Susan Hiller

Interview by Michael Archer, May 1994.

This interview was recorded at Gimpel Fils, London, during Susan Hiller's exhibition of recent work in Spring, 1994.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 14 Number 1, 1994

Transcript

This interview was recorded at Gimpel Fils, London, during Susan Hiller’s exhibition of recent work in spring 1994. Concurrently she showed, as part of the Bookworks event, a new piece conceived for the Freud Museum in Hampstead.

Michael Archer: The paintings here use wallpapers that relate to domestic spaces.

Susan Hiller: I always get really annoyed when people want to talk about the wallpaper as a separate thing. I tend to emphasise the nature of the artefact that I start with, and I maintain it as a sign instead of getting rid of it or turning it into something else; and then people just want to talk about that sign, which to me has nothing to do with the final work except as a starting point. Beyond the obvious gendered and ideological messages conveyed by some of the more blatant wallpapers, almost every kind of wallpaper has a very long history in terms of its genre. The fruit and flower ones are to do with certain kinds of painting, and function as momento mori. They go back art historically as well as sociologically a very long way. In these pictures the papers are almost obliterated in some cases, because I have seen them as a ground for rewriting, and the rewriting has been covered up by other rewriting, till it is semi-obliterated. Because I am in anxious to keep that balance between intercultural determinants and subjective ones, and then to emphasise the interplay between them, I have brought back the cultural ground in the framing, which is not obliterated at all; and you can see that that is a wallpaper and you can read it as such.

MA: The obliteration is literally black paint obscuring the pattern.

SH: This blackness is achieved though writing and rewriting, or writing and brushing out, or even sometimes touching out.

MA: Has the way in which you use automatic writing changed over the years?

SH: These linguistically oriented works run alongside the other pieces that I’ve done. Out of that practice emerges from time to time much bigger, more public works, like entertainments or big installation pieces. So the use of automatic writing hasn’t changed, but because of the way it’s being presented to the pubic now, it has a different appearance. But my studio is filled with sheets of paper with this kind of mark-making, which for me is the closest I get to a kind of drawing, since I never represent anything. When I’m drawing, I’m writing, you know?

MA: The more public pieces you refer to have used time-based media of one sort or another.

SH: Object-making and event-making are exactly the same thing. It simply depends on a timescale, so that an event or a performance or an installation lasts or holds together for less long as a bounded unit. I can’t see that my making of one of the ‘Black’ works, which might go on over three or four years, is very different from something that unrolls in time with a beginning and an end. But it’s very arbitrary. It could go on for ever. The whole notion of this exhibition was to draw attention to that kind of dilemma, because these pieces are an event I’ve been participating in for 20 years, and it leaves these little registrations, you know. When you’ve got a lot of souvenirs of event structures, you have a work, but the actual activity that goes to create those objects is ongoing.

MA: One work is a series of calibrated test-tubes with stoppers placed in groups in laboratory beakers which seem to refer to other areas of practice – the scientific as opposed to the artistic; the military.

SH: They all use laboratory glassware and domestic kitchen bowls, so they’re located between the laboratory and the kitchen, which is very important. I used to have up in my studio a phrase from Charlie Parker: ‘I made my fire, I greased my skillet and I cooked,’ which has to do with jazz. It also has to do with alchemy, and it has to do with transformation, and those themes are present in this work. The calibrated tubes were a convenient receptacle; I bought an enormous box of old school chemistry lab glassware, and it’s a tremendously useful resource. They’re placed in glass activator tanks, and that again was initially just a found object that seemed to make sense. They are organised by five-yearly units – just another way of counting them up and holding them together.

MA: The problem is, making something of these remnants for the viewer, who obviously hasn’t seen the actual stuff in the studio that you’ve been working on. The kinds of titles that you’ve given to them – Witness, Sybil, Sophia, suggest the idea of various ways in which you might come to know something, either through being present or through engaging in some rational process.

SH: It’s not about rationality, though. The point I’m trying to make has to do with some query about the nature of objects, and how they all can exist in the world at the same time, and we can construct meanings on the basis of their existence. I have deliberately gone across the boundaries that you normally find in an exhibition; that there are painting-like objects, there are sculptural objects. We are always making sense of the disparate collections of things that our world consists of, from childhood onward, telling a narrative. And the choice of these things together seems to me to suggest a certain kind of story that I could make up on the basis of it, and I was trying to propose a question, I guess, to the viewer, the same kind of question I feel when I walk into somebody else’s exhibition: ‘What are these things, and why are they all here together?’ In other words, I don’t think installation art is a very meaningful category, because any bunch of stuff in a place, you know, lends itself to that kind of construction of meaning on the basis of the selection.

MA: This is a steel-mesh security door, which I understand usually covers up the entrance to your studio, and on one side there’s a black rubber mat on which is hanging in a polythene cover a little baby’s outfit, and on its chest has been sewn a white six-pointed star made of two triangles.

SH: I found it in a shop selling trendy children’s clothes, and I was very shocked because it evokes a kind of archetypal-concentration camp image. Of course, it is meant to be a little designer babygro for a Rastafarian child, so it made me think about this idea of misreading. To me this entire show has a kind of provocative edge, which I guess that’s the sign for. The rather moody look of the paintings and the ashes and the implied narrative evokes a kind of recent European horror. These objects were all selected around that kind of mood. Nevertheless, beyond that immediate emotional charge there’s a different kind of reality, which it seems to me is what the work is about.

MA: Many strands of that are evident in the Freud Museum work – this idea of remembering or forgetting, and also the exploration of Jewish ethnicity.

SH: The pieces in the Freud Museum relate to Freud’s own collection, and of course you can’t deal with Freud without taking on board Freud’s own ethnicity. What all those pieces are about is about the European notion of ‘otherness’, and asking the question, ‘Who am I?’, if we’re constructed with these paradoxical references to identity. Which is what the show that we’re looking at now is about, to some extent, too. But the Freud Museum piece is situated within a terrain where the language that we use in discussing the work with reference to psychoanalysis and anthropology is readily available. What we’ve got is a big vitrine and a series of cardboard boxes, which are in fact archaeological collecting boxes. When you’re working on-site as an archaeologist, you’re already making decisions – this will go in my box, this will not go in my box. Freud used the archaeological metaphor to refer to psychoanalysis, and that’s the take-off point for the form of the piece. I think the use of psychoanalysis has had a very stultifying, repressive effect on contemporary art practice. Nevertheless, for me the experience of rereading Freud’s texts was very moving. I’ve always tried to argue for the equality of all expressive practices, because I cannot see that art is any less elucidating than psychoanalysis or sociology or whatever. The notion of play is absolutely fascinating, because of course Freud played with these things all the time, and this is a very important aspect of his collection. The myths embedded in the objects have some kind of truth that’ll help you with your own problems; a kind of a weird little confusion which is absolutely rich, you know, and exciting, and seems very artlike to me. So, putting my little collection there, was like a tiny footnote to all of this. What I am trying to get at is that I don’t think you can set a theoretical practice up as a model that a material-based practice should be conditioned by. Art is less censorious. We can sneak things through.