Market Forces
Part II: Consumer Confidence
David Baskin
Displayed in the gallery’s window on glass shelving that vaguely resembles those from a medicine cabinet, the objects in David Baskin’s installation are halfway between purist Brancusi-esque sculptures and mass produced goods which are clearly invested in their fetishistic aura. Cast from Dove shampoo bottles that eroticize a mundane product, the presentation of these objects suggests a realm that is both asserting its private relationship with the consumer, while inviting scrutiny by “opening the medicine cabinet” to the public. Reproducing consumer products with the brand image removed strips them of their commercially sanctioned investment in textbook Freudian seductions, leaving behind a slightly embarrassing factory produced totem that lays bare the underlying codes in consumer goods.
Dara Birnbaum
Produced in 1982 and incorporating the pace and look of a music video, Dara Birnbaum’s Fire! Hendrix sends up the cheerful narratives of consumerism while drawing parallels between the selling of sex in mainstream advertisement and youth culture. Cutting back and forth between a young woman drinking beer who is clearly the object of our gaze, and the activity around a fast food restaurant (money exchanged at the take out window, “cool” cars cruising past) while the Hendrix lyrics “let me stand next to your fire...” blares in the background, Birnbaum’s layered response to the associative mechanisms embedded in the advertised message also anticipates the now ubiquitous use of youth culture to sell goods to adults.
Dan Graham
Dan Graham’s Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Mall offers a hypnotic view of North America’s largest shopping mall. Shot over a period of twenty years, the video echoes Walter Benjamin’s investigations of Parisian arcades, which addressed the dream-like quality of store displays (“the arcade is a city, a world in miniature’’). Revealing Graham’s interest in both the city plan and corporate atriums, Death by Chocolate, through its non-hierarchical view of this spectacular commercial setting, hints at the utopian ambitions underlying the all-encompassing environment of the “all purpose” shopping experience.
Filip Noterdaeme
Making direct reference to a renowned project of the master of irony himself, Filip Noterdaeme takes the macro to micro approach of Duchamp’s “Box in a Valise” one step further, creating a transportable museum-in-a-suitcase version of the Museum of Modern Art. In part a reaction to the 60% increase in the admission fee (from $12 to $20) at the museum, Noterdaeme presented his compact MoMA across the street from the “original”, offering the public a free alternative to its expensive counterpart. In shrinking a now monolithic cultural institution to a “consumable” scale and taking it on the road (MoMA HMLSS also traveled to Kansas City, Mo., Paris, France, Toledo, Spain and Waterloo, Belgium) Notredaeme’s project offers a wry commentary on the expansionist approach now deemed necessary to increase market share within the global culture industry.
Walter Robinson
Walter Robinson’s photographic yet lavishly painted “product” paintings balance a handmade approach with the readily identifiable aspect of everyday products. Part pop and part expressionistic, Robinson’s choices of subject matter are often mirrored in his own consumer habits. Painting beer bottles as he drank a six-pack, or “painkillers” (aspirin, advil, etc.) when in a “down” period, the artist arrives at an odd harmony between the obligations of mass consumption and the need to “channel” one’s experience via the tradition of paint on canvas. While seemingly deadpan, these paintings also encompass the near futility of direct expression within a landscape of branded objects, responding to the options “at hand” amidst an overwhelming array of consumer choice.
Ron Rocheleau
Ron Rocheleau’s collages precisely reconstruct the rarified world contained within the pages of post-war and contemporary art auction catalogs. Shuffling the deck and arriving at what sometimes appear to be random hybrids that present well known art world figures and artworks in unlikely pairings (Gerhard Richter standing in a room constructed by Thomas Demand / Barbara Kruger’s slogans grafted onto a photograph by Andreas Gursky), these alternate layouts are so carefully crafted that they present the viewer with plausible mutations of the “natural order” of market hierarchies. Highly idiosyncratic and guided by seemingly random associations that upset the finely tuned status quo which dictates the worth of an image or object, Rocheleau’s obsessive “what-ifs” provide a skeptical view within the seamlessness of art market aesthetics.
Monika Sziladi
Featuring details in store windows that usually escape the passerby, Monika Sziladi’s photographs present an alternate view of the hermetic environment within which the consumer’s desires are put into play. Through highlighting aspects of the displays that are meant to be overlooked, such as armatures supporting the mannequins or wires binding them to their products, her compositions present an almost unconscious parallel world where perverse interrelationships offer embarrassing counterparts to the prevalence of “good taste”. Opening up a Pandora’s Box of the repressed which lies just beneath the surface of the self-assured poses struck by mute figures, the photographs of On Display betray the banal psychology at work in much of the styling of shop windows, momentarily liberating us from their predictability by revealing the accidental byproducts of their facile narratives.
Momoyo Torimitsu
Momoyo Torimitsu’s oversized bunny exaggerates the concept of cuteness, pervasive in Japanese culture, to the point of claustrophobia. Forcing a 15-foot tall inflated rabbit into a 10-½ foot tall room, Torimitsu’s Somehow I don’t feel comfortable confronts the underlying anxieties of consumer cultures that are awash with infantilizing imagery. Torimitsu says of this piece: “Another meaning of my bunny installation has to do with what we call "rabbit hutches" in Japan, which refers to our cramped housing situation in the big cities. It was originally coined by a French diplomat who visited Tokyo in the early 70’s. This expression remains in Japanese culture today. I wanted to visually illustrate Japan’s repressed lifestyle with my cute but cramped creatures.”
Jeongmee Yoon
Alone in their rooms but lacking nothing, the girls and boys in Jeongmee Yoon photographs are depicted in a sea of carefully catalogued and displayed toys. Holding down the fort and possessing a kind of resignation to their newfound responsibilities, the subjects stare across the gulf of pink (girls) or blue (boys) goods that separate them from the camera, as if waiting for the viewer to inspect each and every item. The stifling nature of a composition filled with edge-to-edge stuff is partially alleviated by the absurdity of such a precise cataloguing of playtime, as well as the irony of children as shopkeepers, taking careful inventory of the products acquired thus far.
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