Shopping & Extreme Pleasures

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Has art become just another consumer product? Relationship of art to retail and porn eg in the work of James Guppy, Jose da Silva. Also the Auckland Triennial reviewed. Co-editor Helen Grace

Topic list: body image, censorship, consumer culture, design, electronic culture, feminism, food, gay issues, gender, identity, popular culture, pornography, sexuality.

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Articles in Vol 24 no 2, 2004

Consuming Pleasure

Editorial by Helen Grace

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Captive Bait: The Work of Jose Da Silva

Feature by Daniel Mudie Cunningham

This essay looks at the work of Jose Da Silva, a young Brisbane artist whose work explores the way pornographic images and acts of violence shape gay male subjectivity. Da Silva underscores the way sexual violence is repeatedly fetishised and performed in gay porn, and by extension queer culture. Da Silva's work is bait, designed to lure an audience with its amateur porn pull. Once captive, an audience finds itself figuratively trapped in a seedy backroom where sexual violence is not simply patterned on recognisable social problems like homo hate crimes and/or gay male domestic violence. — More »

Chaotic Attractors: Jake Chapman Lecture Tour 04

Feature by Kit Wise

The two hours of Jake Chapman's lecture at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne in March 2004 were in many ways a homage to Modernism and the aesthetic of industry - albeit back-handed. The hierarchies of art history, the possibility of the poetic and the tradition of humanism all came under attack. The core issue circled around throughout the discussion was the degree to which art was simply a diversion for the middle-class: a market-responsive product or cathartic moment in which people could be and even pay for the privilege of being shocked. — More »

Enchantment/Disenchantment: The 2nd Auckland Triennial

Feature by Edward Hanfling

The generic theme for the 2nd Auckland Triennial Public/Private sought to address central issues concerned with the relationship of the visual art 'scene' to that of the everyday life (to banality), the potential or otherwise of new technologies to engage with the conditions of modern society and the ability of art to deal in specific 'ideas' of a social and political nature. Furthermore in bringing together artist's projects that are cross-cultural and transgenerational, the curatorial aim was to make connections which would intensify the privacy debate. Edward Hanfling examines some of these works with regards to such issues and concerns. — More »

Flatness Packed

Feature by Alex Taylor

While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern or contemporary lifestyle (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending. No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Foster and Jen Berean's installation at BUS Gallery, documented six miss-assembled items of IKEA furniture and dissect the curious aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms. Taylor looks at this work and others which are focused on drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration. — More »

Food Slut>Manifesto

Feature by Paul Van Ryke

Food increasingly became alienated from the body over the latter half of the twentieth century. Its material, its preparation, its distribution and its consumption became hostage to the banal aesthetics of the food stylist, the aridity of cultural studies and the repressive partnership of the public health zealot and the liability lawyer. Paul van Reyk here presents a manifesto on the 'food slut', a model for the examination of current food consumption trends in our society. As he states, a food slut is never indifferent to food, any more than a sex slut is indifferent to sex. — More »

How Much is that Artwork in the Window? Notes on Shops and Art

Feature by Juliette Peers

Through reference to Walter Benjamin's writings, Peers suggests that it has become commonplace to describe the city in terms of the progress of the flaneur, the middle class bohemian who strolled through the city, moving in the ephemeral sphere of impressions and images. This article looks at shopping as a central feature to the manner in which Australian art and culture has developed. The artist is a shopper and collector, moving through the materiality of things. Australian culture has itself become flaneur-ised over the past decade in the expansion of new museums and cultural precincts inviting discovery and added pleasure to the experiences of viewing and consuming art. — More »

One or Two Things about Art and Shopping

Feature by Josephine Wilson

This article explores the relationship between art and shopping, in particular the contemporary alignment of the two as one and the way feminist identity is largely constructed through the media and consumption. Wilson looks at the work of Barbara Kruger and her critique of Western consumer habits, in particular the way Kruger explores the different shopping patterns of men and women to reflect some inherent gender traits. — More »

Pornography and Photography

Feature by Helen Grace

A series of three exhibitions which appeared to erase or at least redraw the boundaries between art photography and pornography was seen at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 2003. Helen Grace talked to Alasdair Foster, Director of the ACP and curator of one of the exhibitions, about this timely and challenging project. — More »

The Perverted Gaze of the Artist: Recent Work of James Guppy

Feature by Joanna Mendelssohn

James Guppy has a curiously ambiguous place in contemporary art. This is not because of his subject matter, but rather because of his technique. For the most part Guppy's recent work is not about fun, nor is it even really about sex. Rather he argues it is about the nature of exploitation. He argues that artists by their nature are voyeurs who see the world around them and all its objects as items to be used as visual product. His recent Peeping Box series taps into this idea where images of sexual activity with a particular sadistic overlay are presented behind thick glass to incite some vain attempt on the part of the viewer to engage in such voyeuristic acts. — More »

Tokyo Shopping Mix: An Email Saga*

Feature by Stephen Haley

It is not hard to shop given the entire city of Tokyo seems to be premised on the activity. Tokyo is a space as complex and flowing as the most convoluted natural system. One may be in a train station but it is filled with shops. Above ground, below ground, on the ground - shops. Haley documents his activities over a period of a couple of months in what is most likely the world's largest consumer oriented city. He discusses the somewhat surreal and absurdist nature of this environment and paints a picture of the plethora of advertisements, signs, extreme fashion trends and other visual paraphernalia that consume the city. — More »

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