Susan Hiller | Monument

Susan Hiller

Monument

Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, 1981

16 pp.,, 21 x 15 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 750 

Published in co-operation with A Space, Toronto, this rare exhibition catalogue documents Monument,  an installation of forty-one c-type photographs of memorial plaques in Postman’s Park in London, with a twenty-minute audio piece, and a park bench to sit on while listening. 

Each plaque (mostly from 1850 to 1990) commemorates an ordinary man, woman or child who died while performing an act of heroism. For example: 

‘Elizabeth Boxall/Aged 17 of Bethnal Green/ Who Died of Injuries Received/In Trying to Save/ A Child/From a Runaway Horse/June 20 1888’. 

The audio tape plays Hiller's spoken stream of consciousness reaction to the memorials, commenting on themes of heroism, death, memory and representation. The booklet features the texts (in English and French) from the tape, an essay by Tim Guest and artist’s notes. 

Collected Postcards

 

Itinerant Texts

[Various Artists]

Itinerant Texts

London, UK: Bookworks, 1996

8 x 11.5 x 6 cm.

Edition of 40 signed and numbered copies

Itinerant Texts is a set of original slide works by Judith Barry, Robert Barry, Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, Tracey Emin, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Susan Hiller, Joseph Kosuth, Tracy Mackenna and Simon Patterson. 

Each have created works commenting on travel, transience and the nature of site-specificity.

The works were originally commissioned for Artist / Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books, a touring exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts. Itinerant Texts takes as its starting point the idea of the artist as itinerant worker, continually travelling on a kind of circuit and producing site-specific work.

Susan Hiller | Witness

Susan Hiller

Witness

London, UK: Artangel, 2001

78 pp., 27.8 x 18.7 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

"People see strange things. Lights in the sky, mysterious phenomena, visions and visitations — things they can't explain but know they saw. Susan Hiller has been collecting stories of these sightings for years. Some of them are prosaic and descriptive. Others are visionary and marvelous. All of them are true. Hundreds of eyewitness accounts were brought together through years of research for "Witness", Susan Hiller's ambitious installation, which asks us to explore the area where rational explanations no longer seem to hold. This accompanying publication, presented as the artist's "Witness" research file, contains a large selection of the original witness statements, as well as a selection of Hiller's personal notes, sketches, and drawings on the work as it developed. To seduce the reader into experiencing the visions of others, the book comes with a CD containing 50 witness statements."

- publisher's blurb

 

Susan Hiller | Rough Sea

Susan Hiller

Rough Sea

Gardner Centre for the Arts, 1976

60 pp., 11.5 x 16.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

From the early 1970's until her death in 2019, Hiller collected postcards that featured images of waves crashing against the shore, a common tourist image in seaside towns. She frequently used them in her work, including this Artist Book published in conjunction with the exhibition Dedicated to the unknown artists, first shown at The Gardner Centre Gallery, University of Sussex in April 1976.

Susan Hiller | By Night

Susan Hiller 

By Night

London, UK: Tate Gallery, 2018

5.2 x 7.4 cm. 

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Part of the ongoing series Rough Seas, which Hiller has been producing since 1982, using found vintage postcards depicting the English coast and the sea. This edition features images of the sea taken at night, many featuring lighthouses, and many with unnatural or ghostly colours. 

The miniature postcards are presented in a cloth covered box lined with douppion silk, and are accompanied by a signed and numbered card. 

Produced as a fundraiser for the Tate, this work can be purchased from the publisher, here. 

Susan Hiller | Sisters of Menon

Susan Hiller 

Sisters of Menon

London, UK: Gimpel Fils, Coracle Press, 1983

[26] pp., 19.2 x 29 x 1 cm., softcover

Edition of 750 

First produced as an 8-panel work (four of them L-shaped, see below) using the process of automatic writing, this bookwork reproduces the spontaneous scribbling along with printed transcriptions, charts and analytic notes. The heavy grey boards of the covers are individually spray painted and hand coloured. The title was produced by Coracle for Gimpel Fils Gallery on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition between March and April of 1983.

SARAH LOWNDES: You have described the impetus for certain works as arriving 'by accident' and also described others, such as the process of automatic writing that later became the work Sisters of Menon (1972-79) as a transforming experience that 'catapulted me outside of conceptual art'. [Sisters of Menon began as a spontaneous experience of automatic writing which Hiller later analysed and annotated and mounted with four framed pages of her own commentary, to make a cruciform.] Your description of how certain works have developed implies there was something about these occurrences that was unpredictable, - but after this time, did you feel you could to a certain extent 'set up fate' by consciously becoming increasingly attuned to what some people might call 'irrational' possibilities?

SUSAN HILLER: Well, you see, I don't believe there's a difference between rational and irrational; I try not to get into these dualisms. I think that one of the luxuries of being an artist is that one is true to one's experience. Sisters of Menon pushed me beyond the boundaries of what was then considered reasonable or suitable subject matter. My work with dreams, which predates Sisters of Menon, already expressed an interest in fifty per cent of my life, and everyone else's life, that we ignore. And to an extent that tendency, which was ignored or thought to be outside of what was worth noticing, was reinforced by a commitment to feminism because they contained aspects of the world that were called, in a particularly denigrating way, 'feminine' or 'irrational'. As a female subject those terms were applied to me doubly when I expressed those kinds of interests in my work. So that became an important commitment for me, to proceed along those lines.

- Afterall, February 2011

Susan Hiller, RIP

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