Dear Friends and Colleagues
Susan Hiller
I have been working on a history of contemporary art and last week I got to a section where I had to say something about Susan Hiller and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she had recently died. I just need to say something about her.
I had hoped to meet up with her the next time we were in London as though we had met several times and I had written about her work – she was happy enough with one thing I wrote to reprint it in one of her books – we had not met for many years. Indeed, not since I had left England. I think we would have had a lot to talk about.
It was a shock to realise she was 78 when she died, I met her first at Matt’s gallery in 1980, she was unstitching an old painting of hers from the Sixties. It was a very minimal blue on white grid painting, if I remember correctly. We sat and chatted for quite a while. Susan liked talking. I found her a calm, but engaging person. She had a very nice smile.
She could be difficult though: in the Nineties she would not speak to me for two years because I didn’t mention her in a footnote to an essay – or because I did include her, I can no longer remember which.
Rummaging through my boxes of postcards I found several from her – mainly from the Dedicated to the Unknown artists.
On one, from 1985, unusually typed not hand written, she thanked me for writing about one of her shows. “It seems to have aroused some interest but I’m convinced I will never thrive here.”
It was good that she was wrong and in her later years she got better known and exhibited widely.
How strange for someone so concerned with other races, other languages, the peripheralised and the demeaned, that she had spent so much of her life in London, the heart of the old empire.
One of the last times I met her and she explained about her J street work, I said “I have known you so many years and never realized you were Jewish.” She laughed.
Yes, she was Jewish, but she was not per se a Jewish artist, nor an American nor an English artist. She was an artist for all peoples.
Best wishes
Tony
P.S. Next week we will go as promised to the Art Science Museum in Singapore and see the rest of the Minimalism exhibition.