Courtesy: Kunstverein München e.V., Pati Hill Collection, Arcadia University photograph: Sebastian Kissel Pati Hill, Photocopying Versailles ,1980–83, installation view, Kunstverein München. Removed from their original context and illuminated by the photocopier, the objects are alienated from their functionality, but the grid creates a systematizing structure, which evokes relationships between these ordinary items. Originally designed to reproduce text, the copy machine creates sharp contrasts, its glare highlighting every detail as well as the complexity of individual items, which include hair curlers, a shell, a rope, a fish, tea bags and a cassette. Placed in one corner of the exhibition space, the piece comprises 27 photocopies of ordinary objects composed in a grid. It’s hard to single out a highlight in this excellent small retrospective, but the work that best demonstrates the linguistic potential of Hill’s art is, arguably, Alphabet of Common Objects (1977–79). Pati Hill, Alphabet of Common Objects, 1977-79, installation view, Kunstverein München. Courtesy: Kunstverein München e.V., Pati Hill Collection, Arcadia University photograph: Sebastian Kissel Her writings, displayed in glass vitrines throughout the space, reveal Hill’s belief that the photocopier could serve to unite writers and artists. In Slave Days (1975), for instance, Hill paired photocopies of household objects with her poems. Although both Hill and Berlin used manuals to highlight the domestic labour of women but whereas the latter never released another such publication, ‘Informational Art’ was only the beginning of Hill’s persistent exploration of the combination of images and text. Largely targeted at housewives, these instructions reminded me of Lucia Berlin’s short story A Manual for Cleaning Women (1977), which came after Hill’s series: its first edition was not only illustrated with similar reproductions, but also describes the life of a housekeeper. For these first experiments with the photocopier, Hill reproduced images – including instructions for folding an ironing table and a guide to preparing cuts of lamb – from various manuals. Hill’s response came in the form of her series ‘Informational Art’ (1962–69), which is on view in the Kunstverein’s first gallery. Pati Hill, ‘Informational Art’, 1962–79, installation view, Kunstverein München. In her writing, Hill often decried the low value bestowed on women’s labour and, having temporarily abandoned her own writing career after the birth of her first child in 1962 – by which point she had already published three novels and a memoir – it was something she had directly experienced. With tasks such as fanning paper and removing paper jams being seen as more menial, these roles were usually assigned to women. When the first photocopiers were first introduced to offices in North America in the late 1940s, only trained ‘key operators’ had permission to use them. Combining roughly 100 exhibits from both her writing and artwork, ‘Something other than either’ at Kunstverein München is Hill’s first European solo exhibition since her death in 2014 at the age of 93. For the US artist and author Pati Hill, copying was more than just a useful tool – it was a basis for her artistic practice. The ubiquitous keyboard shortcut ‘command-C’ is used to copy text to a computer’s clipboard until it’s ‘pasted’.
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