Sunday, August 4, 2019

Pati Hill at Essex Street


(link)

"the drudgery of adult administrative duties and the messy thrills of high-school collages and punk zines." Erotic photographic frottage against bureaucratic method. Like Bacher's xeroxes, they imply the noise, entropy and dust to which they, their objects, will return.  The photograph is the object's loss. Inherently nostalgic. "Inherently elegiac" The ghosts that photography threatens.

The PR wants to reiterate that these predate Pictures appropriation by some years. And, connectedly, Hill's ex-husband's gallery had been showing Sturtevant since '65. And like Sturtevant's consistent reiteration that she was not appropriationist and thanked the pictures gang for their providing a "negative definition." What she was not. Regardless of who was first. The point being a negative definition and that while the Pictures gen treated the world as image (available for all forms of permutable misdeeds), Hill's 1:1 copying seemed far more interested in the objects and their traces, not inherently its theft. Far more Gonzalez-Torres than Sherrie Levine.