Susan Hiller: Recall
Until July 18; Baltic

Last night a friend of mine described art as “the opposite of denial”. That’s a good description, especially for the art of Susan Hiller. It’s as if she records us talking in our collective sleep, so she can play our inner voices back to us in the clinical light of day. Reaching beyond the subconscious secrets of a few individuals, Hiller reveals the truth beneath the surface of the western world.

Hiller moved from America to London in the early 1970s, having given up her job as an anthropologist. She said she wanted to be inside her activities, rather than watching from a detached standpoint. As a result she has spent over 30 years fixing her anthropological focus on the society in which she lives, and presenting her findings in a range of powerful ways.

Baltic hosts the artist’s biggest exhibition yet. And it needs to be big. Hiller is not the only one who is inside her activities; for the most part we are too. From the four-screen video installation on the ground floor to the massive new soundscape on the fourth, Hiller’s work physically embraces you.

In An Entertainment, it’s terrifying. You’re surrounded by slowed films of Punch and Judy on all four walls, complete with a spine-tingling soundtrack of screaming interspersed with interpreters coldly repeating lines from the show. At one point I found myself on my own in this dark room and the sense of supernatural violence, emanating entirely from a classic form of children’s entertainment, had me genuinely frightened.

Clinic is the exact opposite. Hiller has made great use of the huge, clean, white space of the fourth floor for this new commission, which includes over 200 personal accounts of near death experiences. As you walk deeper into the bright space, sensors trigger more and more voices to tell their stories. You can choose to experience the result as an abstract wave of sound, or you can home in on individual voices. Either way, the room is haunted by the living, and the result is uplifting.

You don’t need to believe in near death experiences, UFOs, group dreams or auras to appreciate Hiller’s art, although it explores all these things. They are part of our collective imagination, phenomena of our own making, and tell us something of our collective need for messages from the other side. They are more likely to be messages from the other side of our own conscious selves, like the automatic writing which fascinates the artist.

Hiller is at home in any format, from video to notebook and from computer art to antiquated display cabinet. Her work has curiosity value, serious meaning, and sensual impact. It can’t have been an easy collection to fit together, but curator James Lingwood has triumphed. The exhibition is an ascending voyage of discovery from the depths of darkness on the ground floor, through enchanted forests of sound and ideas half way up, to the liberation of Hiller’s latest work at the light-filled summit.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 16.05.04