The Spectator’s Andrew Lambirth on Susan Hiller

The art critic of The Spectator, Andrew Lambirth, recently reviewed (19 March) Susan Hiller’s exhibition at Tate Britain which I posted about last month. Although Lambirth seems to have been impressed by Hiller’s work in the past, it didn’t work well for him this time:

… ‘Witness’ (2000), a potentially beautiful and intriguing installation of 400 dangling speakers murmuring multiple reports of UFO sightings, makes the wrong impression here, and has none of the eerie magic it had when first I encountered it in The Chapel in Golborne Road, W10. In the Tate it descends into banal cacophony. Context, with Hiller’s work, is quite clearly of fundamental importance.
So much of this exhibition comes across as sanitised, portentous and oddly dreary. However, it is quite literary in conception — which encourages commentators to write reams of pretentious verbiage about it — and this tends to reassure the word-loving English. Text is everywhere, in fact, and art scarcely gets a look-in. This is the stuff of school projects blown out of all proportion. The exhibition does no service to Susan Hiller: clearly it should not be on show in the Tate.

His experience of the Hiller show led to wider thoughts:

Since pluralism in the arts became the order of the day, categories have been bursting at the seams, and the old definitions have lost validity. No longer does visual art denote painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing, but all manner of extraneous and tangentially linked activities as well. Film, installation and performance are crammed in under the same umbrella as Michelangelo, Dürer and Monet, when it’s painfully clear they have almost nothing in common with such illustrious forerunners.
In fact, it’s extremely doubtful whether much of the stuff that currently parades under the banner of art has any justification for being there. Quite obviously, all film and photographic work should be removed to galleries of film and photography, performance should go back to theatre whence it came, and installation could profitably be confined to empty office buildings, where much of it would blend in nicely. Our great national art museums and galleries should be kept for their original purpose — the preservation and display of art.

By this definition of art, one of Hiller’s works which impressed me, The J. Street Project, would be sent off to a cinematheque. Applying it more widely, presumably the Tate curators would have to turn down offers of works like Duchamp’s Fountain or Epstein’s Rock Drill, should the originals reappear.

So how to decide what should be in and what out? Another distinction between the non-arts like installation and performance and “art” might be provided by Lambirth’s comment “Context, with Hiller’s work, is quite clearly of fundamental importance.” Presumably this wouldn’t apply to Michelangelo, Dürer and Monet? But was the experience of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Washington in 1963 the same as in the Louvre, then or now? That loan is the subject of Lisa Liebmann’s article in Tate etc - worth a look, especially for Robert Knadsen’s photograph (which might or might not be regarded as art?).

After reviewing the Hiller show, Lambirth's article turns to what he calls a splendid exhibition of portraits in the Dorset County Museum:

"I haven’t seen the exhibition yet but the merest glance at the highly informative and fully illustrated catalogue (paperback, £15) makes it look fascinating."

- which could lead into another quagmire about the relationship between works of art and their reproductions, and what judgements on the former canlegitimately be drawn from the latter.

Tate Britain: 'Susan Hiller' and 'Watercolour'

Tate Britain is hosting a “major survey exhibition” of “one of the most influential and innovative artists of her generation”, Susan Hiller. These are bold claims which I am in no position to dispute. Being a boring old techie (but younger than Hiller), I’m uneasy with “knowledge derived from anthropology, psychoanalysis and other scientific disciplines” (other!), particularly if her work “confers status on what lies beyond rationality or recognition”. The language of contemporary art criticism being way above my head, all I can do is experience her installations, constructions, vitrines etc and work out my reactions to them.

Magic Lantern

I’m afraid I couldn’t get to grips with some of her work, though I readily concede that (the apparently highly regarded) Belshazzar’s Feast: the Writing on Your Wall, inspired by apparitions on television screens after broadcasting closedown, and Psi Girls, clips of telekinetic powers and the like being exercised, are beyond the rational. Some works, though, are intriguing and thought-provoking, which is enough to make any exhibition worthwhile. Venn diagrams will never look the same again after seeing Magic Lantern. Witness is, I think, inspired – even if the voices coming from the 400 suspended speakers are describing encounters with UFOs. What was Hiller’s best work for me is just outside the exhibition area (and so can be seen for free). The J. Street Project is a collation of the filming of every street sign in Germany now incorporating the word Jude, and it is a deep and troubling evocation of the banality of evil.

On the way to the Susan Hiller show, the visitor walks through the Duveen Galleries and encounters Single Form: The Body in Sculpture from Rodin to Hepworth. This complements (and helps compensate for) the modern British sculpture currently being offered by the RA (blog post last month).

Downstairs Watercolour was much busier than the Hiller exhibition, full of Ladies Who Gouache. Its intentions are “to expand our horizons” (landscape pun?) and “to challenge conventional understandings” of the medium. I learnt much and always welcome the opportunity to see works by Ravilious and Nash. No Hockneys, but in recent years his watercolours have been generously exhibited.

Alison Smith, the lead Curator of Watercolour, asks:

... Also, what we would like to explore in this exhibition, is the question – is watercolour a particularly British phenomenon?

Klaus Kertes in the Spring edition of Tate etc suggests:

Perhaps being surrounded on all sides by water intensified the British propensity for the medium.

I certainly don’t know enough art history to begin to comment seriously, and I expect that other dull souls have suggested before that it might be our climate. As the CIA World Factbook puts it: “more than one-half of the days are overcast”. Perhaps also the humidity makes application easier, and the translucence of the medium is particularly appropriate to the light levels most of the year in the British Isles.

Watercolour by virtue of its breadth and historical depth is a highly educational endeavour, and Tate Britain should be congratulated on it. Particularly so when we learn of the BBC Trust and management’s depressing intention for Radio 4 of:

Continuing to develop the general tone of the station away from formality and perceived didacticism towards spontaneity and conversation. (Service Review, paragraph 115)

Tate seem to have realised that what many people want is to engage with substance, as attendance at any Literary Festival makes clear. Thankfully, with Miro and the Vorticists to come, it looks as though Tate is going to carry on being didactic.