Autumn 2004- Gateshead: Susan Hiller at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Review C109 Recall brought together the most comprehensive collection of work by Susan Hiller yet seen in the UK. The title of the show could be read as a play on, and a challenge to, accepted notions of the 'career retrospective' as well as a direct reference to the artist's main method of enquiry in employing various examinations of storytelling, myth, faith, fiction, the subconscious or paranormal as triggers to question - if not always to definitively reveal - concepts of who we are. Given the period of time covered by the work on show over the three main floors of BALTIC's large exhibition spaces, the exhibition was illuminating enough in revealing how Hiller's practice has existed alongside, yet always slightly apart from or in the vanguard of, the prevalent movements, fads and critical fashions of the past three-plus decades. This is mostly a sign of the artist's individuality, but also a reflection of her significant presence in art schools and influence on several generations of artists' work, especially in the UK where she relocated from her native USA in the early 1970s. The work itself also plays with the implied chronology of the exhibition's subtitle, Selected Works 1969-2004 , the earliest work on show being Hand grenades , 1969-72, a series of paintings burnt and presented as labelled glass vials of ash. These are shown alongside the similar series Measure by measure , 1973-present (a glass burette of a burnt painting for each year since the work's inception), and Painting blocks , 1974-84 (paintings cut up and stitched into blocks and stencilled with their original uncut dimensions and dates of execution/transformation). Nowhere in the exhibition or the accompanying and extensive catalogue do we actually get to see an 'unadulterated' Hiller painting. Whilst straightforwardly readable as exercises in questioning the Western obsession - still ongoing today but more prevalent thirty years ago - with the objecthood of painting and a rebuttal of the attempt to understand them within a linear (art) history, these works also indicate that the artist, ever the master editor, is never less than fully in control as to how we will view her oeuvre.  | | Susan Hiller, Hand Grenades , 1969-72. Courtesy: Tate Gallery. © the artist. | Hiller's interest in the systems through which we attempt to make sense of ourselves and our lives were no more evident than in Clinic , 2004, the one new commission for the show at BALTIC. Following on from an earlier work, viewable on the floor below, Witness , 2000, a Babel of multilingual recordings of accounts from people around the world of recollections of extraterrestrial encounters, Clinic takes the phenomenon of the near-death experience as its subject matter. On entering BALTIC's vast and lofty Level 4 gallery you were dazzled (weather permitting) by the near-empty white space - walk into the light, indeed. Concealed behind cladding on each of the ten columns of the space, five left and five right, were two speakers, one top and one bottom, numbered with red LED-style flashing numbers, one to twenty. Suddenly, the vari-speed multilingual descriptions kicked into action, a sonic ping-pong of over 200 other-worldly stories that bounced and echoed around the gallery, before slowing to allow individual voices to the fore, before overlapping and building again to a crescendo and suddenly dipping to a final silence following a split-second of reverb. Both exhilarating and frustrating, the work's impact lies in the physicality of the way in which it plays cat-and-mouse with the senses as well as leaving us, like the rest of Hiller's work, no closer to reaching a rational explanation for what we are being presented with.  | | Susan Hiller, Clinic , 2004. Installation view at BALTIC. Photo: Colin Davison. © the artist. | Paul Stone is an artist and a director of Vane gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. Susan Hiller: Recall: Selected Works 1969-2004 , BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, May - July 2004. The exhibition tours to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, 15 October 2004 - 9 January 2005 and Kunsthalle Basel, 30 January - 27 March 2005.
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