Article/Exhibition on/of Susan Hiller

"Even if we are not all suckers under the skin, the power of the irrational is a big draw. For all her decades as an artist, Hiller's curiosity in the world remains that of the anthropologist she once trained as.


Her fascination with UFO encounters, with the presence of ghosts on the TV screen, with the voices of the dead in the radio ether, with levitations, automatic writing and other phenomena is more than academic.




...the artist ...is a medium, and one who is always haunted." :
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/31/susan-hiller-tate-britain




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Susan Hiller at the Tate Britain:
I like her ideas and the subjects she uses but her actual pieces aren't very interesting.

Ideas I liked:
1. Automatic writing (but ultimately not very interesting visually)
2. Dream mapping (people's dreams can actually just be really boring/mundane)
3. 'Magic Lantern' was a recordings of 'dead people' taken in soundproof rooms by a man called Dr Raudive (Hiller's contribution of sings and coloured spots was not so cool)
4. 'Monument': Consciousness= shared subjectivity. Her theory that the dead can speak to us through sound recordings.
"Your present, my past"
5. Parts of the 'From the Freud Museum':

0.22 Seance. Photocopy of Athanasius Kircher(pictured left)
0.37 A wooden Ouija board
0.35 A few decorative hands of Fatima
0.30 Hermanos. A photocopy of a classical pot featuring mythical greek twins Hypnos(sleep) and Thanatos(death)
0.49 A wooden rapping hand used in seances