Tag: collection

Susan Hiller, From The Freud Museum, box 0003

“In From the Freud Museum, box 003 Panacea/cure (filed, 1991) (fig.5) focuses on the eighteenth-century mystic Joanna Southcott, a farmer’s daughter who acquired a large following thanks to her prophecies and her alleged pregnancy with the new Messiah at the age of sixty-four. In 1919 some of her followers formed the Panacea Society, according to whom Southcott had left a sealed box of writings to be ritually opened by a public convocation of all twenty-four bishops of England and Wales. The box is believed to contain a panacea, a universal cure that would revoke the sin of Eve and whose opening would usher in a new order. The bishops refused to gather together and open the box, despite repeated invocations by the Panacea Society, who took out annual newspaper advertisements urging them to do so up until the 1990s. Hiller’s box includes a copy of one such advertisement on the inside of its lid, alongside a biography of Southcott annotated and ‘extended’ by the artist, who added to it a bunch of dried flowers which she picked at Southcott’s grave in London. Hiller originally ‘collected’ the fragments of Southcott’s story when she was researching paranormal pregnancy for 10 Months 1977–9 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), a series of ten composite photographs and texts exploring the implications of human reproduction for female subjectivity. Like Southcott’s pregnancy, the promise of her boxed prophecies never came to fruition: according to Hiller, ‘The moment of opening the box, of disclosing its revelation and (perhaps) bringing a new world into being, remains in abeyance, maybe forever.’30 Yet the legend of the farmer’s daughter-prophetess lives on in one of Hiller’s boxes, to be (re)discovered by each viewer.

The unanswered call of Joanna Southcott and her followers, commemorated in and perpetually disseminated through From the Freud Museum, captures something essential in this work and Hiller’s practice in all its manifestations: ‘an extreme tolerance for the unknown’31 and the unknowable; an unflinching commitment to unsettling the known; and a defiantly ‘reciprocal sympathy’ with all those who dare question ‘the obscurantism of educated opinion’.32 From the Freud Museum releases Freud’s contested legacies from the clinic, the museum and the gallery into sites of cultural and social possibility, where the unconscious activates a visionary politics.”

—-An Extreme Tolerance for the Unknown: Art, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Occult by Alexandra Kokoli