Goings On | 02/04/2019 - Franklin Furnace

Goings On: posted week of February 04, 2019

CONTENTS:

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Susan Hiller, FF Alumn, In Memoriam

1. Stephanie Brody-Lederman, FF Alumn, in The Independent, now online
2. Maya Ciarrocchi, FF Alumn, at the Gallery at the 14th Street Y, opening Feb. 7
3. Buzz Spector, FF Alumn, at Washington University, St. Louis, MO, thru June 6
4. Mark Bloch, John Cage, Christo, Rimma Gerlovina & Valeriy Gerlovin, Geoff Hendricks, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dieter Rot, FF Alumns, at Emily Harvey Foundation, Feb. 22
5. Liliana Porter, FF Alumn, at Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, opening Feb. 8
6. Becca Blackwell, FF Alumn, receives Joe’s Pub Working Group honor
7. Joni Mabe, FF Alumn, at burnaway.org now online
8. Laura Lappi, Warren Lehrer, Jodie Ann Lyn-Kee-Chow and Kanene Ayo Holder, Judith Sloan, Jaimie Warren, FF Alumns, receive Queens Council on the Arts Grants 2019
9. Eve Andrée Laramée, FF Alumn, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Feb. 21
10. Mary Schmidt Campbell, at Revolution Books, Manahttan, Feb. 22
11. Dominic McGill, FF Alumn, at Dépanneur Wines, Brooklyn, Feb. 12
12. David Wojnarowicz, FF Alumn, at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Germany, opening Feb. 8
13. Mira Schor, FF Alumn, at Museum of Art and Design, Manhattan, Feb. 14
14. Mira Schor, FF Alumn, to receive Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Manhattan, Feb. 16
15. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumn, at Neighborhood Shopp Casa Boricua ISC, The Bronx, thru May 2019
16. Dread Scott, FF Alumn, receives Chamberlain Award for Social Practice, and more
17. Kathy Westwater, M. Lamar, FF Alumns, at New York Live Arts, Manhattan, February 14-16
18. Jerri Allyn, FF Alumn, at the Situation Room, Los Angeles, CA, Feb. 9
19. mAgdalen Wong, FF Alumn, at Fresh Window Gallery, Brooklyn, opening Feb. 8
20. Ann-Marie LeQuesne, FF Alumn, at AC Institute, Manhattan, Feb. 8
21. Elise Engler, FF Alumn, at College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY, thru Feb. 23

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Susan Hiller, FF Alumn, In Memoriam

Please visit the complete illustrated articles linked here (text from The Guardian only follows below):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/obituaries/susan-hiller-dead.html

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jan/30/susan-hiller-artist-conundrums-vivid-and-intriguing

The Guardian
January 30, 2019

Susan Hiller: an artist who chased ghosts – and took no prisoners

Her multimedia artworks dwelt on the persistence of the past and the phantoms of cultural anxiety, entertaining, challenging and terrifying viewers

by Adrian Searle

You never knew what Susan Hiller was going to do next, and I sometimes think neither did she. Experiments in automatic writing, burning all her paintings, creating a museum collection of detritus, communicating with the dead. Her art was not programmatic, but driven by curiosity and an alertness to her surroundings.

She recognised that what an artist does happens in the context of place, and society, and the culture in which she finds herself. Hiller’s training as an anthropologist sharpened her view and provided something of her methodology, such as it was. She mistrusted objectivity. In her art, in her curating and in her teaching, she was full of curiosity, insight, integrity, humour and irony.

Susan Hiller, artist who explored the paranormal, dies aged 78

“Whatever catches my eye could be the starting point for a work,” she said, “and my commitment to the remaindered, rejected and overlooked things and ideas we collectively create, can and has been read metaphorically as a commitment to bringing into visibility marginalised social and political others.”

Hiller sometimes positioned herself as a “second wave conceptual artist”, and her art was always distanced from the dour, visual Puritanism and polemically narrow – as well as largely male – conceptual art world of the late 1960s and early 70s. But her appeal reached far beyond the hardcore fans of conceptual art – even though Ludovic Kennedy described her as being part of the “loony contingent” of video artists.

“To be a woman and an artist is a privileged position, not a negative one,” Hiller said. “When I speak of being a woman artist, I’m suggesting a position of marginality is privileged. If you are marginal, you know two languages, not just one. And you can translate and bring into language insights that have been previously unarticulated. So I consider, like being a foreigner, being a woman is a great advantage.” She never shied from complications.

Several works for me stand out. If I say they are memorable, they are themselves also acts of remembering, or re-enacting memory. In her 2007 The Last Silent Movie we watch a black screen. Subtitles provide the only image, the translation of recording of speakers of vanishing languages from all over the world. Hearing these last speakers of Manx, Ngarrindjeri, Potawatomi, Kora, Xokleng and dozens of other disappearing languages (some now lost entirely, apart from their preservation as archival sound recordings) is immeasurably sad. It tells us something about the narrowing of the world, about exclusion and extinction and the homogenisation of cultures.

The 2002-5 J Street Project began on her first visit to Germany on a DAAD scholarship, when she found herself on Jüdenstraße in Berlin. This led her to cross and recross Germany photographing and filming every street sign and location still prefixed by the word Juden (Jew). She located 303 Jüdenstraßes, Judengasses and Judenwegs, back alleys and country lanes, city streets and unmade paths.

Susan Hiller, 75: ‘Self-doubt is always present for artists’

Birds sing. Trucks rumble by, people go about their everyday lives. It rains, and there’s a gorgeous sunset. The camera keeps seeking out the street and road signs. The film, and attendant photographs and book, dwell on the persistence of the past. “Haunted,” I wrote after first seeing the work, “is the only word.” More than a coda to the Holocaust, it is a portrait of Germany in the early years of the 21st century, and to my mind one of the best works of the new century.

“All my work deals with ghosts,” Hiller once said. The ghosts were sometimes real, but mostly the phantoms of cultural anxiety. Hiller reworked the Punch and Judy show into a terrifying video installation, orchestrated commercial film footage of young girls with psychokinetic powers, and filled a room with dangling amplified speakers, like a swarm of flying saucers, each broadcasting first-hand stories of alien abductions. She worked with the experiments of Latvian psychologist Konstantīns Raudive, who believed that tape recorders left in soundproofed rooms could pick up the voices of the dead – including Winston Churchill and James Joyce.

Hiller had a great touch with all this material, making all the conundrums vivid and intriguing. Rather than unmasking enigmas, she unhinged us, entertained and terrified us, and left us with questions. “The meaning of art is collaboratively formed in the relationship between viewers and works,” she once observed. “A major factor in all the work I’ve ever made, it seems to me, is the designation of spaces where viewers and readers can experience their own roles as active participants – collaborators, interpreters or detectives. Not editing out and not forcing strange juxtapositions or unanswered questions to conform to theory is an aspect of my style, almost a signature.”

Hiller wrote brilliantly, acerbically, incisively, critically. She was also a great teacher, provocative and challenging. Briefly teaching beside her at the Slade in the late 1980s, I felt as much scrutinised as any student. In conversation and in public talks, she took no prisoners. On Tuesday, recalling Hiller, the artist Tai Shani tweeted that “I admired and was intimidated by her, and very, very much respected her work and her ways. Susan once very well advised me: ‘don’t be scared of being a monster.'”

Hiller cared very much about getting things right, and believed in art’s seriousness, without ever becoming pompous or humourless or inaccessible. She once confessed a long-standing wish to blend art and science, poetry and analysis in her work. She did all that, and a great deal more.

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