Shopping is a portable art show that wanders up Carnaby Street to Oxford Circus and catches the tube home. Its an event that transforms the street into a kind of gallery, shoppers into art collectors and shops into places of real and proper culture. Amongst the fantastic products, the beautiful commercial graphics, and the not so beautiful advertising executives gulping latte, art must look after itself. No white walls, no polished wooden floors without the buffers that usually protects art from the outside world. And the bags become, alternativly, valuable cultural commodities or a convienient way of schlepping your empties to the recycling centre.
Shopping is the latest in a series of projects that explore the idea of the exploded gallery.
Gallery is a far from neutral word, describing a far from neutral space. The space of the art gallery is inseperable from the institution of the gallery which acts by giving cultural and economic status to the objects and events occurring within its jurisdiction. When the boundary that marks the perimeter of the gallery is erased, the seal that prevents the contamination of the art space from external influence is broken. Works are sited outside the gallery to allow the exploration of the ways in which the meaning and significance of a work of art is read against the context in which it is experienced. We hope you enjoy Shopping while it lasts.