PROJECTS:
For when all that was read was … so as not to be unknown, 2012 Link
…cairo stories, 2011 Link
From Receiver to Remote... Channeling Spain, 2010 Link
study for the mirror and garden. redux 2007
border stories, working title, from one place to another
voice off
speedflesh
consigned to border: the terror and possibilities in the things not seen
the hunt for language
PROJECTS:
For when all that was read was … so as not to be unknown, 2012 Link
…cairo stories, 2011 Link
From Receiver to Remote... Channeling Spain, 2010 Link
study for the mirror and garden. redux 2007
border stories, working title, from one place to another
voice off
speedflesh
consigned to border: the terror and possibilities in the things not seen
the hunt for language
PROJECTS:
For when all that was read was … so as not to be unknown, 2012 Link
…cairo stories, 2011 Link
From Receiver to Remote... Channeling Spain, 2010 Link
study for the mirror and garden. redux 2007
border stories, working title, from one place to another
voice off
speedflesh
consigned to border: the terror and possibilities in the things not seen
the hunt for language
PROJECTS:
For when all that was read was … so as not to be unknown, 2012 Link
…cairo stories, 2011 Link
From Receiver to Remote... Channeling Spain, 2010 Link
study for the mirror and garden. redux 2007
border stories, working title, from one place to another
voice off
speedflesh
consigned to border: the terror and possibilities in the things not seen
the hunt for language
FROM RECEIVER TO REMOTE CONTROL:
THE TELEVISION SET
IMPRESSARIO:
MALCOLM MCLAREN &THE BRITISH
NEW WAVE
TOMORROW, TODAY
DISPLAY: MUSEUM OF SIGNS
Exhibition design, Shopping Mall
Palo Alto California, 1980
I was invited by the artist Lynn Hirshman to propose a project for her Floating Museum at a working class shopping mall in Palo Alto that was going out of business just as Silicon Valley was booming. The owner thought perhaps ‘high art’ could make up for his lack of an upscale anchor store. He had a Penny’s but needed Sak’s Fifth Avenue. Could art bridge for this difference?
While this project was never realized I published the article Casual Imagination in Discourse Magazine, 1982 and many of the ideas explored here found their way into the video Casual Shopper.
Exhibition site before installation
I re-conceived the shopping mall as a Museum, by mapping another kind of experience onto the notion of shopping. I called the project Display: Museum of Signs.
My thesis was that the use of contemporary display techniques in relation to popular culture produces desire(s) which are never sated (psychoanalysis by way of
film theory), but which lead to new forms of subjectivity such as the notion of a female ‘flaneuse’ (after Walter Benjamin’s 19th c male flaneur). Hence on the front of the building, I planned an ever-changing series of images and a name change announcing the formation of this new Museum.
Exhibition sketch
On the bulletin board that announced the day’s events, I located a map of how to make use of the Museum. The map functioned both as a ‘memory aid’ and a ‘memory palace’ as well as a real plan of the exhibition. Rather than allowing the shops to have competing window displays, I proposed that they collaborate thus ritualizing a consumer form of Marxism along side commodity fetishisation.
Exhibition sketch
Display area
Rather than allowing the shops to have competing window displays, I proposed that they collaborate thus ritualizing a consumer form of Marxism along side commodity fetishisation.
Display area
Exhibition sketch
I was particularly interested in what I saw as new contemplative shopping—the notion that you could spend a lot of time looking at something, but not buying and that this was not considered aesthetic experience.
The other display area was a ‘deconstruction’ based on Jacques Derrida’s work where I labeled all the elements that comprise a store’s display system. In revealing the complexity of the design elements that cohere to produce the ‘shopping experience’, I sought to make the relationships between design and the experience more transparent.
Exhibition sketch
Shopping center