Self-titled exhibitions come with a certain expectation that is unlike any other show. Its audience expects a totality; a glimpse through various facades, guises and stages of work to the person who made them. They are rarely so much a selection but more an all-encompassing collection, a Gesamtkunstwerk. Hiller often presents herself as the curator within individual works, for example ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artist’ 1972-6 in which she credits those photographers and postcard hand-painters of British seaside towns. However, there seems little thought given to the overall curation of this exhibition,. The good, the bad and the, quite frankly, ugly, have been indiscriminately lumped together.
I am constantly confused as to why the trend today seems to be for mothers and fathers to splash their newborn all over the internet (I am mainly talking about facebook here). Mary Kelly’s ‘Post-Partum Document’ still eludes me and a mother’s desire to want to exhibit her finest creation does not, unfortunately seem to have diminished. Perhaps it is a hangover from my mother who, in trying to boost the sales of her photographic business, sold a photo of me and her to the paper which later carried the headline, ‘Talking to your Child about Sex’. As a result, such works as Hiller’s ‘Ten Months’ 1976, in which she displayed documents of her pregnant self alongside typed-up journal extracts from the time, merely fill me with fear for that poor exploited lump, still too little to sign its consent form.
Hiller’s dream mapping and automatic writing generate a similar unease and a feeling of overindulgence towards their author as ‘Ten Months'. Less enamored was I still by Hiller’s recycled works. I was once told by a tutor that you should love your artistic disasters like an ugly child - I am still not sure where she was going with this, they may turn into something beautiful in the future? Like Tracy Emin destroying all her past works in her ceremonial burning while studying at the Royal College of Art in the late 80s, some things really are best relegated to collecting dust under the bed. If they were no good to begin with then I very much doubt that shredding them and hanging them upside down is likely to improve their appeal.
The works described above truly were overshadowed however by acts of brilliance. As one critic so aptly put, ‘It has taken decades for this American artist to grow out of her wordy cleverness and the terrifying results have been more than worth the wait.’ Ironically enough it was those works which utilise found images, objects and sound, appropriated to create new, open-ended meanings, that really caught the eye. In other words, her skill as an anthropologer, collector, media-combiner and curator overshadowed any act of creation. Hiller’s radical combinations of media, science and technology were really spectacular yet slightly tempered by their proximity to the soggy looking, shredded canvas of an earlier work. ‘Magic Lantern’ was one such stunning, hybrid installation in which three carousel slide projectors, set at slightly different distances created a mesmerising optical illusion. Equally visually and mentally appealing was ‘From the Freud Museum’ in which objects from Hiller’s own collection were paired in custom-made boxes, referencing Freud’s own collection of artifacts. In Hiller’s own words this evokes an alternative, ‘archive of misunderstandings, crisis and ambivalences that complicate any such notion of heritage.’
‘PSI Girls’ 1999, synchronised the moments of high tension in which women learn how to channel their telekinetic powers in popular films, seen through a series of coloured filters in both a powerfully disconcerting, yet humorous manner. Humour creeps into Hiller’s work from time to time with a welcome interlude to the dryness of her subject matter. ‘PSI Girls’ intermingles images from ‘Matilda’ alongside more sinister horror films. ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artist’, while crediting the unaccredited, also draws attention to a certain British preoccupation with bad weather.
All in all a mixed bag, yet is this what we should expect from a self-titled retrospective? For someone who is so obviously so selective within each separate work, this mishmash did not do her acute eye justice. The exhibition felt scattered, ill-advised and spilled laboriously into the corridor and an extension area. I must conclude that this creative curator has been badly curated. Perhaps the curation of the curation spoilt the creation!
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