Shopping the Abject

Another swimming lesson to attend, another 45 mins of outdoor creation.


The theme for this second ‘art’ installation is the discourse inherent in negotiating relationships within the context of an anti-historical present.

The piece consists of the placement/arrangement of 3 trolleys (shopping carts). The trolleys have been removed from the delineated and discrete lanes (aisles) of the supermarket and placed within a ‘natural’ environment. In this way we can negotiate their purpose without the contextual situation of commercial space. We thus can now truly see the trolley as both signifier and totem.

The trolleys have been positioned and imaged three times.

The first image of standing trolleys represents the commodification of relationships removed as they are in the West from familial or community control and historical procreational purpose. The trolleys placed in a line symbolise the commerce that is concomitant with love. We shop with our conceptual trolleys browsing society with our mental lists of desired attributes (some ours some inherited) searching for the partner commodity. When we perceive the symbolic trolley is filled, we then negotiate the emotional price and freedom we are prepared to lose/pay. The commodity purchased can thus replace/negate a self lived life and create an artificial human value (price), the exchange also potentially unequal.

The trolleys upturned represent the rejection of the commodity principle and of the necessity of competing in a denatured environment. In the prone position the trolleys are unable to be filled purposefully with the commodity we may want, but are left open for nature to fill with the potentially abject. Pushed over, the trolleys are in a ‘state of nature’ where our ‘logical’ expectations can ‘fall out’ and the fundamental elements of nature may grow around/within/thru subsuming the inorganic back into the organic. But this is also a representation of decay, the destruction of civilisation, and in essence a return to a brute master/servant scenario as opposed to the current purchaser/provider model. Thus we are given the question, if the present is unequal and the past problematic, then how may we transcend the future.

The third image wherein the trolleys have been physically removed (but the idea of trolleys is still present) represents the absence and distance inherent in the impossibility of a real knowledge of a creator god.