Opening Reception
Friday March 11, 2005, 7-10pm

Gallery Hours
Sat & Sun 3-8pm, March 10 - April 11th

Special Event: Digestion: Changing the Nature of Nature
Sat Mar 26, 6-9 pm
a buffet of edible visualizations of supermarket excesses
catered by Shannon Spanhake, Roberto Freddi, Jason Moore, Camilo Ontiveros, Steve Rioux

Packard Jennings

One tactic characterizing interventionist art is a reliance on the artwork's (re)assimilation into the language and space of hegemonic symbolic systems. Packard Jenning's Il Duce Action Figure involves both the insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart and documentation of the ensuing comical conundrums (a spycam video of confused workers assigning a value to the item, the manual entry of 'Mussolini' onto the receipt, etc.).

Steve Lambert

An alternate strategy employed by interventionist art is the insertion of a 'mute' or 'impotent' commodity-a commodity whose non-functionality rejects or halts the flow of signification/consumption. For instance, Steve Lambert's ultra-genericized cereal boxes employ the language of advertising to create a meta-commodity. Devoid of purpose or motive, Lambert's art works like an insect's abandoned carapace, pointing out the absence of what was.

the Boys & Girls Club

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.

Many interventionist artworks situate themselves not as 'disruptive' (a term which, for some, can connote a privileged position at the expense of the unwitting shopper) but as gestures of 'gift-giving.' For Shopdropping, various text-based artists and writers were asked to create labels or tags that were later pinned to garments in a local upscale department store. Asked to incorporate elements of site-specificity and intimately address the shopper, the tags are intended to function as stowaway gifts. Commenting on the characteristic of the gift to connect with its receiver, the anthropologist Lewis Hyde writes, "It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection... a gift makes the connection." The shopdropped tags, then, can be considered a process of bestowal that symbolically imports the logic of gift exchange into the realm of commodity exchange.

Ultimately, Shopdropping expands the discourse and field of interventionist art, asking us to consider its nuanced range of representational strategy, intention, context, and references.