Susan Hiller

A legendary producer and his mild-mannered accountant face catastrophe when their sure-to-flop play unexpectedly becomes a success.

"Susan Hiller was born in the United States in 1940, and studied and worked as an anthropologist before becoming an artist and settling in London in the early 1970s. Hiller's startlingly original works are inspired by overlooked and unnoticed aspects of our culture, including postcards, dreams, automatic writing and first-hand accounts of encounters with alien life and near-death experiences. She has described her work as 'paraconceptual', situated at a meeting point between conceptual art and the paranormal. The results of her explorations are displayed in media as varied as artist's books, video, projections, drawings and large-scale installations. Comprehensive and extensively illustrated, accompanying a major solo exhibition, this book surveys the breadth of Hiller's long and fruitful career to date. Including a new conversation with the artist and contributions by leading critics, as well as a selection of previously published texts, this is the most thorough investigation of Hiller's achievements yet published."--Publisher's website.

Before the dawn of history mankind was engaged in the study of dreaming. The wise man among the ancients was preeminently the interpreter of dreams. The ability to interpret successfully or plausibly was the quickest road to royal favor, as Joseph and Daniel found it to be; failure to give satisfaction in this respect led to banishment from court or death. When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet dug up from a Babylonian mound where it has lain buried for five thousand years or more, the chances are that it will turn out either an astrological treatise or a dream book. If the former, we look upon it with some indulgence; if the latter with pure contempt. For we know that the study of the stars, though undertaken for selfish reasons and pursued in the spirit of charlatanry, led at length to physical science, while the study of dreams has proved as unprofitable as the dreaming of them. Out of astrology grew astronomy. Out of oneiromancy has grown - nothing.That at least was substantially true up to the beginning of the present century. Dream books in all languages continued to sell in cheap editions and the interpreters of dreams made a decent or, at any rate, a comfortable living out of the poorer classes. But the psychologist rarely paid attention to dreams except incidentally in his study of imagery, association and the speed of thought. But now a change has come over the spirit of the times. The subject of the significance of dreams, so long ignored, has suddenly become a matter of energetic study and of fiery controversy the world over.The cause of this revival of interest is the new point of view brought forward by Professor Bergson in the paper which is here made accessible to the English-reading public. This is the idea that we can explore the unconscious substratum of our mentality, the storehouse of our memories, by means of dreams, for these memories are by no means inert, but have, as it were, a life and purpose of their own, and strive to rise into consciousness whenever they get a chance, even into the semi-consciousness of a dream. To use Professor Bergson's striking metaphor, our memories are packed away under pressure like steam in a boiler and the dream is their escape valve.That this is more than a mere metaphor has been proved by Professor Freud and others of the Vienna school, who cure cases of hysteria by inducing the patient to give expression to the secret anxieties and emotions which, unknown to him, have been preying upon his mind. The clue to these disturbing thoughts is generally obtained in dreams or similar states of relaxed consciousness. According to the Freudians a dream always means something, but never what it appears to mean. It is symbolic and expresses desires or fears which we refuse ordinarily to admit to consciousness, either because they are painful or because they are repugnant to our moral nature. A watchman is stationed at the gate of consciousness to keep them back, but sometimes these unwelcome intruders slip past him in disguise.

Dream Machines takes up the theme of the transformative power of art, presenting works that propose the possibility of shifting the viewer's consciousness to induce reverie, hallucination, or transcendence. International and cross-generational, this book includes daily dream drawings, dream paintings, and real-life "dream machines," as well as photography, sound, video, and installation work that engage with mediumship and trance, intoxication, hypnosis, and out-of-body experience. Selected by the artist Susan Hiller and operating in the territory covered by her own work, Dream Machines is the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by distinguished artists. -Amazon

Collected talks, lectures, and conversations spanning 1975-1995.

Summary:"In a career that spans more than three decades, Susan Hiller has orchestrated a wide range of material including destroyed paintings, recorded voices, found objects, film footage and automatic drawings to produce a sequence of influential exhibitions and installations." "Susan Hiller : Recall surveys a singular career and sheds light on the artist's preoccupation with collecting and re-presenting cultural signs and artefacts, often related to dreams, visions and the disruptive power of the unconscious. Delving into aspects of contemporary culture from encounters with UFOs or Near Death Experiences to film footage of children with special powers, Hiller investigates forces and phenomena from 'the other side.'"--Jacket

"This collection brings together incisive reviews of artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hélio Oiticica, Yves Klein and Pierro Manzoni, and documents her interventions in current debates around the shifting roles of art theory ..."--Back cover.