Susan Hiller

Germans should be familiar with their country’s history, for there are plenty of castles and cathedrals, palaces and ordinary houses that record their nation’s noble and painful past. Nevertheless there is scarcely any material trace now of the prominent role once played in German culture by Jewish artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and intellectuals. The Holocaust also had a direct effect on the country’s architecture, with synagogues being destroyed and schools and cemeteries vandalized during the riots of Kristallnacht in November 1938. But the names of individual streets, courtyards and sets of steps still remain – names such as Judenstraße, Judenhof or Judentreppe still hauntingly present in German towns and cities such as Bad Freienwalde or Berlin.
In her show ‘Recall – Selected Works, 1969–2004’ Susan Hiller (who has had a studio in Berlin since undertaking a residency there in 2003) presented a photographic series based on her search for localities that still have, or have recently been given, a Jewish name. Not restricting herself tourban contexts, she discovered places within and outside villages all over Germany that maintained vestiges of former Jewish life. The series, which since the end of the Basel exhibition has also been made into a film, is called ‘The J-Street Project’ (2002–5) – a title pregnant with meaning, as the simple initial ‘J’ (for Jew) was used by the Nazi government to brand Jewish citizens. Thus Hiller creates a kind of double-bind: on the one hand the artist (originally educated as an anthropologist) evokes history; on the other she alludes to the power of semantics. If no names were given for these places, wouldn’t we just have some cosy village scenes or innocent landscapes? Significance is generated simply by putting fact (the indexical function of a street sign) into context (photographing and filming that sign in its surroundings), and it becomes apparent that changing names means changing meaning.
Hiller’s works have been described as ‘investigations into the unconscious of culture’, and in Basel (the third and final leg of an exhibition that travelled from Gateshead to Porto) she displayed more than one example of this aspect of her aesthetic strategy. The most succinct work in this respect was perhaps Clinic (2004), installed as a complete white cube within the gallery. Tall pillars running along the walls extended to the ceiling, each of them fitted with two loudspeakers that broadcast descriptions given by people who had undergone near-death experiences. The whole piece was organized as a symphonic arrangement – from time to time testimonies were given seemingly at random, and then they suddenly converged so that a tumultuous multilingual babble filled the empty hall, while red LED numbers, also fitted into the pillars, flickered like an alarm.
Acting as a counterpoint to Clinic was Witness (2000). While Clinic is white; Witness is black: a dark room with hundreds of speakers dangling from the ceiling so that visitors can actually hold them to their ears like headphones. Despite the contrast in atmosphere, there are apparent structural similarities between the two works. Again the speakers emit reports of stories that transcend rational perception, this time about extraterrestrial encounters. People talk about seeing colours they have never seen before, or about having sighted the most bizarre life forms, and give descriptions of objects whose appearance is as baffling as their purpose. These voicesoverlap and interfere with each other, creating ‘a multitude of actual physical presences’, as Hiller puts it. Each of these works has a strong sense of individual momentum. The artist stresses the uniqueness of every story told, in both Witness and Clinic. She even speaks in terms of confessions, and although these are all linked to different cultures and social circumstances, they still sound like they share a common base. This is the main feature of her work: a conscious blurring of the relation between subjective attitudes and objective manifestation.
Yet Hiller doesn’t evade us with a loose arbitrariness. PSI Girls (1999), a monumental five-channel video piece about girls with telekinetic powers, is compiled from excerpts from Hollywood feature films. For Hiller the movies she works with are just a raw material containing layers of subconscious narrative, myths and beliefs that have lain dormant throughout history and been sparked into life by the impact of the mass media. The sequences in PSI Girls are obviously staged, yet they illustrate a state of superstition deeply rooted in Western culture.
Hiller reflects on the ‘making’ of the imagination – its cultural conditions – as well as the ‘making’ of the ability to imagine in the first place, and earlier works such as Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–6) and Inside a Cave Home (1983) make it clear that she has been doing this persistently for three or four decades. The latter work is, in fact, related to the former, as it is based on a postcard bought in Coober Pedy, the site of an opal mine in the Australian outback. The postcard shows the interior of an ordinary house in the town, and in it the artist spied a reproduction of a painted seascape above a sideboard. She had collected British postcards showing images of ‘rough seas’ in the 1970s, in order to stress the individual momentum within these scenes of towering waves, dramatized by the painterly efforts of ‘the unknown artists’ referred to in the title of the work. These images can be seen as popular emanations of the Sublime; though they are everyday items, they are looked at with a certain respect, as if they were icons. And although these postcards are the product of an impersonal printing process, they still recall the individual artistic approach that lies behind them and alluded to in Hiller’s Inside a Cave Home. For this she painted 12 studies of the seascape shown in the postcard from Coober Pedy. Personal statements blend into mass production, as the most ordinary objects (such as postcards) seem to arouse metaphysical feelings. The one is linked to the other and can’t be seen separately, a closed circuit kept in permanent suspense.