Art and Psychoanalysis, paranormal expereince - Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller

 

Susan Hiller is renowned for making works which investigate often overlooked everyday phenomena. Previous subjects have included UFO sightings (Witness 2000), horror movies (Wild Talents 1997), near-death experiences (Clinic 2004), Punch & Judy shows (An Entertainment 1990) and dreams (Dream Mapping 1974). She employs sound, video, text and photography, often creating large-scale installations. Hiller has been described as a feminist, a conceptualist and a para-conceptualist.

 

 

 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hiller-from-the-freud-museum-t07438/text-summary
 

 

Susan Hiller: born 1940

Title: From the Freud Museum

Date1991–6

Medium: Glass, 50 cardboard boxes, paper, video, slide, light bulbs and other materials

Dimensions Displayed: 2200 x 10000 x 600 mm

Collection: Tate        

Acquisition Purchased: 1998

Reference: T07438

 

 

Many of the items included in Hiller’s installation are ephemeral, everyday articles, such as 45rpm records, two china creamers in the shape of cows, the English puppet Punch’s wooden slapstick. Others are objects of historical and anthropological significance, including Mayan obsidian blades and reproductions of aboriginal Australian cave paintings alongside earth collected near Papunya in Australia.

Other boxes combine items of contemporary relevance or modern usage with images of historic significance. In Box 018, for example, titled ‘La Peste/Plague’, Hiller has attached an article detailing ‘the current global situation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic’ alongside a photograph of the artist facing a stone carving of a skull, a typical memento mori dating from the time of London’s Great Plague.

The ‘from’ in the title does not refer to artefacts collected at the Freud Museum, but indicates that this is a work inspired by it. At the museum, Sigmund Freud’s personal collection of art and antiquities is displayed alongside objects pertaining to his professional life as a psychoanalyst, such as the couch used by his patients during their analysis.

As Hiller noted in the afterword to After the Freud Museum, a companion publication to her installation work, ‘[w]hatever might be said to be the “collection” on display in the Freud Museum is complicated by an overlay of settings where historical, biographical, archaeological, familial, personal, ethnographic and psychoanalytic facts merge to produce representations whose meanings are always in flux’ (Hiller 2000, unpaginated).

The diversity of Freud’s own collection influenced the form of Hiller’s installation.



See article http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/the-collective-conscience/ Colin Herd, 2011

Hiller initially trained as an anthropologist, and Dedicated to the Unknown Artists displays an anthropologist’s interest in collective psyche and imagination. In this work Hiller unifies the two meanings of the word “collective”, meaning both a commonality and an accumulative tendency. Her piece subtly interrogates the British tendency to exaggeratedly bemoan our climactic conditions, which is in fact one of the most moderate. A number of themes emerge in the collection, from a belief in naval supremacy, to the sense of Britain’s embattled isolation, aloof from the disorderly and riotous outside world. By taking the hackneyed images of seaside postcards and compiling them in an extensive collection, Hiller reveals and illuminates aspects of our collective imagination.