- Venue
- Matts Gallery
- Location
- London
Comfort for those not comfortable with themselves.
Susan Hiller: Channels: 13 Feb – 14 April 2013
A show at once provocative and at the same time disassociating its central premise from obvious interpretation. It asks of its viewer to adopt the same objectivity as the artist purports to use in its making; to use the same presets contained within the Minimalist aesthetic paradigm as the artist does. It comes with its own disclaimer: “Channels is an artwork designed to engage us in a consideration of some of the gaps and contradictions in our modern belief system and collective, cultural life. It is not intended as a religious consolation nor ‘new age’ fantasy, but rather as a de-stabilising aesthetic device opening to the un-representable.”
A wall about 30 ft wide stacked up with variously sized TV video monitors: not flat screen, old technology, analogue. A long bench runs the length of the opposite wall. You sit down and wait.
Video noise like silken thread slowly draws down from monitor to monitor – the stack like a 20 ft high dry-stone wall of different colours and electronic textures.
The sounds are continuous. The noises, veering from hiss to white noise. Then a voice speaks, recounting its’ near death experience. Then another and another, overlapping. Each one with its own matching monitor.
The monitor screens are perfectly arranged to be an evenly distributed patchwork of purples, browns, pinks, greys and blacks. The sort of accidental colours non-calibrated video monitors have. At the start all have the ‘blue screen of death’, a term which originated when IBM developers found fatal error bugs in the computer operating system’s software during beta testing. The wall of monitors creates the impression of a ghost in many machines. Within the work the metaphor for the human consciousness is repeated countless times, bouncing the idea of dis-embodied thoughts around simultaneously as we hear the near-death anecdotes recounted by a mind recalling being alive as the body is off-line, waiting to be restarted.
Hiller uses her artistic skills to arrange the monitors so that they fit and fill the wall space. Her aesthetic sense also ensures that they are arranged in such a way that the colours of the screens are evenly distributed. Her patience and relentless attention to detail have garnered together these recordings.
The total impact of this show is to emphasise and savour life and being alive. I enjoyed “Channels” for the following reasons: Matt’s gallery is a space which presents work in a straight forward and unpretentious way. Hiller’s special relationship with Matt’s Gallery goes back to 1980 when she was one of the gallery’s first artists to show. This brings a feeling of continuity in a changing world. Hiller’s presentation of near death experiences factors in this comfortable relationship of the human occupation of inanimate objects, vessels, TVs via video recordings and of course human bodies. The human presence is a widespread world-dominating thing. Whether it continues when our physical bodies have worn out and perished is a question for debate and opinion. This exhibition is not asking us to do that.
This exhibition works without the artist’s title, or the gallery’s press release explanation. It is a piece of art that doesn’t need justifying or words to explain it, but they sit comfortably alongside it. Coining the term para-conceptual to label it is an interesting sales pitch. Bridging the gap between the paranormal and conceptual art…Hiller could be on to something we all need.
Jane Ostler, 24 February 2013
