Meanwhile Back at the Tate Modern

While at the Tate Modern I encountered an installation by Bruce Nauman, an artist I am familiar with and whose work I admire. His installation was in a room and consisted of 6 or 8 colour projections on the walls of video that he shot of the inside of his studio at night while the lights were out and all was quiet. Or was it? He used infrared film and several camera angles and captured the movements during the night of the creatures that inhabit his studio. As you sat on the benches in the middle of the room and gazed at a seemingly still image, you would suddenly hear a little sound behind you and when you turned you might see that there was a mouse running along the wall, or a moth fluttering about or a cat jumping up to look out the window. You had to sit for quite some time to see any movement. Impatient viewers were not rewarded. Anyone who stayed and waited patiently had a smile on their face at some point. (No the image isn't upside down. The projections on the walls changed from upside down to right side up sporadically!)
In reading about him on the wall of the gallery, I was reminded of his famous quote:
Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1964 with a BFA, and then the University of
California, Davis in 1966 with an MFA, Nauman had the simple but profound
realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was
doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and
less of a product.”
I feel a bit that way in London. If I am an art student, and I am in London at the RCA on an art scholarship, and I am wandering around taking photos and video, I must be making art!

It is always fun to discover an artist you have never heard of before and for me the artist that caught my attention at the Tate Modern was Susan Hiller, born in the USA in 1940 but has lived in England since the 70's. At first I almost skimmed over her work. I had seen so much and was feeling a little brain dead, but something compelled me to look a little harder and spend a bit of time reading and thinking about what she presented. So I took out my notebook and sat down and made some notes and spent some time really thinking about what I was seeing. It seems to be the only way I can understand some art that is a lot more demanding than eye-candy.
The installation was called "From The Freud Museum" The room was stark. Mostly empty. About 70' long and 45' wide. Along one wall was a showcase cabinet about 50 or 60' long. There was a long bench in the middle of the room with some children lying on it "pretending to be a sculpture" they told me. In the showcase were two rows of slanted shelves with cardboard boxes on them. The boxes were made of a thin but sturdy cardboard, natural coloured about 10" x 13" x 2 1/2" in size. They were displayed alternating between vertical and horizontal. The lid of each box was open above the box and something was pasted inside it - a photocopy text from a book, images, photos, magazine clippings, instructions, maps.
Each box contained an object or a collection of objects and the box had been constructed specifically to display, yet contain these objects. At first glance it looks like an archive of some kind. The lighting in the room is subdued as you would expect in a museum.
There are a variety of objects in the boxes, and on closer inspection you discover what they are: a book, a 45rpm record, ceramic heads, slides, an ouija board, stones, tubes with ore and crystal samples, dried flowers in plastic slide pages, toothpicks with shells glued to the ends, pot shards, devotional light bulbs, a tiny video image. What could possibly connect these objects? They vary from kitschy souveniers to collectibles. I notice that each object connects in some vague way to the piece of paper that is attached to the lid of the box. There is a tag accompanying each box that lists the contents.
(You can see another version of the installation at http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-FM.html as they wouldn't let me take any photos in the gallery)
The boxes and their contents were a puzzle to me. I read the text on the wall to try to figure it out. It describes her motivations. She had a show in the house that Freud used to live in and while she was there was amazed at all the rare classical and ethnographic art and artefacts that he had collected. This is her response to seeing his collection. This is her collection of cultural ephemera and personal mementos. There is an aura of memory that hints at meaning. The boxes are archeological collecting boxes. She sees this as a way of excavating, sorting, salvaging, naming, preserving something of her history. Ways of dealing with her "stuff" intrinsic to archeology, psychoanalysis and making art. The viewer is expected to make dreamlike links between the unrelated objects. The viewer is like a detective or psychoanalyst.
I look again. This time I notice that there is a moving image projected in the corner of the ceiling and wall at the end of the showcases. It is barely perceptible, like a ghost. It hovers and changes and shifts, glowing a pale green light like something you see in a show about haunted houses...or maybe like a dream.

" ... Susan Hiller has been a hugely-influential figure for a younger generation of British artists. She uses ephemeral, everyday objects, telling their stories and extracting new meanings from them, producing art which is both visually stimulating and emotionally compelling." (Tate Gallery, 1996)

" ... There aren't many artists whose every new work you would want to see and Hiller is one of them." ( The Observer, April 5, 2005)