Pond: Shopdropping

Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle

curated by Pond for Western Front Exhibitions (Vancouver, CANADA)
303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V5T 1S1 | Tues-Sat, 12 - 5 pm | e: exhibitions@front.bc.ca | p: 604.876.93439 | http://front.bc.ca
oct 21-nov 25, 2006 | reception: Fri Oct 20, 8 pm

at Pond (San Francisco, USA)
324 14th St., San Francisco, CA 94103 |
june 2-july 1, 2006 | reception: Fri June 1, 7 pm

from exhibition at The New Gallery

Zine Library
Shoplifting Special: From How-To Primers to Critiques (featured only in Calgary Exhibition) curated by zine archivist Smurph

Reviews
Smith, Caroline. "Interview with curators Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada," Radio One, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 1010 AM, 6/1/06
McVeigh, Jennifer. “Shop Till you Drop: The Art of Shopping Takes on Nnew Meaning.” Calgary Herald. 06/2006
Slaton, Joyce. 'We're Sold'. SF Weekly (March 09, 2005) (PDF)
SF Weekly Calendar Highlight (March 9, 2005)
Baker, Kenneth. 'Droll art aims to discomfit commerce'. San Francisco Chronicle (March 19, 2005) (PDF)
Garchick, Leah. 'Datebook'. San Francisco Chronicle (March 11, 2005) (PDF)
Han, Sarah. 'Datebook'. SF Weekly (March 9, 2005) (PDF)
Clamor (Summer 2005)
Smith, Caroline, Interview with curators Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada, Radio One, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 1010 AM (June 1, 2006)
Del Pesco, Joseph. "Beware of Subversion in Your Supermaket.” review in Fast Forward-Calgary Weekly Paper (June 8, 2006)
Review of Exhibition in Vancouver, Modern Painter (Nov 8, 2006)

United Victorian Workers

Shopdropping is an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce (specifically, conglomerate retail stores). The artwork-ranging from social sculptures to gentle gestures of gift-leaving-is presented in the exhibition in the form of multiples/duplicates or audio/photo/video documentation. Using beauty, humor, and intimate address to invite shoppers' self-reflection and second glance, the works eschew a reductivist commodity critique in favor of complex strategies that detourne situations, present alternatives to normative systems of exchange, and graft together alternate economic regimes.

One tactic characterizing interventionist art is a reliance on the artwork's (re)assimilation into the language and space of hegemonic symbolic systems. In 'Victorian Stroll', a project which references the annual re-enactment in Troy, NY, of its 19th century bourgeois heyday, members of the collaborative known as 'The United Victorian Workers' dressed in Victorian-era working-class apparel and performed a period-inspired strike. By making visible the class and labor struggles of the era, the performance obliquely points out the city's motives to present a selective history conducive to consumption.

Packard Jennings

Zoë Sheehan Saldaña

A project similar in its use of humor as historical reminder, 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.).

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.' In a series of work entitled Shopdropping (2003), Zoë Sheehan Saldaña bought a woman’s blouse from a Wal-Mart located in Berlin, Vermont, and proceeded to duplicate the item by hand. Saldaña copied its pattern, using matching fabric, thread, and embellishments (such as lace, elastic, ribbon, embroidery, and fabric paint) to make as faithful a reproduction as possible. After re-attaching the original tags, including the price tag, the simulacrum was then returned and presumably sold for the original’s price of $9.94 With an artist’s signature conspicuously absent, we are left to assume Saldaña’s craftwork was sold to unwitting shoppers, a silent comparison between hand-made and mass-produced labor. Saldaña exhibits new work for this exibition.

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.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. London: Vintage Press, 1999. p. 56