SUSAN HILLER

Proposal for an Aquarius New Age Intergalactic Typewriter (Version 2 of 10 versions), 1972 Unique hand-coloured offset print 16 1/2 x 11 5/8 in. Retail Value: $6,000 Courtesy of the Estate of Susan Hiller

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM (D. 2019)

Photo by Nanda Lanfranco

Susan Hiller (1940-2019) was born in Tallahassee, Florida. After studying film and photography at The Cooper Union and archaeology and linguistics at Hunter College in New York, she went on to a National Science Foundation fellowship in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the early 1960s she settled in London, where she lived until her death two years ago.

Hiller’s work has been the subject of survey exhibitions at Bloomberg SPACE, London (2020); The Polygon, Vancouver (2018); Officine Grande Riparazioni, Turin (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2017); Samstag Foundation, Copenhagen (2014); Les Abattoires/Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Toulouse (2014); Tate Britain, London (2011); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007); ICA, Philadelphia (1998); and ICA, London (1986). Hiller’s work features in numerous international private and public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London.

WPA talked to Gabriel Coxhead, an art critic and curator based in London, who is Hiller’s son and manages her estate, to learn more about Proposal for an Aquarius New Age Intergalactic Typewriter (1972):

WPA: You said that this work is a “kind of play on the idea of codifying or systematizing the human capacity for imagination and mysticism.” Could you talk a little more about that, especially in relationship to your mother’s work?

GC: The print shows a diagram for a typewriter layout, but instead of letters the keyboard characters are abstract, randomly generated shapes. They’re very arcane-looking, though, and so they seem to suggest some sort of occult symbolism or extraterrestrial alphabet—which Susan emphasized with the work’s title. She was always interested in the human tendency to read some kind of design or significance into chance shapes and patterns, and she often used strategies inherited from Minimalism to apply a rational framework to products of the unconscious. In the case of this piece, which dates from very early in her career, the orderly, keyboard format is used ironically, as if the complexity of an alien language, or the mystery of human imagination, could ever be so straightforwardly communicated.

WPA: What relationship does this

piece have to future artworks and ideas of hers?

GC: It ties in to a whole strand of works where she explored what she called ‘contemporary visionary experience.’ Belshazzar’s Feast (1984), for instance, a video work depicting flickering, dancing flames, was about British press reports of people seeing ghostly faces or messages in the television static after daily broadcasting ended, and how rather than acknowledging the basic human capacity for reverie and fantasy, the press speculated the cause was transmissions from UFOs. Witness (2000), a vast, immersive audiosculpture, also focussed on UFOs, this time in the form of thousands of spoken accounts of encounters from around the world. But perhaps most relevant is her lightbox series From India to the Planet Mars (1997-2017), which gathers together historical examples of mediumistic and trance-induced writing, including several supposed extraterrestrial languages.

WPA: Was there a political dimension to her interests in the paranormal and Supernatural?

GC: Yes, definitely. Her art was all about questioning cultural certainties, and revealing the structures of power and knowledge that underlie what we take to be normal, consensus reality. That’s why she was so interested in other people's stories and personal accounts, in their attempts to make sense of the sorts of liminal, irrational experiences which didn’t sit easily inside everyday language—dream states, near-death experiences, beliefs in auras and psychic abilities, and so on. It wasn’t that she herself necessarily believed in the paranormal or supernatural—but she believed in the people who did, if you see what I mean; she believed in the value of their experiences. Her art was extremely democratic in that way.

WPA: How did your mother hope to alter people’s perception through her artwork? What kind of future did she envision or what messages does her work leave for the future?

GC: Her works typically began with a cultural artefact—whether social or material—that was overlooked in some way, that was ignored or forgotten about or disparaged. And while many of her pieces explored the category of the so-called paranormal, she investigated plenty of other cultural phenomena too—unnoticed street signs all across Germany that pointed to a past Jewish presence; recordings of extinct languages that had previously languished, unheard, in anthropological archives; the unacknowledged and anonymous contributions of female artists to British seaside postcard traditions. So in a very literal way her intention was to alter people’s perception, to bring into view what otherwise might remain lost or invisible. As she stated in a text from Sisters of Menon (1977-79), a key work that documents and analyses her own experience of automatic writing, ‘messages suppressed by a culture do not cease to exist.’ She thought it was the job of an artist to be alive to these sorts of messages, and bring them into the open.