'Life Before and After Susan Hiller' - Frieze Magazine

In a new feature for Frieze, writer Lynne Tillman reflects on her longstanding friendship with Susan Hiller, recalling the artist’s intellectual curiosity, generosity and enduring influence on her life and work:

“In the early 1970s, Susan and I became close, discussing art, film, writing, and talking about problems with friends, problems conceiving and making any kind of art. She took my wanting to be a writer seriously and told me I was a writer, when in fact I couldn’t finish anything. She insisted I was, anyway.

I often visited their flat, but can’t remember where I lived then. When I first knew Susan, I was drifting, and Susan seemed to be what I wasn’t, an adult with an adult life, a home and marriage, a stocked refrigerator and cooked home dinners. Susan was a gracious host, always offering me tea and a biscuit, as the English do, adding, ‘It’ll make you feel better,’ so I became a tea drinker. One Christmas, Susan made trifle, setting tiny, shiny figures into the somewhat translucent, wobbly pudding. I’d never seen one before, and she loved its silliness.

We listened to Van Morrison’s songs, and whenever ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ played, I felt David’s love of her – she was his brown-eyed girl. Morrison’s songs played so often in their flat, I associated his sound with them, Notting Hill, London and my time there.

Our conversations ranged. Susan was a great reader and intellectual. She might be reading novels by Doris Lessing and Jane Bowles – as was I – and a history of something, along with philosophers P.D. Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff. I read the mystic Gurdjieff because of her, the almost fanatical and magical devotion of his followers fascinated me. Susan didn’t disown novels, and wasn’t suspicious of narrative’s allures, when from the 1960s it was claimed that novels didn’t provide ‘information’. She was enlightened and knew ‘information’ was embedded in imaginative work.

Feminism then, generally and in the art world, was an irritant – politics in art, never.”

Read the full piece here.

Image: Susan Hiller, Rough Waves Dreaming, 2015. © Estate of Susan Hiller/DACS, Courtesy Lisson.