Surrealist Ghostliness

8 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts

201 8 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts The repressed within modernism is automatism. Susan Hiller, speech at West Dean College, 2005 Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum (1991–97) activates the archival dimension of surrealist ghostliness, which is made of two coexisting oppositional forces—one retrospective, one anticipatory—that pivot on an oscillating present moment.1 The pre– and post–World War II time periods brought together by the placement of Hiller’s work in Freud’s London house interrupt chronological time the way any archive does, looking backward and forward in time in an impossible contradiction, capturing the past as it slips away as vividly as a photograph in an insistently present moment. She connects ghostliness with Freud’s thought so that the forces typical of the archive may be understood in Freudian terms as motivated by the death principle, on the one hand, and by the life-affirming pleasure principle, on the other. Hiller’s postmodern collection of trash and tourist objects of little monetary value is emblematic of her feminist cold war generational concerns. Presented in archival boxes in the vitrines that line the walls of what was once Freud’s bedroom, it evokes Freud’s modernist collection of valuable ancient objects, true to his modernist interwar aesthetic. At the same time, Hiller’s collection works in opposition to Freud’s and simultaneously crystallizes the symbolic value of all collections. 202 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts With the creation of From the Freud Museum for the installation inaugurated in 1994 at Freud’s house museum in London (originally titled At the Freud Museum), Hiller consolidated the relationship with surrealism she had begun in the 1970s with her automatic writing experiments (see fig. 47). As each collection reflects a historical period refracted onto each other in that house, we see how our own early twenty-first-century sensibility remains interconnected with historical forces out of our control, an embodiment of surrealist ghostliness. Like Alechinsky’s 1980s paintings on nineteenth-century maps, Hiller’s installation from the 1990s similarly intersects a social dimension with an intensely personal one and sums up the human ways in which we continuously reassess the past in our evaluation of the present and our projection of ourselves into the future. Hiller’s display of boxes transforms her viewers into Freudian subjects, bringing out in us a deep, perhaps unconscious response to her demonstration of how the chance encounter with things can 47. Susan Hiller, From the Freud Museum (1991–97). The first version of the work as installed at the Freud Museum, London, 1994. © Susan Hiller. Collection Tate, London. Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts 203 be self-revealing. From the Freud Museum crystallizes key aspects of surrealist thought about automatism, the way objects materialize dreams, and the psychoanalytic function of found and made objects. Thus surrealist ghostliness refers to that aspect of human nature explored in depth by the surrealists that always makes out of one life a double life, our rational minds haunted by memory, our unconscious awareness of mortality, and the ways these psychic forces inform and enrich our lives, making us all into dreamers. In this final chapter I explore Hiller’s automatic creative process, her conscious use of ghostliness, and how she closed the twentieth century with references to surrealism’s repressed spiritualist ghost with a postmodern reconsideration of surrealism as Freudian. From Anthropology to Automatism and Art Born in Florida, Hiller moved to London after graduate study in anthropology at Tulane University and fieldwork in Central America. In the foreword to The Myth of Primitivism (1991) she explains, “A long time ago, when I was doing postgraduate work in anthropology, I was so intensely moved by the images I saw during a slide lecture on African art that I decided to become an artist” (1–2). Staring in the early 1970s, she began creating art that allowed her “to show what we don’t know that we know.” In May 1972, while on a visit to France, Hiller practiced automatic writing for the first time, later producing a work and an artist’s book based on the “scripts” she had written. The title, Sisters of Menon, is a reference to the voices that spoke through her: “Suddenly, I started to write and write and write” (in S. Morgan 39).2 At first she thought of this writing only as a form of drawing, as she focused...