Internationally and locally the term ‘the art of shopping’ has been given new meaning
Kathryn Smith
The Pet Shop Boys spelt it out for us: “S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G. – We’re shopping.” Malls, fleamarkets, boutiques, 24-hour garage shops – it really doesn’t matter.
According to CNN, the Chinese government recently declared a seven-day shopping holiday. Wanting to appear “generous and magnanimous”, the real aim is to seduce citizens into spending the several million United States dollars nestling comfortably in a myriad of Chinese savings accounts.
But is it how you shop, or what you shop for that counts? Blurring the boundaries of art and advertising, shopping provides access to aesthetic appeal while allowing you to scale the upper echelons of fashion, according to your proportions of taste, discernment and credit-card worthiness.
What defines mass culture seems to end at fashion and lifestyle. Not that this is all bad. High art now calls on billboards, big- screen video projections and performance happenings to scream for attention in a media-glut. And this fact has not escaped some of the 20th century’s most venerated thinkers. In his seminal Mythologies, Roland Barthes autopsied the semiotics of media and entertainment (to some it’s one and the same), with essays irresistibly entitled The World of Wrestling, Operation Margarine and Steak and Chips.
The question is whether mall culture represents the last bastion of cultural endeavour. What a horrific thought. Shopping is not simply about purchasing a necessary or luxury item. It is a macro- and micro-bodily experience that requires total sensory awareness (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste), critical decision- making skills and the willingness to go where the mood (or flashing neon sign) takes you. Shopping malls have their own, apparently subjective, internal geographies. It has to do with one’s sense of scale.
A protean activity, shopping has inspired some of the grossest architectural aberrations – Durban’s The Wheel and Southgate outside Soweto. And in the north, shopping’s fourth dimension: the mega-malls of Sandton, Hyde Park and the under- construction Zone@Rosebank.
On receiving an invitation to veteran photographer Jurgen Schadeberg’s latest exhibition, The Naked Face: People of Sandton Square, I started taking mall culture really seriously. An initial reaction was, what is he doing, this celebrated documentary personality? And I’m still not quite sure.
The show consists of two bodies of work. The first is a series of compelling and beautifully printed black and white portraits of shoppers, tightly cropped such that only their faces loom from a velvety-black background. That “glazed- eye” phenomenon is conspicuously absent from these images. The second series depicts scenic hand-tinted images of children playing in the mall’s fountain and lunch-time restaurant traffic. They could politely be described as the stuff that Hallmark dreams are made of.
But what is Schadeberg’s new exhibition really all about? The fact that Sandton Square management lent their full support to the project makes one suspect that it’s what’s on the outside that counts. The portrait studies, shot by one of the country’s best-known lensmen, are about surface and gloss. At the same time, shopping is paraded as a deeply spiritual experience.
Malls are, after all, also art marketplaces. Although Henry Moore and Picasso prints have become shopping trolley favourites in the Square’s commercial galleries, mall culture does not guarantee instant credibility, as art-in-a-box consumers would like to think. Regardless of the extent to which the real snobs look down on the mall snobs, malls do centralise people and are an inextricable component of our cultural and economic lives. As a result, there are artists who have dared to tackle the specious shopping beast, making pertinent and inventive work in the process.
Such interventions have moved from simple spectacle to more insidious invasions into the public/private, high/low culture divide, and back again. In an attempt to overcome her fear of human imperfection as revealed in department store change rooms, British artist Merry Alpern had a spy camera installed in her handbag and secretly filmed fellow de-robers. The result is a coffee-table book of grainy, pervy images of cellulite, dimples and thick ankles simply called Shopping.
On the other hand, Steven Cohen’s guerrilla performance tactics, appearing unannounced at Rosebank, Sandton Square and Killarney Mall, are seen as a breach of security and moral codes. Where Alpern doesn’t ask permission to look, Cohen doesn’t ask permission to be looked at. Both are equally non-consensual demands, but with Cohen, you have the choice to walk away.
Sophisticated and subtly subversive, Minnette V ri is an artist who turns commodification on its head. Decoy: Perfume – an installation at the Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1998 – presented fashion images of V ri intertwined with king snakes as part of a department-store mock-up, neon-lit and complete with product: a perfume called Faith. On closer inspection the ingredients of this heady fragrance revealed themselves as powdered bone, processed snake venom and cannabis with added essential oils. Faith questions exoticism, and what we are prepared to believe for the sake of advertising.
In Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning American Beauty, there is a video-artist who proclaims that a plastic carrier bag buffeted by a breeze is the most beautiful thing on earth. Clearly, the creators of the FAT collective’s Shopping project thought so too. For a limited period, London’s Carnaby Street shoppers could transport their purchases in limited edition, artist-produced shopping bags that included designs by such cult figures as Gilbert and George, and Jake and Dinos Chapman. As each artist was assigned to a specific boutique, strategic shopping was key.
Commenting on the FAT project, critic David Barrett pondered the weighty metaphorical significance of the plastic carrier bag that proclaims “I have something” as an “unsustainable short- term solution with disastrous long-term consequences”.
The shopping experience may well provoke more deep-seated emotions, from euphoria to genuine panic-attack, than any exhibition ever could. The thing with art presented as advertising is that it’s totally unintimidating. Take a look at the Young Designer Emporium’s latest poster campaign of abject fashion models unzipping their flesh. Risqu, it may be, but unlikely to be splattered with ink in protest.
If media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s oft- quoted adage of the “medium is the message” is anything to go by, then the mall culture experience is a flawless exhibition of postmodern ephemera, where individual shop- installations create a multi-sensorial whole that is certainly greater than the sum of its parts.
But commercial turnover is too quick, and
in the conservative atmosphere of the malls irony is curiously lacking. So, while artistic interventions into the consumer world may be telling and iconic, they don’t necessarily scratch at the surface of the real issues at play in the consumer world. Most mall-centred art works have yet to make lasting impressions on their unsuspecting audiences, even if they have been noticed.
So is the cultural graveyard really the bottom of a box of popcorn? Apparently not. By working in malls, artists are endeavouring to reclaim their territory, or least make it look like they’re trying. But the co-opting of advertising space for art works is insufficient unless carried through with a whole eye-blistering campaign.
What better way to demand attention than in an arena that presents itself solely for this function? I still can’t decide whether the vanilla and ginseng bubblebath I purchased at Fresh is art or not. I think it might be.
Jurgen Schadeberg’s The Naked Face: People of Sandton Square is currently being exhibited at Sandton Civic Gallery. Tel: (011) 881-6432/2