On the trail of the outlaw cowgirl

A critical essay published in the catalogue accompanying a major show of Susan Hiller’s work at the BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, Austria. The essay considers the interrelationships of humour, psychoanalysis and feminism in Hiller’s work. It asks whether the humour in Hiller’s work may be characterized as cynical in the philosophical sense. It goes on to associate Hiller’s authorial persona with the figure of the “outlaw cowgirl”, and suggests that the full challenge and disturbance of certain key Hiller works relies on their “outlaw” character: at times they may operate by revealing the potential fascination of the unethical, rather than by reiterating ethical norms. From this the essay poses a more general question about the tendency of some criticism to wish to characterize “radical practice” as emollient rather than destabilizing and problematising.