| Merchandise and customer service. These are the focus of Christine Hill’s current installation at Eigen + Art Gallery in Berlin. On the right-hand wall: a constellation of photographs depicting neighborhood shops, supplemented by information on the history of each of these family businesses, as part of her “Keep Shop Vendor Archive.” To the left: a square grid consisting of It’s a Pleasure to Serve You forms, each with a recognizable company logo, a drawing of an object or a motivational phrase, accompanied by Hill’s personal reflections noted in the margin. |  |
Keep Shop Vendor Archive – Anna Altman
Merchandise and customer service. These are the focus of Christine Hill’s current installation at Eigen + Art Gallery in Berlin. On the right-hand wall: a constellation of photographs depicting neighborhood shops, supplemented by information on the history of each of these family businesses, as part of her “Keep Shop Vendor Archive.” To the left: a square grid consisting of It’s a Pleasure to Serve You forms, each with a recognizable company logo, a drawing of an object or a motivational phrase, accompanied by Hill’s personal reflections noted in the margin. In the center: an open trunk, packed with colorful items inventoried for Hill’s own business venture, the Volksboutique.
The three pieces together, with the collective emphasis on production and inventory, pose the questions of how businesses function and what is necessary to create a successful business. Even such perfunctory questions, though, are handled by Hill with a surprising dose of whimsy and grace: the cheery but soft colored pencil drawings on her inventory forms, as well as her comments on the personal mannerisms and tendencies of each shop-keeper—one, she tells us, is camera shy—reveal a sensitive, thoughtful, as well as ebullient, entrepreneur and artist.
But around the gallery’s corner, another motive becomes clear. A table is stacked with slips of paper, each offering the chance for Berliners to suggest their own favorite shops that Hill can include in her “Archive.” This is not only a way to engage her audience, but to document a neighborhood, an atmosphere and the details behind various livelihoods.
The back room of the gallery delivers even more charm from—and, in fact, about—Hill herself. Here, the artist has hand-drawn maps of eight apartments and studios that she inhabited after moving from Berlin to Brooklyn and during the time in which she began her Volksboutique venture. The bright colors of her drawings and her neat but flourished handwriting display the same playful attitude, but this time turned inward, to her own thoughts and personal experiences.
Beside each drawing is a bullet-point list that boils down Hill’s concrete occupations—where she worked, how she got there, the logistical problems of this particular living space—as well as her internal explorations and growth. Comments like “Vicarious, possibly imagined sense of living on the edge” and “Space was very light and expansive but I don’t remember it as such” exemplify the probing emotional, but also tongue-in-cheek, slant of the information provided.
If the first three pieces of the installation seek to discover the internal workings behind business and industry—the nuts and bolts, but also the personal histories behind them—then this final segment clarifies Hill’s purpose. Her representations of people and items demonstrate an understanding that the objective—the numbers, the lists, the inventories—are always informed by the subjective: internal growth, relationships, the experience of being in a space, the expansion and contraction of time as it passes.
By documenting, in her quirky and delightful way, the details of her personal life during the time she worked on the projects now on display, Hill adds an additional, and very human, layer to her work. She provides a more complete picture of production and business, but also of empathy: she, too, has been through the experience of starting a functioning business; and though this business may partially have been in order to create her art, there was always the question of livelihood and the bottom line.
It is the simultaneous success of the multiple and indeed innovative lenses that Hill uses in each piece that makes the show as a whole so pleasing: this is not just a self-indulgent trip into her own psyche, but a reflective and honest account of herself, and of the tips of other peoples’ icebergs, as best as she is capable of representing them.
As a result, a particularly poignant bullet-point alongside Hill’s final living space—“Feel like a ‘real artist’”—allows her viewers to feel her triumph along with her. It is this playful irony and self-conscious that infuse
