Trendsurfing: Reverse shoplifting (The Times)
By David Rowan
How does an artist get noticed when everyone is too busy shopping? Increasingly, by naughtily subverting the shopping trip itself. In a trend that's causing a buzz in the international art world, growing numbers of pranksters are placing their messages directly on to the supermarket shelves. They are leaving behind anything from creatively re-labelled cans of beans to specially recorded musical CDs, awaiting their serendipitous discovery by shoppers. The cleverest exhibits even carry barcodes intended to confound human intervention at the check-out. Score one, then, to art over commerce.
The practice is known as reverse shoplifting, or droplifting, and as a form of retail sabotage it goes back almost 20 years. Remember the Barbie Liberation Organisation, which in 1989 swapped the voice boxes of hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies with those removed from Talking Duke GI Joe action figures? They were returned to toy-shop shelves, so that US Army hunks declared, "I love shopping" and Mattel's blonde bimbos screamed: "Vengeance is mine!" Mattel's lawyers were not too happy, but the artists neatly conveyed their message about gender stereotyping.
That was just the start. Since then, the genre has attracted mischief-makers such as Packard Jennings, an American artist who created the Il Duce Action Figure (in Benito Mussolini's likeness) and smuggled it into Wal-Mart. Part of the subversion was in the packaging - other titles in the "Fascist Collection" apparently included George W Bush and Margaret Thatcher - but the main fun centred on Jennings's attempts to buy his invention, which he secretly filmed. The resulting footage - involving confused staff debating a suitable price - proved a hit at a subsequent gallery exhibition.
The latest reverse shoplifter to create a stir is Ryan Watkins-Hughes, a Brooklyn photographer whose "Shopdropping" project has become an internet hit. Watkins-Hughes buys canned foods and replaces the packaging with "art objects" based on his photographs, but retaining the original barcode. There is a serious point, Watkins-Hughes insists: "Shopdropping strives to take back a share of the visual space we encounter on a daily basis, [and] subverts commercial space for artistic use." It is also a democratic art form, allowing anyone visiting his shopdropping.net website to submit drawings or paintings for his next reverse-shopping trip.
For most practitioners, the main attraction of reverse shoplifting is simply the disruptive thrill of inserting tiny hand-made sundials into a jeweller's watch displays, or replacing cat-food cans with cute pottery replicas. The French, however, have more serious intentions. The Babyrul Foundation has droplifted hundreds of home-made CDs into record stores and mash-up DVDs into Blockbuster branches. Being French, the foundation naturally has a deep philosophy underpinning its oeuvre: retail profits, it suggests, are "set aside in favour of critical thinking about the way this activity's production is distributed", challenging "the commercial space-time of a store". More Marx, then, than Marks & Sparks.
The nearest we've come in Britain is the bookcrossing movement, in which favoured books are dropped in public spaces for others' discovery. Clearly, then, it's time for us Brits to get creative too. When you're out shopping today, remember that it's what you leave behind that counts. And when security hauls you aside, mumble something about reinventing a new commercial space-time. Just don't bother mentioning that The Times sent you.
(The Times Magazine, August 20 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
How does an artist get noticed when everyone is too busy shopping? Increasingly, by naughtily subverting the shopping trip itself. In a trend that's causing a buzz in the international art world, growing numbers of pranksters are placing their messages directly on to the supermarket shelves. They are leaving behind anything from creatively re-labelled cans of beans to specially recorded musical CDs, awaiting their serendipitous discovery by shoppers. The cleverest exhibits even carry barcodes intended to confound human intervention at the check-out. Score one, then, to art over commerce.
The practice is known as reverse shoplifting, or droplifting, and as a form of retail sabotage it goes back almost 20 years. Remember the Barbie Liberation Organisation, which in 1989 swapped the voice boxes of hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies with those removed from Talking Duke GI Joe action figures? They were returned to toy-shop shelves, so that US Army hunks declared, "I love shopping" and Mattel's blonde bimbos screamed: "Vengeance is mine!" Mattel's lawyers were not too happy, but the artists neatly conveyed their message about gender stereotyping.
That was just the start. Since then, the genre has attracted mischief-makers such as Packard Jennings, an American artist who created the Il Duce Action Figure (in Benito Mussolini's likeness) and smuggled it into Wal-Mart. Part of the subversion was in the packaging - other titles in the "Fascist Collection" apparently included George W Bush and Margaret Thatcher - but the main fun centred on Jennings's attempts to buy his invention, which he secretly filmed. The resulting footage - involving confused staff debating a suitable price - proved a hit at a subsequent gallery exhibition.
The latest reverse shoplifter to create a stir is Ryan Watkins-Hughes, a Brooklyn photographer whose "Shopdropping" project has become an internet hit. Watkins-Hughes buys canned foods and replaces the packaging with "art objects" based on his photographs, but retaining the original barcode. There is a serious point, Watkins-Hughes insists: "Shopdropping strives to take back a share of the visual space we encounter on a daily basis, [and] subverts commercial space for artistic use." It is also a democratic art form, allowing anyone visiting his shopdropping.net website to submit drawings or paintings for his next reverse-shopping trip.
For most practitioners, the main attraction of reverse shoplifting is simply the disruptive thrill of inserting tiny hand-made sundials into a jeweller's watch displays, or replacing cat-food cans with cute pottery replicas. The French, however, have more serious intentions. The Babyrul Foundation has droplifted hundreds of home-made CDs into record stores and mash-up DVDs into Blockbuster branches. Being French, the foundation naturally has a deep philosophy underpinning its oeuvre: retail profits, it suggests, are "set aside in favour of critical thinking about the way this activity's production is distributed", challenging "the commercial space-time of a store". More Marx, then, than Marks & Sparks.
The nearest we've come in Britain is the bookcrossing movement, in which favoured books are dropped in public spaces for others' discovery. Clearly, then, it's time for us Brits to get creative too. When you're out shopping today, remember that it's what you leave behind that counts. And when security hauls you aside, mumble something about reinventing a new commercial space-time. Just don't bother mentioning that The Times sent you.
(The Times Magazine, August 20 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
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