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| Augustin Pajou Ideal Female Heads before 1806 terracotta Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Josesph Chinard Bust of Juliette Récamier ca. 1801-02 terracotta Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
" . . . what happened was I came across some newspaper articles about people who saw ghost images on their television set after close-down. There was a spate of these articles, and I collected them and decided to make a work which dealt with something that has been said many times (it was said first by Marshall McLuhan), that the television set now exists in everybody's front room as the fire used to, where you had this moving image all the time. It was the focus; people could sit around the fire and look into it and see pictures, tell stories, regenerate imaginative, creative thinking on the basis of this eidetic imagery. Television is exactly the same thing. I'm convinced that one of the sources of pleasure in television viewing is not to do with the programme, it's actually to do with that moving thing. We go back to the cave and the fire, it was important for our species. I think people are using the television set for something quite creative and subversive and original, and these newspaper articles were really about that . . . "
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| Joseph Chinard Family of General Guillaume-Philibert Duhesme ca. 1801-05 terracotta Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Joseph Chinard Portrait of a man 1787 terracotta Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
" . . . what happened to the people in the newspaper articles was made peculiar by the cultural interpretation and by the denial of the unconscious and the denial of what's actually going on when they looked at their television and saw ghosts. All the interpretations which they got were either, 'It's a flying saucer beaming messages', or 'It's a hoax'; it was always empirical, they always wanted to explain these things by saying there's something outside you that's making a picture on your television set. At no point did anyone say, 'Oh, isn't that interesting, the moving imagery has triggered off your imagination, in connection with certain anxieties you may have, and you have seen a picture that has spoken to you and prophesied the doom of the planet, as in the Bible.' No one said that. There was this total denial. I wanted to recreate that situation, to make it possible for everybody, including myself, to have that sort of visionary experience. I made a video which consisted of a fire, and the fire is slowed down – people see things in the flames – and the soundtrack consists of a reading of newspaper articles. I read them in a whisper, as though this were a dreadful secret that I'm sharing with everybody. There is also some improvised singing that I consider analogous to the kind of automatic writing that I do, which creates a sort of uncanny atmosphere. When it was shown on Channel 4, they told me that aside from the flying saucer contingent who were very enthusiastic, they also had a number of other letters . . . "
– extracts by Susan Hiller from a 1991 conversation with Andrew Renton at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London
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| Jean-Marie Nogaret Bust of a young woman 1802 terracotta Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Jean-Antoine Houdon Portrait-bust of Denis Diderot 1771 terracotta Louvre, Paris |
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| Jean-Antoine Houdon Portrait-bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1779 terracotta Louvre, Paris |
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| Philippe-Laurent Roland Portrait-bust of Thérèse-Françoise Potain Roland ca. 1782-83 terracotta National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse Fantasy-bust of veiled woman ca. 1865-70 terracotta National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse Bust of Mary, Queen of Scots ca. 1860-70 terracotta Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco |
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| Louis-François Roubiliac Portrait-bust of Francis Willoughby, FRS 1751 terracotta British Museum |
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| Aimé-Jules Dalou Mother and child terracotta ca. 1873 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Clodion The Surprise 1799 terracotta National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Clodion Offering to Priapus ca. 1775 terracotta Getty Museum, Los Angeles |