirit?
The show, curated by James Lingwood, fills three floors of Baltic. There are experiments in automatic writing, recorded witness statements about strange encounters, dreams and mythologies and folklore, totems and fetishes, movies and archives. Among all this there is also the story of an artist's development, her dialogue with her media and subjects. You have to work at Hiller's art, listen as well as look, read as well as see. Hiller has worked in all kinds of media - from painting and drawing to video and other kinds of installation, from presenting collections of found and fabricated material to work made for the internet. She is less concerned with consistency than discovery. This is one of the good things about what she does.
One of the first things writers bring up about Hiller is that she trained as an anthropologist (and did several years field-work in Central America) before turning to art; and that her work - with its oral histories, its density of collated material, her observations - is in some way a continuance of her former discipline by other means. For her, everything, including her own work, is material to be organised, ordered, presented. An American based in London for most of her working life, she began her artistic career as a painter. She ditched painting, but cut up her early works, presenting their remnants either as numbered and filed blocks of sliced-up canvas, or burning them and presenting the ashes of incinerated paintings in laboratory glassware. These early paintings really did become, as Picasso said of his own work, a sum of destructions.
The glass burrettes, stoppered jars of cremated paintings and blocks of carefully cut-up paintings look very much of their time. The collected notebooks of an exercise in dream-mapping, in which Hiller and some friends went off to a farm in Hampshire and attempted to document their dreams (a sojourn that, according to Guy Brett, was abetted by mushrooms - and I don't think he meant morels), can be taken as a kind of post-hippy encounter session. Seeing the array of open notebooks now gives me the shivers, a flashback of my own misspent youth. I wonder what really went on down on the farm, whether it was a last gasp love-in or an encounter session? I guess you had to have been there to see the point.
If Hiller's early work looks now very much of a period, her work from the mid-1980s onward is much more in command of its material and its various media. This is to be expected, though some artists never really do develop, and get stuck with their premature success. In Magic Lantern, from 1987, discs of pure colour are projected on the wall. They meld, overlap and superimpose, as though to demonstrate the properties of optical mixing. The soundtrack, heard on headphones, plays excerpts from Konstantin Raudive's 1950s recordings of ethereal voices picked up on a tape that captured the silence in empty rooms. Raudive, a Latvian novelist and translator, devoted many years to recording peculiar phenomena, which have since found their way into several pop samples (including the Smiths' Rubber Ring: "It is happening again. It is happening again ..." ), and have recently been used as the basis of an entire album by, among others, DJ Spooky. It would be nice to think Hiller got there first.
In the Raudive tapes, voices emanate from bursts of noise. In optical mixing, as opposed to the mixing of pigments, the overlay of red, yellow and blue light should give us white light. Are there ghosts here, too? The problem is that Raudive's recordings are so powerful, and peculiar, that it is hard to concentrate on Hiller's slideshow, except as a sort of hypnotic experience. The sound overtakes you, with Winston Churchill muttering amid the static.
Throughout Hiller's work one is put in a position where it is necessary to step back from the allure of the material itself in order to see what she is doing with it. In the 1997 video installation Wild Talents, clips of movies featuring children displaying paranormal gifts - including Brian de Palma's Carrie, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and David Lean's Blithe Spirit - are in themselves so entertaining that what Hiller is trying to do is in danger of passing us by. In any case, the re-presentation of film footage has become such a commonplace artistic strategy that it is difficult to get excited by it, unless in the hands of someone who really manipulates it as marvellously as Christian Marclay or, occasionally, Douglas Gordon. In Wild Talents, a monitor set up on a chair in front of the movie projections shows old footage of, I think, a procession to the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, where in the 19th century a young farm girl allegedly saw and spoke to the Virgin Mary. Wild Talents is about belief, about the real and the faked. But isn't it also about a wish for such things to be true - a wish as necessary for the movie-goer as for the devout?
We might regard the forest of 400 dangling earphones in the installation Witness (2000) as a constellation of flying saucers. Each emits a recording of an eyewitness account of a UFO sighting, gathered from around the world. The sound comes in waves. The voices merge and are alone. Standing outside this dangling world, with its sizzle of tinny voices, one views it almost as a model of some sort. Walk among the earphones and one is transported. The stories themselves matter less than their cumulative effect, the fact that these people believed what happened to them. There is something lonely and lost about these accounts, this wish for the stories to be believed. So it is that Hiller also wishes us to "believe" in her vitrine of artefacts and notes in After the Freud Museum (1991-7), a Tate-owned work that has so many stories, jokes, wordplays and object poems that it, too, convinces as much by its density and inner complexity as by the voracity of individual items. There's a whole world in there. You've got to believe in something, haven't you?
· Susan Hiller - Recall is at Baltic, Gateshead, until July 18. Details: 0191-478 1810
