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