'Witness' - Susan Hiller, Audio Sculpture, 2000
Susan Hiller Recall: Selected Works 1969-2004
DVD - Directed by Gary Malkin, Produced by the Baltic Library
This new insight to Susan Miller's work leaves me thinking about collecting, in her case often collecting accounts of social phenomena. In collecting there is a curation, a framing of accounts, which is then ciphered through the mind and hands of the artist, and with the aid of various media, and then returned to the public.
I enjoyed the way she spoke of subject matter vs. content. Iterating that they are not the same thing - and that confusion often limited people in reading contemporary art. A still life often contains metaphors (the moralistic content of las vanitas for example) How to read between the lines becomes crucial.
Also, another analogy in the presentation of work: the physical space between objects, the gaps, if systematically leveled the gaps between the works can read like the black spaces between frames of film, putting stills in motion creating a unified whole.
