Art and agency in the supermarket
Shopdropping: experiments in the aisle - “an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce”
Despite appreciating Packard Jenning’s Il Duce Action Figure, which involved the “insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart” I’ll admit to being one of those people described in the exhibition text who gets really uncomfortable when artists, because of their privilege, disrupt things at the expense of unwitting shoppers or passersby or people in general, i.e. non-artists. (I really hated Rachel Weisz’s character in The Shape of Things.)
But I love the interventionist qualities of this project:
In Lost in the Supermarket, a collaborative led by Marijke Jorritsma, involving instructors (Marisa Aragona, Melissa Orzolek, Tara Foley) and youths from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco, hand-crafted ceramic commodities (lotion, dishwashing soap, spice bottles, soup cans) were reverse-shoplifted into a local grocery conglomerate-a process that offers a delightfully humorous narrative of the encounter between shoppers/workers with these ‘inadequate’ or ‘fallible’ products made by kids.
But perhaps more importantly, the process proved wildly startling for youths, ranging in age from 7 to 14, who were fascinated by the prospect that “you could really do such a thing” (i.e., that you could put something ‘not real’ onto the shelf with other ‘real’ products). For youths, then, to realize their agency within the economy, by extension comes the demystification of commodity logic.”
(via Core77)