Bad At Sports

This week: Duncan, Brian, and Abigail Satinsky in conversation with Christine Hill at the Open Engagement conference, which took place from May 13 to 15, 2011 at Portland State University. Open Engagement is an initiative of PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program that encourages discussion on various perspectives in social practice. Christine Hill is an artist, musician, hobby librarian and the proprietor of Volksboutique, a former second-hand shop turned production facility operating out of Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. Hill's work proposes new investigations into mixed-media installation and performance. Examining contemporary forms of popular entertainment (for example, producing a television talk show in a New York gallery, in Pilot, 2000), imitating paradigms of elite advertising, and deploying businesses as art projects (a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, Volksboutique in 1996-97, a fully operable tour guide agency in New York in 1999) Hill investigates the proximity of contemporary ar