186 posts on the Instagram account christopherlghill are one part of Christopher LG Hill’s current exhibition, Meaningless is more. This online stream has been doing a lot of heavy lifting as the work depicted in the larger gallery at Conners Conners is physically inaccessible to visitors because of the COVID-19 restrictions. I have not “seen” the show. Distance is collapsed, of course, by documentation. I get the sense, however, that this is not the point of the exercise. There can be no documentation of work that solicits its documentation to instantiate itself as art. Here it is both documentation and not, art and not art.
Looking at Meaningless is more, I’m reminded of something Erika Balsom wrote recently about Karl Rove’s pejorative description of US-liberals as members of the “reality-based community,” with imagined communities instead called into being through media. Installed at Conners Conners from early August, the steady stream of images of the exhibition that Hill has seemingly taken himself and uploaded to various locations on the internet—emails, blogs, Twitter, as well as his Instagram—has not only kept Meaningless is more in the minds of Hill’s followers, but called an imaginary community into being. This community is perhaps identified as Tumblr, millennial or otherwise “online”. It’s a network that dutifully “likes” the posts, comments occasionally, uses emojis freely.
Dedicated to the memory of John Nixon (1949-2020). Giles is a writer and researcher of film and media art histories.
