Towards an Autobiography of Night

Location

Country: Italy
City: Rome
Place: British Embassy

In her early work with postcards, beginning in the 1970s, Susan Hiller took on the role of curator and collector, analysing hundreds of images of stormy seas from around the whole coastline of the UK by unknown photographers.

 

'Towards an Autobiography of Night' relates to Hiller’s seminal artwork 'Dedicated to the Unknown Artists' (1972-1976, Tate Collection), which consists of over 300 postcards that depict waves crashing onto shores around Britain, each one bearing the legend ‘Rough Sea’. Hiller subjected them, as she wrote in 1976, to a "methodical and methodological approach", tabulating such details as location, caption and vertical or horizontal format. The works were grouped according to these categories or types on framed boards and documented with a commentary, chart or map. For Hiller, these images represented the sublime landscape tradition in British art history, but also reflected  the way in which the UK chose to present itself to the world. Hiller’s work also serves as a tribute to all the unknown artists and photographers, by elevating these mundane and throwaway images to items worthy of care and consideration.

 

The grid formation, serial presentation and typed labelling clearly identify the work of an artist employing the language of conceptual art. In 'Towards an Autobiography of Night', however, Hiller introduces hand-embellished elements with gold ink – glittering moons and hand prints – connecting the strict conceptualism of her earlier work, with her later work that often introduced more playful or fantastical elements to her methodological approach. 

 

Another work related to this series, 'Addenda to Dedicated to the Unknown Artists: Addenda II, Section 10: Fronts' (1977), is also in the Government Art Collection.

Susan Hiller was born in America and trained as an anthropologist at Tulane University, New Orleans. After undertaking fieldwork in Central America and completing her PhD in 1965, she experienced what she has called ‘a crisis of conscience’ and abandoned a career in anthropology. From the mid 1960s she based herself mainly in London and she began her career as an artist in the early 1970s, with her first solo exhibition at Gallery House in 1973. Across four decades, she worked in a variety of film, video, installation and sound media, and her work has been exhibited widely, including a major solo exhibition of her work at Tate Britain in 2011. Her work is included in numerous international collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Tate Collection. She died in London in 2019.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

gold paint, paint, photograph (as object name)

Artist

Susan Hiller (1942 - 2019)

Title

Towards an Autobiography of Night

Date

1983

Medium

12 C-type photographs, hand painted with gold ink

Dimensions

height: 50.8 cm; width: 76.2 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Lisson Gallery, March 2022

Provenance

Lisson Gallery, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2022

GAC number

19096