SUSAN HILLER at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (401 Richmond West), to November 26. 416-591-0357. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Susan Hiller has an impressive resume of pioneering works in a variety of media, including painting, video, installation, artist books and photography.
The influential U.S.-born, UK-based conceptualist and feminist trained as an anthropologist and invests her explorations of culture, history and the psyche with rich layers of meaning. Her work is a perfect tonic for the dry intellectuality, obscure art-world references and inside jokes that often prevail in conceptual art.
Though The Last Silent Movie, the 2007 installation mounted at Prefix, is visually austere, it offers a deep experience. Chairs are set up to view what’s sort of the opposite of a silent film: audio of field recordings in 25 extinct or endangered languages, with English subtitles on a black screen but no visuals.
After the name of each language flashes onscreen, speakers may repeat a list of words as if giving a lesson or offer small snatches of conversation mixed with English. Storytellers and singers evoke the oral transmission of lost cultures others testify about colonial efforts to eradicate their languages.
One language consists entirely of whistles translation is no longer possible for another. A powerful sense of communal loss emerges as we listen to these disembodied voices and try to imagine the worlds they inhabited.
On the opposite wall, Hiller places a grid of prints of oscilloscope representations of a phrase from each speaker. Without the human voice, the prints have no emotional hold on us. Neutral technology, Hiller seems to suggest, now preserves these words, yet it’s also one of the forces that destroyed these minority tongues and communities.
Paradoxically, Hiller has chosen to produce these prints as etchings, though their clean surfaces lack the texture and linear spontaneity we usually associate with the printmaking medium. Perhaps she is saying that, although spoken language and art persist, when a technologically mediated culture levels out our diversity, the dehumanizing, bland uniformity that results impoverishes us all.
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