The market as medium
Type “Markets in Contemporary Art” in a search engine and you will be inundated by metrics, facts, graphs, and percentages of the current Art Economy. Often simplifying a work, artist, or region to a mere number, this flooding of information serves as a reminder that Art is a commodity—a transactional exchange between maker, seller, and buyer. Offering a different conflation of “Art” and “Market”, this article aims to address the commodification of art by defining the latter less as a monetary system and more as a space where people gather to shop. Indeed, artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Xu Zhen, and BGL merge the two by transforming the traditional white cube into a convenient store, tienda, bodega, corner store, or dépanneur. In doing so, the artists blur the elite art market with the banal shops resulting in a critique of today’s consumer culture and the placement of art within this consumption.
Undeniably, there has always been a need for the necessities of life, yet today consumption has gone beyond essentials and can be better defined as gluttony due to the insatiable hunger for consumer goods. As best expressed by curator Max Hollein, “The act of purchasing, the modern hunting and gathering, becomes the spiritual and creative confession of our lifestyle society.”[1] Within art history, the performative nature of shopping—the idly strolling down aisles composed of serial objects—was first recreated in The American Supermarket (1964). Transforming Bianchi Gallery into a store, the exhibition brought together several Pop artists including Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life, real food items were displayed alongside Warhol’s Campbell’s Soups, Mary Inman’s Fake Sirloin Steak, and Lichtenstein’s silk print turkey shopping bag. Here, “shopping was elevated to an art form, the art dealer turned grocer, and serious art collectors became ordinary supermarket shoppers.”[2]
BXDF0C A busy supermarket store – customers queuing in aisles.
Building on this historic work and demonstrating how consumerism has become a global phenomenon, Gabriel Orozco, Xu Zhen, and BGL have adopted the corner stores as an art installation. In 2017 Gabriel Orozco transformed kurimanzutto, the prestigious gallery located in Mexico City, into an OXXO, the most wide-spread convenience store in the country. Cleverly, titled OROXXO, the gallery was retrofitted with merchandise, display cases, and real-life OXXO employees. Upon entering the store, visitors were handed a single “Oroxxo” dollar, a counterfeit bill composed by collaging U.S. and Mexican currency and decorated with a geometric pattern. This singular bill could then be exchanged for goods inside the shop. Yet, the bill was not the only art object created. Much like The American Supermarket, Orozco collapsed art with consumer goods by painting his iconic circular motif on 300 objects, including chips, sodas, flour, sugar, etc. This manipulation transformed these objects from seemingly everyday items into non-consumable sculptures. It is important to note that the Oroxxo dollar could not be exchanged for an object that had been intervened, instead these had to be purchased and their price fluctuated depending on supply and demand. In doing so, the price of chips sky-rocketed from 30 pesos (less than $2) to $30,000.[3] As such, OROXXO served to not only highlight consumer culture but also critique the inflated art market by creating a space where high and low economies collapsed, and unprivileged consumer goods were only purchasable by elite art collectors.
Whereas Orozco’s chips and soda have since gone stale sitting as decorative objects in people’s homes, Beijing based artist, Xu Zhen invites us into a store filled with empty objects. First exhibited during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2007, XUZHEN Supermarket took over an entire booth and functioned as a fully stocked Chinese convenient store where visitors were invited to browse the aisles and purchase objects at the check-out counter. However, the various beers, soda bottles, detergents, snacks, etc. were unfilled. The artist painstakingly purchased the objects, delicately opened them, emptied them of all content, and then sealed the packaging back up. Indeed, the selling of empty shells demonstrates the depth of our consumer culture where people are willing to purchase literally nothing. During the length of the Fair the hollow merchandise began to disappear and what started off as a fully stocked store ended up as nothing but bare shelves. Since 2007, Zhen has exhibited his store in London, New York, and China, demonstrating the globalization of consumerism and the importation/exportation of products. Indeed, the artist created the work in his studio in China using locally sourced products which have since then been transplanted and sold in different Western cities. Beyond demonstrating the infiltration of Chinese products into Western economies, the work also comments on the introduction of American convenient stores in China and its social impact. Prior to 1992, when the first 711 (the iconic 24-hour American convenient store) opened in the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese stores were predominantly small, family-owned businesses which sold unique products.[4] These provided a more personal shopping experience and garnered a sense of community. However, with the introduction of convenient stores, shopping became impersonal. Through his practice more broadly and this work in particular, Xu Zhen aims to visually display this cultural change in people’s habits and the “standardized way of thinking and behaving in line with Westernized prototypes.”[5] Regrettably, this Western business model has become the norm, and from 1992 to today the number of convenient stores in China has gone from one to close to 200,000.[6]
Similar in its desire to disorient visitors by converting an exhibition space into a convenient store, BGL, the three-part Collective from Québec City, transformed the Canadian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale into a traditional Quebecois corner store or dépanneur. Working together from 1996 to2021, Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicolas Laverdière, chose to juxtapose the wealth and regality of the Venice Biennale by immersing visitors in four distinct yet banal spaces.[7] As visitors walked into the pavilion, they were spatially removed from the Giardini and thrown into a market replete with tinned goods, snacks, Québécois beer, and cleaning supplies. After spending time in the store, visitors realized that there was no one tending to the cash register and that these objects were in fact not for sale. Grounding their practice on inviting viewers to question what is true or not, BGL masterfully replicated a non-functional store, and further distorted the experience by scanning, blurring and reprinting each item’s label. As such, visitors experienced an everyday occurrence, yet something felt off, there was a physical annoyance that defined the space. As such, while Orozco and Xu Zhen transformed their respective white cubes into a functioning store where items could be purchased, BGL’s Canadassimo converted the dépanneur into a stagnant art installation. Seen through this lens, the store serves as a microcosm for the Biennale where objects displayed seem to be unpurchasable. Unlike a gallery or art fair, where the pieces are all for sale, or a museum, where works have been purchased, the status of objects in the Biennale is ambiguous.
Using the market as their medium, these three artists have demonstrated not only society’s obsession with consumer goods but more importantly the commodification of Art. While Orozco has made a mockery of the hyperinflated art market by successfully convincing collectors to spend thousands on a bag of chips, Xu Zhen has persuaded countless people to spend a couple of dollars on empty containers. Conversely, BGL has created a confusing environment where people may be enticed to purchase something only to be denied. Yet who is to say this entire installation would not be sold to the right buyer for the right price? In fact, in 2018 Xu Zhen’s Xuzhen Supermarket, was auctioned by Sotheby’s Hong Kong and purchased for $200,000 USD.[8] Perhaps this is Xu Zhen’s grandest sale of nothing since the transaction did not include any physical objects, structure, manpower, or materials necessary for the recreation of the work. Instead, the buyer simply purchased a certificate and installation instructions. When the piece was to be installed, the objects and structures could be negotiated directly with the artist.[9]
The sale of these works reminds us of the traditional role of artists as Producers whose success relies on creating objects to be consumed by society. However, as argued by Art Critic, Boris Groys, the social role of the artist has been radically transformed from a model producer to a model consumer. He goes on to state that, “above all, within the framework of installation art as well as in the new media, the artist works equally with both self-produced as well as externally-produced objects.”[10] This is best exemplified by the works discussed above where each artist has manipulated existing products, blurring the boundaries between object and art. To fabricate these large-scale, realistic installations, Orozco, Zhen and BGL had to purchase each individual object displayed within the corner store as well as the cash registers, refrigerators, shelving, etc. As such, in order to produce these analyses of mass consumption the artists had to become one of the mass consumers they intended to criticize.
[1] Hollein, Max. “Shopping,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers,2002), 13-15.
[2] Grunenberg, Christopher, “The American Supermarket,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers,2002), 171- 174.
[3] Moe, Karren. “The Game of the Same: Gabriel Orozco’s OROXXO,” Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, September 2017. https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/same-gabriel-orozco-s-oroxxo/3740
[4] The Associate Press, “COMPANY NEWS; 7-ELEVEN CHAIN IS READY FOR A MOVE INTO CHINA,” New York Times, June 3, 1992, Section D, Page 4. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/03/business/company-news-7-eleven-chain-is-ready-for-a-move-into-china.html
[5] Prapoglou, Costas. “Xuzhen Supermarket: Sadie Coles HQ,” The SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal for Contemporary Art, November 30, 2017. https://theseenjournal.org/xuzhen-supermarket-sadie-coles/
[6] “Top 10 convenience stores in China by numbers,” China Daily, September 9, 2021. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/09/WS61393bc5a310efa1bd66e3a3_1.html
[7] Ramsey, Dillon. “BGL’s Canadassimo at the Venice Biennale,” Nuvo Magazine, May 26, 2015. https://nuvomagazine.com/art/bgls-canadassimo-at-the-venice-biennale
[8] Tsui, Enid. “The Collector | Chinese artist Xu Zhen’s US$200,000 ‘supermarket’ makes a dig at commercialization of creativity,” South China Morning Post, October 7, 2018. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/2167105/chinese-artist-xu-zhens-us200000-supermarket
[9] Contemporary Evening Sale, Lot 1065, Xu Zhen, Xuzhen Supermarket, September 30, 2018. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2018/contemporary-art-evening-sale-hk0815/lot.1065.html
[10] Groys, Boris, “The Artist as Consumer,” in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers,2002), 55-60.
