To get around Britain’s strict lockdown measures, the Design Museum has teamed up with Bombay Sapphire and designer Camille Walala to create a pop-up called ‘Supermarket’.
“The past year has been really challenging for artists who haven’t been able to show work or collaborate as normal,” said Camille Walala in a statement. Indeed, beyond providing the public with tea bags and pasta, Supermarket does more than it says on the tin, Sammi Gale writes.
LONDON, UK – APRIL 20: General view of artwork at the Supermarket installation by Bombay Sapphire and the Design Museum showcasing emerging artists who have designed essential items with their artwork on the packaging with all proceeds from sales will go to the Design museum’s new Emerging Designer Access Fund at the Design Museum on April 20, 2021 in London, England. (Photo by Ming Yeung/Getty Images)
London’s Design Museum is slated to re-open on Tuesday 18th May, as per the latest COVID-19 restrictions and government guidance. You will probably have noticed that a handful of smaller galleries have already resumed normal service. Somehow, it’s a novel idea that private galleries are considered ‘non-essential retail’. Having become so accustomed to galleries as temples for the secular, it is easy to forget that, unlike an altarpiece, the works on the walls of our white cubes are there to be bought.
As the private gallery slides into view as a storefront, and essential and non-essential take on new shades of meaning, The Design Museum are exploiting a technicality: designer Camille Walala has made-over the museum’s High Street Shop in her typical bold patterns and colours. The installation is fully serviceable, shelves stocked with everyday basics, and the project comes fully-packed – pun intended – with a hashtag-able call to arms: Creativity is Essential.
ArrayThe items on sale range from toilet paper to kidney beans, washing up liquid to bread, and they are all packaged in artwork from ten up-and-coming artists. The pop-up aims to spotlight the work of these young creatives and will continue to sell the limited-edition items in-store at Supermarket and online, until they sell out. Proceeds will be going to the new Emerging Designer Access Fund, which gives out free Design Museum tickets to emerging talents.
It’s not the first time an art world supermarket has forced us to question what is ‘art’ and what is not. The American Supermarket exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in 1964 gathered together the work of Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, Tom Wesselman and Claes Oldenburg, who took commonly known symbols of corporate practices – logos, adverts, and, of course, tins of Campbell’s tomato soup – and said, these belong just as much inside the museum as outside. In contrast, Supermarket could be the first time a shop has been mobilised towards the opposite: art and creativity must be considered a necessary part of daily life, and the rest of the world should open its arms to the work of museums.
Of course, this has long been catnip to artists. It’s too tempting to use the market as synecdoche for consumer society and to transform the viewer into a customer, which when you think about, she always is. Flemish Baroque painter Frans Snyder was up to as much in Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market (1614). An elderly vendor even tips his hat to greet the viewer, as his open-air market teams with life and death. The American Supermarket exhibition was an immersive installation, complete with muzak and signage; Snyder achieves just as much with paint.
Of course, Andy and the gang had more to play with when their turn rolled around: at the turn of the twentieth century, products were becoming packaged in more creative ways than customary plain, brown paper. In the 60s, packaging experienced another boom as more and more retailers realised just how sophisticated a marketing tool they had at their disposal. As the historian Glenn Porter once noted, ‘few aspects of human life have been so closely studied as the behaviour of the consumer in the presence of the package.’ He could have continued – few aspects of human life have been so richly mined by artists and writers as our sites of commerce. Is my bread a sculpture, if I carry it from the bakery to the museum?
Campbell’s Soup, Andy Warhol, 1965
Murray, a character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, compares the supermarket to a kind of Tibetan heaven. ‘This place recharges us spiritually’, he says, ‘it prepares us, it’s a gateway or a pathway.’ Particularly charged is the packaging, ‘All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum’. Meanwhile, Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon (2002) – one of the most expensive photographs ever sold – similarly revels in popping colour and infinity. Via digital manipulation, several smaller photos of aisles crammed with goods are stitched together; with strong horizontal and vertical lines, almost oppressively symmetrical, Gursky gives the viewer the feeling the store could go on forever.
Time and again, from Frans Snyder to Gursky, the (super)market is a site where human virtue and vice comes up against the value of art, as if to ask, both literally and figuratively: what is the cost of living? Ceal Floyer’s Monochrome Till Receipt (White) (1999) – as it sounds – cost £70.30 to make, at a branch of Morrison’s, and has a price tag of £30,000. Ten years prior, the original opening sequence of The Simpsons sees Maggie rung up at a price of $847.63. Not a number plucked from thin air. It was the approximate monthly cost of raising a child back in 1989, when the show first arrived on screens.
Frans Snyders, Still-Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market, 1614
Back at the Design Museum, and this Supermarket pop-up seems hyper-specific to our time – a pushback against certain measures and a rallying cry to implement others. Yet, if we can use previous supermarket-art-market crossovers to tell us something about how humans behave and what they find aesthetically pleasing, surely, we can do the same with the Design Museum’s.
While it would be a mistake to draw too many generalisations, the artists that Walala has selected do seem to have a number of traits in common. All of them work at the cross-section of other mediums — art, textiles, design, illustration. The artworks on the packaging here all leap from a vibrant, pared down, pastel colour palette and employ simple shapes. Even the more expressive works, such as Joey Yu’s rice box – which sees a blue-haired woman blushing ovals and holding hands across a table – seems in conversation with a style elsewhere referred to as ‘flat illustration’.
Flatter, sharper, vector-based design is a response to technology. ‘Flat’, in this case, does not refer to affect, but to designs that embrace clarity and simplicity when presented on various digital displays. Simply put, flat shapes load faster and scale easier. Apple’s visual overhaul from iOS6, with its skeuomorphic icons, and the sharper, flatter iOS7, introduced in 2013, seems to exemplify ‘flat illustrations’ ubiquitous; many people will see it first thing when they wake up and last thing before bed. Google the simple search term ‘illustration’, and you’ll see just how omnipresent the trend is.
So, while the Supermarket pop-up insists upon creativity made concrete, a splash of colour and shape in physical space, it also reflects how hybridised the digital and the analogue world has become over the past year, in particular; how more and more we are ‘shopping for images,’ as the poet Allen Ginsberg once put it (‘I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!’).
In 2002, the historian Susan Strasser observed that ‘few seek their entertainment in the dinnertime run to the supermarket.’ Would she still agree? The past ten months have seen our relationship with the supermarket shift: the one constant, the last bastion of ‘what’s open’. Many of us have indeed sought entertainment in the daily run.
Unlike previous iterations, there is something fittingly pragmatic, grassroots about the Design Museum’s pop-up. What’s more, you can actually buy these products (works? essentials?), for similar price points to goods found on regular supermarket shelves – loo roll is 50p (limited to three rolls per order, you may or may not be pleased to note.) Whether consumers put these essential items to good use or keep them for display remains to be seen – what is art and what is not? The perennial question.
