August 7, 2004
Short essay about Christine Hill
Here is the text of a short essay I wrote for the debut issue of Work magazine. The article is also archived here on BrianSholis.com.
It’s by design that Brooklyn-based Christine Hill is seated behind a desk in the accompanying photo. An unusual theme among contemporary artists, “work” is both subject and object of Hill’s multifaceted practice. Over the past dozen years, she has assumed the role of receptionist, shopkeeper, rock star, street cleaner, lecturer, tour guide, television talk show host, and—all along the way—archivist, pursuing a defiantly individualist path through an art world that hasn’t always known what to make of her.
Since 1996, Hill’s efforts have taken place under the rubric of Volksboutique, which started in East Berlin as a secondhand shop-slash-social space and now operates as an “organizational venture,” incorporated in Germany and New York State. What unites these disparate activities, along with the Volksboutique name, is a disciplined, self-sufficient, and hands-on approach: the artist is involved in all aspects of her productions, no matter the scale. She is a rigorous organizer, assiduous recycler, and unfaltering performer. She is also meticulous about aesthetics, and has developed a mix of 1950s American corporate optimism (“Make the most of what you’ve got!” reads one poster) and 1970s East German industrial functionality, both curiously filtered through a DIY sensibility whose implements include lots of rubber stamps and antiquated machinery.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, conceptual artists dematerialized the art object— to borrow the phrase coined by Lucy Lippard, who has also written about Hill— and Volksboutique is a significant furthering of that investigation, wherein the “work” is not only a noun (the object), but also a verb (the act of making). For Hill, the two are as inseparable as “life” and “art,” and gallery visitors will almost invariably find Hill working full-time in her exhibition spaces, preparing for her next project while the current one is on view. Such was the case with “Home Office,” her autumn 2003 solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. The central objects of the exhibition were Portable Office Prototypes: a collection of five custom-designed faux-antique steamer trunks, each outfitted with the accoutrements necessary for Hill to execute different tasks (reception, accounting, public relations, production, and management) in her one-woman enterprise. Appropriate outfits, desk accessories, and nametags accompanied each persona. She conducted business in the front room while exhibition documentation and an array of models for future projects filled the other. My first meeting with the artist (as Christine E. Hill, office manager) was at this desk; appropriately, I had an appointment.