G-Mart
Walter Benjamin began his unfinished masterpiece, "The Arcades Project," with two quotes. First, from a book of views of Paris:
First, from a book of views of Paris:
The magic columns of these palaces
Show to the amateur on all sides,
In the objects their porticos display,
That industry is the rival of the arts.
Second, from the poet Arthur Rimbaud:
For sale the bodies, the voices, the tremendous unquestionable wealth, what will never be sold.
With G-Mart, I constructed a public double-blind taste-test of the eye to prove that industry's finest art--advertising--is indistinguishable from fine art. At the same time, I constructed a temple to the idea of sales, and to the ineffable, unquenchable, source of consumer desire, always for sale, never sold.
Any close observer of the first world over the last two decades knows that citizenship and the idea of a public is more or less dead. The citizen has evolved into the consumer. The "forum" of deliberation, where matters of state and society are carefully weighed through the democratic process, has given way to the "mall," a carefully designed retail environment offering consumers every imaginable choice and sellers total control of the environment.
Our concept of freedom is built around the idea of choice, but choice itself has come to mean something different. Most of the great moral choices--between freedom and slavery, good and evil, what is and what could be--have been decided by previous generations. What's left is the weak, impotent choice of the consumer--choosing between thirty-eight brands of toothpaste or nine varieties of sneaker. There is a sense that this is not enough choice with which to make a human life. And yet there is ample evidence that this is all we have.
Freedom no longer means choice. It means convenience.
With G-Mart I took all the spiritual malaise that's accumulated around buying and selling and use it as an engine to sell even more. Situated in Old City, an urban historic retail center made over into a yuppie playground, G-Mart's slogan was: For every generation, there is crap.
I created G-Mart to be a store that sold everything and nothing. With so many self-described "fine artists" attempting to harvest their cachet with retail ventures, I wanted to see what happened if a regular store were presented as a giant work of art. I wanted to stretch the concept of a "brand" to its outermost limit and find the line where the meaning of wanting something and meaninglessness of being defined by your wants begin to intermingle, in a pleasant way. I was interested in exploring the architectural and pedestrian patterns that define today's urban retail environment, and playing with consumer expectations of exactly what counts as a "store." But most of all, G-Mart was an experiment in the art of packaging.
We sold home-grown pseudobrands like Cult 666 Malt Liquor, Deez Nutz, the GMart Home Meth Lab (for kids!!!) and Mother Cluckers Fried Chicken. We sold brands with teasingly innocuous names like "Fresh Milk." We put a label on cream soda, calling it beer. We had one of those arcade claw games, where for a couple of quarters you could try and fail to win a stuffed animal. We sold products like "Hot Meat Sticks," that stretched and twisted retail cliche to the point of the grotesque. We sold funny t-shirts. So what?
G-Mart sold "nothing" because the store's products were pure surface, humorous and rebelliously designed packages that resonated deeply with our contemporary frustrations and yet contained nothing, or next to nothing.
G-Mart sold "everything" in that its product carried a deep symbolic charge. The smaller the actual product is in relation to the advertising spent to promote it, the more space there is for the consumer's deepest feelings to fill in the blanks. G-Mart sold perfect, empty packages, painted in spectacle, but with no essential content within the wrapping. In other words, G-Mart's products were pure forms, the secular equivalent of shamanic totems. These were icons of almost religious intensity--highly sensitive screens that could receive and reflect almost any emotional projection. These tiny spectacles epitomized the vacuum of the larger spectacle, the universe as a store of beautiful forms, where everything is for sale but no one is selling what you really want. And so you keep on buying.
I drew G-Mart's retail vocabulary not from Prada or Nike or other exalted temples of retail design. I sought sublimity in the vernacular of the most average American retail experience possible--the convenience store. I took the blandest retail experience possible, repackaged it in star-spangled spectacle, and sold it as art.