Christine Hill

Works such as Volksboutique and Tour Guide? (1999) combine a performative element along with the artist providing a service and thereby gaining an audience in that way whilst also questioning the artist's role in society.

This idea of merging income and art occupations culminated with opening the Volksboutique-as-shop in 1996. It was a way of claiming autonomy. It both freed me from being anyone's employee, and launched me straight into Proprietor-status, and it absolved me from having to rely on the art system to provide me with an audience. It allowed me to build a base of operations, and work from it, which is a device I've held onto over years.

Really intersesting interview with Christine Hill here.

I'm also curious about her work which uses a kind of documentation of her work and life and which then becomes the work itself for example Minutes (2007 Venice Bienalle).

Initially, I thought of this book as a sort of end of year Annual Report, and was thinking of course about summing up.

"It is entitled Minutes (as is the entire piece for Venice) — referring to detail, minutae; the passing and accruing of time; and of course, taking meeting minutes, the tallying of progress.

The book as an object is patterned after a calendar/datebook. In considering what one could/should put in an exhibition like Venice, there seemed to be pressure for Big Project, and I sort of dislike the notion of the masterpiece or opus. I like the continuum, that the machine is humming, that things are ebbing and flowing insofar as industry is concerned, and that many factors contribute to the so-called Process. This is most easily evidenced by a glimpse into my own datebook. So, the piece for Venice speaks to that...how my (or the mind) is organized, and what things are in there, and they can be very small things, and that it is something about growth via accumulation. And organization. I like that haircut appointments reside in the same space as big deadlines, and so-called Events of Note."

Insight into Hill's view of her notebooks and work for Minutes "they illustrate my method of ordering and apportioning time and energy ‹ specifically addressing how my labor is divided between my daily life, my artmaking, and my responsibilities as a professor. These lists, these tallies, the organization of details in setting up projects start to become their own project. "