...STORMY WEATHER......

...A couple of weeks or so we were in Madrid - I had gone primarily to see Picasso's Guernica  ( of which more in a later posting ) at the Museo Reina Sofia , but then wandered into the museum's then current exhibition ' Atlas - How to carry the World on One's Back ' , curated by Georges Didi - Huberman.

The exhibition itself was fascinating, collective ideas from a very diverse group of artists on cataloguing and listing the ' World '; very much a fan of Peter Greenaway's obsession with cataloguing , I found the entire group of works very thought provoking . My only regret was that the comprehensive exhibition catalogue wasn't available in English.

I was particularly drawn, however, to a couple of frames by the artist Susan Hiller , whose work I was unfamiliar with . Each frame consisted of a group of old English postcards - from the look of them pre-war - each being a picture of a rough sea crashing against a sea wall or flooding over a promenade. No people were visible, just the power of the rough seas . Each card taken in isolation was fairly unremarkable and would never have warranted a second glance , either in a postcard rack at a shop or on a market stall amongst other cards. Collectively , though , they very much worked as a group - I started to compare them ; the force of the waves , the different ways in which they were breaking , the different ways in which they had been photographed - and the way in which , much like water as wave

,  the collective power was far more than that of the individual. Each group of postcards was supported by a sheet of information , annotating location , date , type of card and any handwriting comments on the message side . All of the cards, it transpired , were from the south-west of England - Weston-Super-Mare, Ilfracombe, Torquay and smaller coastal resorts, and it was slightly disconcerting to come across these obscure pieces of decidedly english ephemera , memories of old english sea-side resorts , in an art gallery in Madrid ; the English sea-side postcard is very much a part of our collective national Psyche . All very fascinating.

So who is Susan Hiller ? - these pieces dated from around the mid-seventies , and to my knowledge I hadn't come across her before. Back in the UK I looked her up and found that - much to my surprise - she is currently the subject of a retrospective at Tate Britain , running until May 15th., and the couple of frames I had seen were just part of a much bigger collective artwork ' Dedicated to the Unknown Artists 1972-76 '. Working very much at that time as a conceptual artist , the work derived from her discovery of these pieces of cheap graphic ephemera of no particular merit and interpreting them through her background as an anthropologist.

The following web link from her web-site gives a far more detailed explanation than I could attempt...

http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-RoughSeas.  Suffice to say that I find her work fascinating and having purchased the Tate's exhibition catalogue am looking forward to seeing the show.

.......And having read the catalogue I then realised that I had even seen another one of her pieces earlier in the year , ' Measure by Measure ',  shown as part of the  ' elles@centrepompidou ' exhibition that we had seen in Paris in January. Three months, three different exhibitions , three cities , three different countries - someone out there wants me to look at Susan Hiller's work.