no borders, no dangerous goods, no matches, no live organisms and animals, no flammable liquids or solids, no aerosols, explosives or corrosive

no borders, no dangerous goods, no matches, no live organisms and animals, no flammable liquids or solids, no aerosols, explosives or corrosive, no artwork titles or year of production, no institutional funding, no artist fees, no committee… no worries. So goes the exhibition title and list of things not included in the current group show at Endless Lonely Planet, a new space run by Christopher LG Hill, located on level six of the Nicholas Building in the CBD. Recently leased by Hill, it is a single room that sits in the inner section of the building. At this stage level six feels to me like an old familiar sharehouse — so for those similarly acquainted, it’s a space that Caves gallery occupied a few years ago, just down the hall from a favourite bookstore of Melbourne art-nerds, World Food Books.

Visiting last Saturday, I was greeted by Hill, who was seated in the corner with a little cushioned mat at his feet. It was because of the bare concrete floor, he told me, which made sense. He has been regularly facilitating group exhibitions like no borders, no dangerous goods for what is now two solid decades. In an early interview with Brad Haylock published in un Magazine 6.2 (2010), Hill frames the group exhibition as a fundamental part of his activities as an artist, citing the emergence of this practice from his 2006 exhibition Omnipresents, held at Gertrude Contemporary, where he built infrastructure to both physically and relationally support artworks made by dozens of his contemporaries. The list of artists was appended by the phrase “and many, many more…,” a now-characteristic strategy that meant the possibility of more participants remains open even after the exhibition goes up. This rolling cast of artists engaged by Hill, some recurring and others just once or twice, gives us an idea of Hill’s approach to organising in both a practical and conceptual sense. Exhibitions seem to emerge as momentary, contingent, public manifestations out of the always-churning activity of art making.

This sense of a constant, barely differentiated flow of art, images, and objects is consistent across the broad range of activities undertaken by Hill. This includes the production, compilation, and making-public of music, performance, and publications, as well as found-object sculptures and images. Most of these activities include contributions from other artists and are usually exhibited at artist-run galleries, online on blogs or Instagram, or offsite. Endless Lonely Planet, as it happens, is also the name of Hill’s publication imprint and an eponymous series of annual magazines of artist-contributions established in 2012. Here, a magazine can also be a tee-shirt or a plastic bag containing “C90 audio cassette, autumnal leaves, loose-leaf A4 printed pages, envelope with edition, various other materials,” as listed for Endless Lonely Planet 3 (2014) on the World Food Books website. no borders, no dangerous goods is no different from the majority of Hill’s activities in this sense of expanded practice, and includes nineteen artists, ranging from those he frequently engages like Mike Moonen and Virginia Overell, to those invited by artists already in the exhibition (Samaan Fieck invited Lucia Canuto, Gabriella D’Costa invited Tomás Loureiro Gonçalo and Flora Fee Mayrhofer, and so on).

As alluded to by its title, Hill requested that the artists sent their works to him through the post. This is akin to the practices termed “mail art” or “postal art” developed in the 1960s—in particular by the Fluxus movement and artist Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School. These artists circulated their work in this way as an accessible and inexpensive alternative to engaging with major institutions and the art market—realms similarly shirked by Hill in favour of the self-organised and non-commercial. For no borders, no dangerous goods he tells me he suggested artists post only small-scale works in order to keep costs minimal (Frank Koolen and Kate Newby followed this brief closely, sending actual postcards from overseas), and only works that they were prepared to permanently part with.

The result is an exhibition of mostly paper-based works installed with a characteristically egalitarian approach to all parts of the gallery space. Many are fixed with large flat magnets and arranged, salon-style, over the walls like the front of a fridge; Koolen’s postcards are stuck on the gallery door, D’Costa’s columnar paper sculpture stands on the floor, and Yuske Muroi’s contribution—a letter allegedly written by a warmongering Japanese demon—hangs down from the ceiling. I particularly enjoyed Moonen’s work here, a nearly floor-to-ceiling display of chaotic collages, where large colour printouts of mascot-like figures are covered with drawings, some stickers, cut-outs of photographs, and a lot of packing tape. Following the logic of the fridge display, one of Tahi Moore’s text works on lined note-paper is hung directly on top of Moonen’s work before continuing across the wall. This hang is actually more pared back than the last two group exhibitions organised by Hill that immediately come to mind—Dissecting Table at TCB Art Inc. last year, and a do ocean at KINGS Artist-Run in 2022.

Hill points out that the two deflated paper husks attached to Moonen’s assemblage are the packages it was all sent in, and I notice that the black gaffer tape that held it together forms an asterix-like shape similar to the Chaos Star used as the space’s logo. The symbol was conceived by science-fiction author Michael Moorcock in the 1960s as an extension of the four cardinal points in “all directions”—or what he describes as “all possibilities.” It was subsequently taken up for use by practitioners of chaos magik, table-top gamers, and, most relevant to its appearance here, within insurrectionary and nihilistic anarchist movements. The no borders of this exhibition’s title is significant here too—riffing on the infamous anarchist slogan “no gods, no masters”—and bringing to mind the No Border Network, a loose association of anarchist groups and individuals that oppose the restriction and control of human migration, especially by nation states. While Hill’s chaos star looks a bit more like a ringed planet (and I don’t know if he has personally blown up any train tracks), he has long since associated anarcho-syndicalism with his activities. The is privileged by Hill as a “lived practice” above a theoretical or academic engagement, as noted in his interview with Haylock. Giles Fielke concurs in his 2020 Memo review of Hill’s exhibition Meaningless is more, writing that Hill’s practice can “only be framed by acknowledging its anarchism,” that is, its commitment to building self-instituting, horizontal coalitions of practitioners, where participation is not overly prescriptive or conditional. This is particularly relevant if we consider the connections that bind much contemporary artistic activity within the state or with private institutions, that more often than not curtail artists’ autonomy. This curtailment of autonomy also extends to the many artist-run spaces in this city, like KINGS or TCB, who had previously paid their rent by having artists pay exhibition fees (an approach with its own set of issues). The widespread cessation of this practice over the past decade has meant that these spaces are increasingly reliant on various precarious sources of external funding, particularly government grants that bring into these spaces their associated expectations of risk-management and other forms of oversight. This is to say nothing of tendency for some artists to professionalise, which is an attitude that has even surpassed the trained attitudes produced from within art schools. Artistic autonomy is reframed as an attribute of wage income and financial independence, in other words “success.” All of this stands directly opposed to Hill’s commitment to the DIY ethos.

While Hill essentially eschews engagement with government funding bodies and major institutional exhibitions, his main concern with the establishment of Endless Lonely Planet is to harbour and extend the self-instituted relationships that he has nurtured over the previous two decades. This is not Hill’s first artist-run space, having run Y3K gallery with artist James Deutscher from 2009–11. Y3K, in fact, was the first artist-run gallery I ever remember visiting, not knowing beforehand that such a thing could exist. This was in 2009, the same year that I started studying as a fine art student, with Hill as one of my tutors in the Painting department at the Victorian College of the Arts—where he still teaches now. Incidentally, the Y3K exhibition that I visited closed on this day, 12th September, seventeen years ago, and showed works from Hill alongside Masato Takasaka (who now also teaches at the VCA).

While it’s not unusual for an artist, curator, or art historian working in an art school to invite current or former students to participate in their projects, Hill has done this regularly over this entire period. This means that there are a relatively large number of people now who have participated in or attended one of his activities in some way. Despite this, as an undergraduate student—before I considered Hill’s approach as I do now—I was critical of what I thought was its main purpose: the cultivation of an exclusive social clique. However, while any selection of practitioners for a project functions via the exclusion of others, Hill’s continuous modelling of DIY making and exhibiting practices has, in my opinion, influenced certain approachs to contemporary artistic practice in Melbourne, regardless of whether people were directly involved in his projects at all. Hill is not peerless in this influence, but I can’t deny that I, for one, didn’t realise until coming across his approach that, if me and my friends put cheaply-made artworks in a tree or a laundromat, that this was as much an exhibition as a blockbuster at the National Gallery of Victoria.

While no borders, no dangerous objects is held in an actual white-walled room, it remains provisional at every level. When I asked Hill about artwork titles and other details for this review, he said that he didn’t have them—they either didn’t exist or weren’t deemed as necessary for the exhibition roomsheet. Instead, this is just a list of the artists’ names, as if the works were plucked from the studio and installed without even the need for the obligatory cop-out moniker, Untitled. This is not to say that these works are careless or lazy (or that these details are always unimportant); rather, it is that for this exhibition the making and showing of work takes precedence. The photo-documentation of the exhibition, taken by Hill on his iPhone, is similarly unconcerned with conventional, professionalised exhibition practices, and collapses into the undifferentiated and endless soup of images mentioned above—often through his non-stop posting on Instagram and his blog-cum-website. The soup metaphor was suggested to me by artist Gemma Topliss when we were talking about Hill’s maximalist approach to documentation (he sent me 222 images of no borders, no dangerous goods). This style and rate of image-making and circulation both greatly enables and frustrates the instrumentalisation of his documentation for conventional art-historical purposes—while the photographs exist, they’re probably blurry, weirdly cropped or ten-thousand images deep on Hill’s Instagram page.

Writing a review that focusses so heavily on my knowledge of Hill’s ongoing practice led me to wonder how someone might take no borders, no dangerous goods sans context. While many self-funded artist-run spaces have emerged in recent years, not least with the proliferation of backyard or house galleries, it is less common now for a gallery like this to be located in a more publicly accessible place like the Nicholas Building, in the sense of both practicality and vibe. Of course, perhaps someone would be compelled by D’Costa’s sensitive compositions of coloured-pencil on paper, or Hogan’s tiny sculpture—a pink elastic band with the word “broccolini” printed on it. At the very least, and for whatever its effect, they would encounter the fact that an exhibition can be a bunch of unnamed artworks in a room, with no intention for them to ever enter into commercial circulation, alongside a person who has been at this for the last twenty years.