Lisson...ON AIR Lisson...ON AIR

Barbican Talk | Artist Garrett Bradley in conversation with Ekow Eshun | Friday 14 Oct 2022

Where It Came From by Lisson...ON AIR

A response in sound by Liz Gre to Your Name, A Familiar Whisper

British artist Ryan Gander discusses a new body of work related to culture, time, mortality and the inability of language to describe the full range and despair of our current human condition. In each work in this trilogy of sculptural installations, an animatronic mouse appears from the debris of a hole in the wall to philosophise, commanding the room with its tiny voice and inviting the visitor to kneel down to hear what it has to say.

This special edition of the Lisson podcast ON AIR, entitled ‘Voices’, is dedicated to the artist Susan Hiller, who died earlier this year, aged 78. Hiller’s was a unique voice in contemporary art over the last five decades and succeeded in distilling many important truths and posing enduring questions about belief and humanity, often using the speech or the impressions of others, many of which were seldom heard.

While a memorial is being held at Tate Modern in the same week as this podcast is being released – as is a presentation of important early pieces, staged in a solo booth at the Frieze Masters art fair – this episode calls on many of her friends, colleagues and admirers from all over the art world to share their memories and interpretations of her life and work.

Among these recordings are interjections from Susan Hiller herself, taped at many live panels and conversations held over the last few years, including at Tate Liverpool, Frieze Art Fair, Art Basel, Lisson Gallery, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Model in Sligo, Ireland, as well as for Resonance FM, Slade School of Art, and Hiller's alma mater of Smith College in Massachusetts.

Our thanks go to the full list of contributors who contributed to this hour of discussion: Robin Klassnik, founder and director of Matt’s Gallery; Ann Gallagher, the director of Collections for British Art at Tate; Lynne Tillman, novelist, author and art critic; James Lingwood, the co-director of Artangel; the psychoanalyst Darian Leader; art historian and critic Jörg Heiser; John C Welchmann, the Professor of Modern Art History at the University of California, San Diego; Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries and the British artist Mike Nelson.

Brooklyn-based Spencer Finch recreates or approximates many different phenomena, both manmade and natural, visual and physical. Poetry is a great influence on his work and even a model for creating forms, experiences and installations that are as succinct and evocative as a string of words seemingly effortlessly stitched together, but to great effect. In this conversation with Mackie Healy, recorded in his studio in Gowanus, New York, Finch discusses his discovery and love of Dickinson’s work alongside that of WH Auden and James Schuyler among others.

In addition to being an artist-in-residence at Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Finch has in the past made many homages to her poetry including the short verse, Before I got my eye put out, for which he measured the sunlight in her garden and recreated the effect of a passing cloud by means of fluorescent tubes covered in gel and suspended theatre filters. The resulting work is entitled Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004) (2004). He also created a monumental public work of coloured glass panels for the Morgan Library and Museum’s Gilbert Court, titled 366 (Emily Dickinson’s Miraculous Year) commemorating the year 1862, in which Dickinson completed 366 poems in 365 days. Although all of her 1,800 poems were published posthumously, Finch still consider Dickinson a rich archive of ideas, as well as an important moral guide: “Almost all of my titles of the past five years come from Emily Dickinson, it is an endless source.”


Poem excerpts:

WH Auden, The Shield of Achilles (1953); The Cave of Making (1965)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), There's a certain slant of light; She sweeps with many coloured brooms; This is the land the sunset washes; The grass so little has to do; The outer from the inner; The brain is wider than the sky; A bird came down the walk; If I can stop one heart from breaking