"Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture" at Tate Liverpool
By Albert Dock
As Andy Warhol put it, "All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores." And so a department store the Tate Liverpool has become.
A co-production with the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, "Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture" is the first exhibition to thoroughly explore the correlation between consumer culture and art.
Over 240 works of art spanning the twentieth century are on display, reflecting the changes in consumerism and buying patterns over the years, and in turn, the culture and values of society. "Shopping" explores the bane of urban life–consumption and commercialism. If there is money to be spent, everything and anything is for sale.
Each artwork is different, all are clever; satirizing, critiquing, yet celebrating the last century’s trend to buy, buy and buy.
Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy (1992), shown for the first time at Tate Liverpool, is an entire room stacked with neat rows of coloured pill-boxes. Just like the goods on display at the store, Pharmacy suggests that ‘health and happiness’ is also offered to the consumer for a price.
Even the body can be a commodity as depicted in photos of mannequins sparsely adorned with fabrics, feathers and odds and ends by Man Ray. Another surrealist example would be a picture of Salvador Dali carrying a mannequin the same way one would carry a briefcase!
Throughout the twentieth century, artists have been fascinated by the locales of shopping and the sophisticated methods of seducing customers to consume–from corner shops and department stores to suburban mega-malls.
In "Shopping," pictures of Parisian shopping arcades are juxtaposed with chain department stores. Photographs of shop fronts by Eugène Atget in turn of the century Paris and Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott in 1930s America can be seen alongside Stewart Bale’s modern-day photographs of Woolworths, Lewis’s and Marks & Spencer in Liverpool.
Andreas Gursky’s photographs illustrate the two ends of the shopping spectrum. Photographs of the Prada store in New York, revealing the height of consumer chic and elitism, are shown with his new work, 99 Cent II (2001). This leads to the question: Where does the discerning consumer shop today? At the upscale boutique on Fifth Avenue or at the neighbourhood 99 Cent Store?
The exhibition also epitomizes 1960s pop art ideals: the endeavour to turn everyday, commonplace items into art.
The irony of works like Prada Valuemeal (1998) by Tom Sachs and Sylvie Fleury’s Golden Supermarket Cart (2000) satirize today’s consumer culture. Sachs comments on the overrated (and inflated) designer brand name, while Fleury demonstrates the elevated status of shopping in today’s world with her shopping cart made of gold.
Monumental installations have taken over the galleries, blurring the line between exhibit and environment.
The major Pop art installation The American Supermarket (1964) has also been reconstructed for the first time since the original showing in New York. A collaboration between the great names of Pop art including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Billy Apple and Robert Watts, this stylized 1964 supermarket environment includes meat, cheese and fruit counters, neon signage and jaunty muzak playing in the background. Real food is displayed among Warhol’s signed stacks of Campbell’s soup cans, Watt’s chrome fruits, and Lichtenstein’s Turkey, all proffered for sale.
Guillaume Bijl has created Your Supermarket (2002), a ‘real’ supermarket with shelves of fresh food, drinks and household products, as well as checkout tills. By changing the context in which we view these things, Bijl transforms the mundane and familiar into something original, even works of art. However, the viewer might come away feeling frustrated. The need to buy is so powerful, yet none of the items are for sale.
