“This stocky, unrevealing box stands 3 ft. high without stockings or feet and lights up like a Xmas tree no matter what I show it.” So begins an entry about the photocopy machine, typed on a small placard, by Pati Hill, the American artist and writer, who was the subject of a small yet thrilling survey exhibition at New York’s Printed Matter last fall. The entry continues: “[The photocopier] repeats my words perfectly as many times as I ask it to, but when I show it a hair curler it hands me back a spaceship, and when I show it the inside of a straw hat it describes the eerie joys of a descent into a volcano.” To Hill’s confusion and wonder, common objects become strange and beautiful. A hairbrush is the surface of a gloomy planet, teddy bears thrash in space, ribbons are bacterial colonies. In Hill’s hands, xerography is a pliable—and underappreciated—form of photographic art.
Yet Hill did not arrive at xerography until the mid-1970s, after she had lived multiple lives—as a model (in Harper’s Bazaar, no less), a writer (three novels, a memoir, a poetry collection, and short stories in the Paris Review), and a self-proclaimed housewife in France. The Printed Matter survey charted her life chronologically, assembling her varied creative outputs to render a portrait of someone who could be aptly described as an image/text engineer. Observing her life from its end, the viewer appreciates Hill as an artist in dogged pursuit of a language of her own—one that deployed word, sign, and image in equal measure.
The beginnings of from 1941. Another shows her in a polka-dot dress, with multiple outtakes presented in a makeshift grid. Perhaps the experience of modeling, of having her body molded in the light, informed her later work. There’s something of that posturing in the deconstructed rose petals of (ca. 2000), as if the act of being an object compelled her to transform other objects. As she later wrote in her memoir, modeling gave her the “peculiar feeling of ‘reality’… The reality of an object, maybe.”
