Susan Hiller (born 1940) is an ex-anthropologist who first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a radical, feminist artist with a particular interest in the workings of the subconscious. This year, she’s the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain, while Timothy Taylor Gallery is exhibiting a selection of recent pieces – testimony to just how influential her work has become (although whether you think that influence a good or bad thing may depend on your view of contemporary art’s fixation on found objects, forgotten voices, and the process of its own creation). Time has dulled the originality of Hiller’s work while taking none of the edge off its self-important tone [1]; still, her argument for the validity of subconscious experience is as vehement and urgent today as it ever was. Hiller explores dreams, memories and belief – the rich human mysteries that science denies at its peril.

Hiller’s desire to give voice to women and outsiders, and to draw attention to the subconscious, are part of the same project – a rehabilitation of people and ideas pushed aside by society’s dominant discourses. She uses found objects to mine our collective unconscious and to speak for people who are rarely heard. ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists’ (1972-6) is a collection of postcards of rough seas. It works by contrasting the drama of the painted scenes, the banality of the postcard form, and the objects’ elevation to the status of ‘art’. For ‘Monument’ (1980-1), Hiller photographed a set of tiles in a London park commemorating men and women who died in terrible accidents while trying to save others. Aside from resurrecting these long-forgotten heroes, ‘Monument’ introduces some welcome human colour into what is otherwise a rather earnest exhibition; we learn, for instance, of Sarah Smith, a pantomime artiste at Prince’s Theatre, who died on 24 January 1863 “of terrible injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion”. ‘The Last Silent Movie’ (2007) is an audio recording of speakers of around 400 dying languages: the capture of these last breaths means that at least the ghosts of these languages will now live on forever.

Hiller, then, is interested in art’s magical ability to invest power and meaning in the everyday. Since the 70s, she has ritualistically burnt and recycled her works. And she notes how art takes on sacred qualities, becomes fetishised as a source of transformative power. In ‘Home Nursing: Homage to Joseph Beuys’ (1969-2011) she exhibits a cabinet full of vials of “holy water” labelled “St Helen’s Well, Yorkshire” or “Lourdes” or “Rennes-le-Château”. While she’s clearly then more ambivalent about this process than was Beuys, it would seem that for Hiller artists have special powers, explaining why so much of her work takes the form of homages to, or channellings of, past artists.

There is, however, nothing supernatural to this process. Artists gain their power from their ideas, which have an influence on us and become absorbed into the collective unconscious. We must dream, and believe; the shape those dreams and beliefs take depend upon the culture we’re part of. As past visionaries saw gods and angels, contemporary witnesses see aliens: ‘Witness’ (2000), a galaxy of suspended speakers humming with individual accounts of UFO encounters, is also a cathedral of the faithful. ‘Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on Your Wall’ (1983-4), a living room arranged around a flickering flame on a TV screen, was inspired by newspaper reports of faces in TV static. The installation includes audio of the reports (including a TV Choice interview with FT’s own Jenny Randles), and demonstrates how these looped back into witness experiences: speculation that the faces were alien fed into subsequent tales of transmissions from orbiting UFOs.

Hiller is not saying that because the wiggly-antennaed little green men from outer space are products of our collective unconscious, rather than physically real flesh-and-slime entities, the experience has no value. On the contrary. The imagination is all-important, however unlikely or banal its phantasms. Hence the elevation of dreams to the status of art, in 1974’s ‘Dream Mapping’, in which participants slept outdoors in fairy rings and then wrote down their dreams (none of which, disappointingly, provided any evidence for travels to fairy land). Another technique Hiller uses to bypass the conscious brain and access the subconscious is automatic writing. ‘Sisters of Menon’ (1972/9) is an assembly of A4 sheets scribbled over with words that Hiller felt were dictated to her, suggesting the possibility of the unconscious, collective or individual, as a source of truth. And in ‘Magic Lantern’ (1987) she projects circles of coloured light onto a wall, exploring the way different colours affect how we feel.

‘Magic Lantern’ also incorporates an audio element, recordings by Konstantine Raudive of some of his EVP experiments. This tendency to see patterns – voices in static, faces in fires, UFOs in stars – is central to Hiller’s work, in which our quest for meaning is an important part of being human. It’s another way of looking at the world that has its own truth: the auras in Hiller’s ‘Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp’ (2008), a series of found portraits of people surrounded by light, are a way of conceiving of ourselves in a digital world; the figures in the ‘Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein’ series (2008), referencing Klein's iconic ‘Leap into the Void’ (1960), might not be physically levitating, but for an eternal second their spirit really flies.

For Hiller, belief in gods or spirits or aliens is an imperfect expression of a more profound truth rooted deep in the collective unconscious. None of her ideas will be new to the 21st-century Fort fan or Jungian, but that doesn’t make them any less important: art is a useful way to access this layer of sensed or felt meaning, which, too often, we simply poke at with the science stick. Hiller is a shaman for our times.

Susan Hiller, Tate Britain, 1 Feb-15 May. Admission £10 (£8.50 concessions). Open daily 10am-6pm. For tickets visit www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 020 7887 8888.
Susan Hiller - An Ongoing Investigation, Timothy Taylor Gallery, 3 February - 5 March.



Notes
[1] A series of pregnancy photos is split into lunar months, each annotated with less-than-illuminating diary entries. This, for example, for month two: "She must have wanted this, this predicament, these contradictions. She believes physical conception must be 'enabled' by will or desire, like any other creative process. (Pregnant with thought. Brainchild. Giving birth to an idea.)"