Susan Hiller
Dedicated to the Unknown Artists; Addenda III, Section R., The Rough Sea, 1976
22 vintage postcards mounted onto seven separate cards, each adhered to a backing board, alongside three maritime charts, also mounted on card and adhered to backing board. The lower card bearing the artist's signature in ink.
Presented in a plexiglass frame.
Presented in a plexiglass frame.
92 x 139.5 cms
36 1/4 x 54 7/8 ins
36 1/4 x 54 7/8 ins
270498
Further images
Provenance
Timothy Taylor Gallery, LondonExhibitions
Oxford, Museum of Modern Art,Susan Hiller: Recent Works, 9 April - 14 May 1978.
The current work is one of 14 works, each titled Rough Sea, the artist produced for one of her first major UK institutional exhibitions, the entire series being known as...
The current work is one of 14 works, each titled Rough Sea, the artist produced for one of her first major UK institutional exhibitions, the entire series being known as Dedicated to the Unknown Artist.
Adopting the role of artist as collector/curator, Hiller explains that in June 1972 she found the first Rough Sea postcard in a Brighton sweet shop, and in September of the same year found another postcard of a different image (but bearing the same title) in a shop in Western-Super-Mare. At that point she became aware of the existence of this popular set of pictorial formats designated by a precise phrase but with differing imagery. She decided to continue to source and collect these Rough Sea postcards, presenting them as art works onto boards, at times along side other maritime ephemera.
Subsequently it became impossible for her to say whether she had 'found' or 'made' the Rough Sea series, because the acts of noticing and finding coincided exactly with the process of selecting and combining. In this sense, in her mind there was no distinction between discovery and creation. The artist continued to produce new works in the Rough Sea series, across all media including painting, sculpture, film and photography which continue to explore themes first identified in Dedicated to the Unknown Artists.
In 1977 Hiller discussed the work in the following way:
"Dedicated to the Unknown Artists was designed as an exhibition piece with myself in the role of curator, collaborating with/extending the work of the unknown artists who created the Rough Sea ‘set’ of postcards. The ‘coincidental’ pairings of alternative descriptive languages – verbal and visual – are sustained as levels of presentation throughout the piece. While the charts may look like models of objectivity and the visual images like expressions of subjective internalizations, they lead to a series of paradoxes involving the unexpressed but intended vs. the expressed but unintended." (Susan Hiller quoted in Tate Britain 2011, p.76.)
The British Museum, which holds another example, refers to the origins of the series: "The first of Hiller's ‘Rough Sea’ postcards was bought at Weston-super-Mare and was struck by the particular character of English coastal resorts. She continued to buy postcards and she came to know the subject well enough to realize that ‘rough seas’, both the words and the scene, symbolised the English seaside. She also observed that at protected South Coast bays, spray and waves were airbrushed on to the benign seas of the original photographs."
Further reading
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool 1996.
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2011.
‘Second Sight’, Frieze, no.109, September 2007, https://frieze.com/article/second-sight-1
Adopting the role of artist as collector/curator, Hiller explains that in June 1972 she found the first Rough Sea postcard in a Brighton sweet shop, and in September of the same year found another postcard of a different image (but bearing the same title) in a shop in Western-Super-Mare. At that point she became aware of the existence of this popular set of pictorial formats designated by a precise phrase but with differing imagery. She decided to continue to source and collect these Rough Sea postcards, presenting them as art works onto boards, at times along side other maritime ephemera.
Subsequently it became impossible for her to say whether she had 'found' or 'made' the Rough Sea series, because the acts of noticing and finding coincided exactly with the process of selecting and combining. In this sense, in her mind there was no distinction between discovery and creation. The artist continued to produce new works in the Rough Sea series, across all media including painting, sculpture, film and photography which continue to explore themes first identified in Dedicated to the Unknown Artists.
In 1977 Hiller discussed the work in the following way:
"Dedicated to the Unknown Artists was designed as an exhibition piece with myself in the role of curator, collaborating with/extending the work of the unknown artists who created the Rough Sea ‘set’ of postcards. The ‘coincidental’ pairings of alternative descriptive languages – verbal and visual – are sustained as levels of presentation throughout the piece. While the charts may look like models of objectivity and the visual images like expressions of subjective internalizations, they lead to a series of paradoxes involving the unexpressed but intended vs. the expressed but unintended." (Susan Hiller quoted in Tate Britain 2011, p.76.)
The British Museum, which holds another example, refers to the origins of the series: "The first of Hiller's ‘Rough Sea’ postcards was bought at Weston-super-Mare and was struck by the particular character of English coastal resorts. She continued to buy postcards and she came to know the subject well enough to realize that ‘rough seas’, both the words and the scene, symbolised the English seaside. She also observed that at protected South Coast bays, spray and waves were airbrushed on to the benign seas of the original photographs."
Further reading
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool 1996.
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2011.
‘Second Sight’, Frieze, no.109, September 2007, https://frieze.com/article/second-sight-1