Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller (March 7, 1940 – January 28, 2019) was a US-born, British conceptual artist who lived in London, United Kingdom.

Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing.

A key figure in British art across four decades, she was best known for her innovative large-scale multimedia installations, and for works that took as their subject matter aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded, including paranormal beliefs – an approach which she referred to as 'paraconceptualism'.

Born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1940, Susan Hiller was raised in and around Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1950 her family moved to Coral Gables, Florida, where she attended Coral Gables Senior High School, graduating in 1957.

Following a period where she lived in France, Wales, Morocco and India, Hiller settled in London in the late 1960s, developing a practice that was innovative for its time and included a variety of media and performance-based work.

She later cited minimalism, Fluxus, aspects of Surrealism and her study of anthropology as major influences on her work, as well as aspects of feminism.

She attended Smith College and received a B.A. in 1961.

After doing fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, with a grant from the Middle American Research Institute (1962–5), Hiller became critical of academic anthropology; she did not want her research to be part of the "objectification of the contrariness of lived events [that was] destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of 'evidence' that would help anthropology become a science".

It was during a slide lecture on African art, that Hiller decided to become an artist.

She felt art was "above all, irrational, mysterious, numinous … [she] decided [she] would become not an anthropologist but an artist: [she] would relinquish factuality for fantasy".

This decision to begin an art practice was an effort, as the artist later recalled, to "find a way to be inside all my activities."

After spending a year in New York City studying photography, film, drawing and linguistics, Hiller went on to pursue post-graduate studies in anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans with a National Science Foundation Fellowship, completing her Ph.D. in 1965.

In the early 1970s Hiller created participatory 'group investigations' including Pray/Prayer (1969), Dream Mapping (1974) and Street Ceremonies (1973).

These works originated in her conviction that "art can function as a critique of existing culture and as a locus where futures not otherwise possible can begin to shape themselves."

After the mid-1970s, Hiller continued her engagement with minimalism.

Many of her works explore the liminality of certain phenomena including the practice of automatic writing (Sisters of Menon, 1972/79; Homage to Gertrude Stein, 2010), near death experiences (Clinic, 2004) and collective experiences of unconscious, subconscious and paranormal activity (Dream Mapping, 1974; Belshazzar's Feast, 1983–4; Dream Screens, 1996; PSI Girls, 1999; Witness, 2000).

Borrowing strategies from Minimalism to apply a "rational" framework to these products of the unconscious, the artist mounted the work Sisters of Menon in four L-shaped frames that, when installed on the wall together with four individually framed pages of her own commentary, make a cruciform.

Hiller also published Sisters of Menon as an artist's book.

She insisted on blurring the boundaries between cultural definitions of "rational" and "irrational", at the same time reinstating the validity of the unconscious as a source of knowledge or truth.

Hiller's first exhibition was a group show at Gallery House in London in 1973 that she organised with her friends Barbara Ess and Carla Liss.

There she presented two works, one under her own name and one using the pseudonym 'Ace Posible' (a pun on 'es posible', Spanish for 'make it possible'): Transformer, 1973, a floor to ceiling grid structure with tissue paper covered with the artist's marks, and Enquires, 1973, a slide show of facts collected from a British encyclopaedia that revealed the culturally partisan definitions in what was ostensibly an objective and equitable source of information.

For the artwork entitled 10 Months (1977–79), she took photographs of her pregnant body and kept a journal documenting the subjective aspects of her pregnancy.

The final work comprises ten gridded blocks of twenty-eight black and white photographs, each block corresponding to a lunar month.

The images are accompanied by excerpts from her journal entries for the same period.

These components are installed on the wall in a stepped pattern that descends from left to right.

Lisa Tickner observed,"The sentimentality associated with images of pregnancy is set tartly on edge by the scrutiny of the woman/artist who is acted upon, but who also acts: who enjoys a precarious status as both the subject and the object of her work ... The echoes of landscape, the allusions to ripeness and fulfilment, are refused by the anxieties of the text, and by the methodical process of representation."

The work was considered controversial when first exhibited in London.

Over the course of her career, Hiller became known for making use of everyday phenomena and cultural artefacts from our society that commonly were overlooked, denigrated, or marginalised Such cultural artefacts included postcards, dreams, Punch & Judy shows, reports of UFO sightings, reports of near-death experiences, horror movies, bedroom wallpapers, street signs, ceramics, and extinct languages.

Using the techniques of collecting and cataloguing, presentation and display, she transformed these everyday pieces of ephemera into art works that offer a means of exploring the inherent contradictions in our collective cultural life, as well as the individual and collective unconscious and subconscious.

As an artist, she was interested in the areas of our cultural collective experience that are concerned with devalued or irrational experiences: the subconscious, the supernatural, the surreal, the mystical and the paranormal.

She engaged with such experiences and phenomena which defy logical or rational explanation through the rational scientific techniques of taxonomy, collection, organization, description and comparison.

She did not, however, apply systems of judgment to the work, refraining from ever categorising the experiences as 'true' or 'false', 'fact' or 'fiction'.

Beginning in the 1980s, Hiller incorporated the use of audio and visual technology as a means of investigating these phenomena, allowing the visitor to 'make visions from ambiguous aural and visual cues'.

Hiller described her practice as 'paraconceptual', a neologism that places her work between the conceptual and the paranormal.

In describing Hiller's work, art historian Alexandra Kokoli notes that "Hiller's work unearths the repressed permeability ... of ... unstable yet prized constructs, such as rationality and consciousness, aesthetic value and artistic canons. Hiller refers to this precarious positioning of her oeuvre as 'paraconceptual,' just sideways of conceptualism and neighbouring the paranormal, a devalued site of culture where women and the feminine have been conversely privileged. In the hybrid field of 'paraconceptualism,' neither conceptualism nor the paranormal are left intact ... as ... the prefix 'para'- symbolizes the force of contamination through a proximity so great that it threatens the soundness of all boundaries."

During the 1980s she lectured at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

British artists who were taught by Hiller include Sonia Boyce, Zarina Bhimji, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, and Jane and Louise Wilson.

Hiller was widely influential as a teacher for a younger generation of British artists, and was named by the critic Louisa Buck as one of the key progenitors of the young British artists movement that emerged in the UK in the 1990s.

Hiller died in London on January 28, 2019, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 78.