Skip to main content

Susan Hiller: an artist who chased ghosts – and took no prisoners

Her multimedia artworks dwelt on the persistence of the past and the phantoms of cultural anxiety, entertaining, challenging and terrifying viewers

You never knew what Susan Hiller was going to do next, and I sometimes think neither did she. Experiments in automatic writing, burning all her paintings, creating a museum collection of detritus, communicating with the dead. Her art was not programmatic, but driven by curiosity and an alertness to her surroundings.

She recognised that what an artist does happens in the context of place, and society, and the culture in which she finds herself. Hiller’s training as an anthropologist sharpened her view and provided something of her methodology, such as it was. She mistrusted objectivity. In her art, in her curating and in her teaching, she was full of curiosity, insight, integrity, humour and irony.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FWRrn3
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more