>>PREVIEW
SHOPDROPPING: EXPERIMENTS IN THE AISLE
Runs until July 1
The New Gallery
The New Gallery’s exhibition Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle reveals a tactic employed by artists who seek to interrupt the status quo of global capital – the functional opposite of tucking a candy bar or CD down your pants. It involves the insertion of an object in amongst the shelves of colourful products in places like supermarkets and chain stores. Here, these ersatz commodities are left to surprise and confound the consumer's regularly scheduled programming, while wreaking symbolic havoc on the capitalists.
Within the boundaries and codes of the gallery, these impostors are recognizable as art, but outside the white walls they occupy a more ambiguous zone – creating situations and disrupting expectations. Many of the "dropped" objects included in the exhibition rewrite promotional language, question market value or directly critique the host store.
A few of the artists even bring the performance-encounter to its conclusion by returning to the store and buying their own artwork. This effectively tests the limits of their project and exposes loopholes in the system. The video and photo documentation of these interventions invites us to walk down the aisles of Wal-Mart with Packard Jennings to find his "Il Duce" Benito Mussolini action figure (implying the mega-store's near fascist hegemony), or to go thrifting with Conrad Bakker for hand-carved and painted wood surrogates of a porcelain piggy-bank (transforming a banal trinket into a curious treasure).
Other projects come closer to gift status, by attaching themselves to pre-existing products and therefore a kind of parasitic distribution. Imagine trying on a pair of pants in the dressing room and finding a tag in your pocket that provides troubling facts about the origins of the garment. These artists are inverting the strategies of high-priced advertising agencies, designed to colonize your precious consciousness, by using them for critical discourse or amusing personal anecdotes rather than persuasive hyperbole. One tag reads, "Inspected by No. 7: his wife laughs every time he burps."
The Shopdropping exhibition has travelled from San Francisco's politically engaged Pond Gallery, including much of the Bay Area's brightest talent in addition to artists from across North America and overseas. While the Bay Area is historically known for its radical innovators, from the Diggers to the Black Panthers, successful mergers of art and politics are tricky and often result in work that is overly didactic or heavy-handed. In other words, Shopdropping is a rare gem that not only brings together a group of interesting artworks, but also marks a new strain of sub-cultural pursuit, complete with its own catchphrase. As this portable strategy continues to spread through the global network of artists, storeowners may find themselves facing a peculiar epidemic. |
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