Op
Shop Culture: Aesthetics In Mothballs
published in Like No.1, Melbourne,
1996
Every year PEOPLE magazine does its two 'special' issues:
"Where Are They Now?" and "Annual Best Dressed Worst Dressed".
This year's issue gathers 'media personalities' to make
and jokes and gush praise on famous people's outfits. Not
surprisingly, a large number of dismissives use a hot term:
op shop. Queeny comments like "leave it in the op shop,
darling." This from a magazine that says it would be impossible
for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to not look 'stylish'.
I guess the message is op-shops are a no-go while mediocrity
and banality are timeless qualities.
What
is this thing with the op shop? What sets it up as a site
for cheap shots? And obvious anti-fashion statements? Why
does it persist as a well into which many cultural splatters
fall? And - last and perhaps least - why do so many contemporary
art installations look like op shop windows?
Hard
core op shop versus soft core op shop
Soft
core op shop is the stuff PEOPLE magazine belittles and
bemoans - 'wacky' gear worn by extremely straight people
who use the 'outrageousness' of their attire to affirm their
innate conservatism. Nylon leisure suits which are too obviously
daggy - like fat Elvis impersonations by 'new wave' comedians.
Fake fur coats which are too obviously tatty - they're only
hip thanks to expensive designers who revived them over
eight years ago. Anything 'cool' is soft core - ie. anything
originally marketed as 'cool', like corduroy and suede unisex
bell-bottoms, satin or high sheen unisex body shirts. They're
soft core because retro copies are worn by MELROSE PLACE
stars presenting awards at the BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO AWARDS.
These days, bimbo and bambo TV soap stars get stylists to
dress them up in remade op-shop chic to send out a message
to casting agents: even though we do bland TV, we have a
potential 'edge'. The clothes are usually designed by graduates
from fashion courses who have had Euro fashion history lectures
on everyone from Mary Quant to Vivienne Westwood. These
designers know the references despite being ignorant of
the shifting envelopes of cultural narratives which fold
over and crease every fashion statement they believe their
designs to be making. These are the pitfalls of being soft
core.
Hard
core op shop now means down quilted vests (like Michael
J. Fox wore in the mid-80s BACK TO THE FUTURE movies); bright
blue, red or emerald green tracksuits (like TARGET made
in the late 70s); and any patterned top that mixes beige
with a day-glo colour (preferably the original deep peach
day-glo called 'Rocket Red'). Ultra hard core is murky plaid
cuffed-flares for men or women. Why? Firstly, they're unflattering
to your figure - a real stylist no-no. Secondly, they're
mega-rare - The only ones around come from the estates of
dead fat men. All the smaller sizes have been scooped by
thin and rakish street people who hang out in SAFEWAYs and
NEW WORLDs, and who dress in gear left in bags in front
of the op shop at midnight. And thirdly, they were rampant
between 1972 and 1976 (every male from skinheads to politicians
sported them), yet like the missing sock in the laundry,
they pose the eternal enigma: where the hell did they all
go? Just in case you missed the point, such hard core fashion
statements do indirectly exploit the aesthetic fall-out
from dreggy people most of you would cross the street to
avoid. But that's fashion in its quintessential avant-garde
(not postmodern) form. Ever since Richard Avedon took shoots
of gorgeous peacock women striking a pose next to dumpy
wog peasants, the template has been regularly applied: contrast
beauty against its absence. Reduced to such binary polarities,
style can become too easy and too obvious. Everyone gets
hung up on playing out their opposite, their other, the
nightmare that can't haunt them because they visited it
first. These are the pitfalls of being hard core.
Not
surprisingly, hard core and soft core define the other.
Hard core needs dags who think they're cool so that they
can then be cooler. Soft core needs fashion radicals who
venture into areas the designers (for the moment) fear to
tread. Of course the designers will be there a few years
down the track, while the hard core op shoppers will have
moved elsewhere. The aesthetics are always morphing (though
never really evolving) while the strategies and statements
are overtly defined (though always saying the same thing).
This is perhaps because the op shop is one of those peculiar
sites where the politics of taste are strictly territorial:
people either go too far or not far enough. It's not as
if there is any stable reference or any validated history
of its contents (although the Christie's auction of Warhol's
ephemera collection did redefine the investment potential
of junk for many a scornful businessman). It is these timeless
and rootless aspects that make ops shop both a pathetic
aesthetic recourse and a desperate artistic matter.
The
op shop as pathetic aesthetic recourse & desperate artistic
matter
The
op shop as a pathetic aesthetic recourse. From little girls
and boys dressing up in mum & dad's clothes (humanist
photographers and film makers take note: it never fails)
to drag queens pillaging the signage of the collapse of
womanly/feminine codes (interventionist photographers and
film makers take note: it never fails), the dressing-up
in the discarded excess of the other is standard fare in
any discourse on fashion. A parade of 60S counter-cultures
first chose this recourse: from West Coast scene makers
in their pre-Raphelite glitz and pseudo-chivalrous finery
along Haight & Ashbury, to the East Coast emergence
of camp and its intersection with bisexual Glam in New York.
The former electrically trumpeted by Jimi Hendrix and Brian
Jones; the latter chemically screamed by numerous Factory
superstars. David Bowie's THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD (1971)
with its original drag cover best captures the cross-over
between these two streams of antique ambience: he languishes
like Garbo in what looks like the loungeroom of someone
who runs an antique store. This was the first era of drugged-out
rock heads discovering old Hollywood movies on late night
TV, finding old feather boas in bric-a-brac stores, and
pinning up Maxfield Parrish-style posters by Rick Griffin
and Robert Crumb. A time when anything new-world was repulsive
and anything old-world was attractive. The core statement
made over and over again was an escape from the present.
The legacy of this tack-as-chic hangover has been acknowledged
by 80s revivalist acts like Lenny Kravitz (afro-American
John Lennon), Terence Trent D'Arby (carribean James Brown),
Motley Crue (Hollywood Black Sabbath) and Aerosmith (New
York Rolling Stones) - polysexual mulatto acts heavily marketed
on the style resulting from their retro excessiveness and
their theatricalized otherness.
While
the op shop - or its precursors of market stalls and second
hand boutiques - has been excavated for a redefinition of
past aesthetic values, the op shop is also scavenged for
any shreds of anti-aesthetic ethics. This is the op shop
as desperate artistic matter - 'matter' being things that
can't be regarded simply as loud, gross, funky, gaudy, but
which are presented, received and articulated as first degree
ugly. Two factors orient the op shop as desperate artistic
matter. Firstly, the present is ungainly celebrated as the
collapse between those who are so late they're uncool into
those who force lateness to become cool. This is a sloppily
unmediated present, wherein images, objects, sounds hang
around like bad smells. They become drained of their original
design flair and logic and become perceived as ill-formed
statements. Stuff like metallic chocolate Sandman panel
vans and classy hairdressers with names like Le Split Enz;
cute grey terra-cotta frogs and tri-colour pastel windcheaters
with Gum Nut Baby appliqued; towering SIZZLER signs and
Ronald McDonald's hair; stretch acid wash jeans and beautiful
guitar solos by Tommy Emmanuel. Stuff that is impossibly
uncool and possibly everywhere you look (if you keep your
eyes open). Secondly, these artefacts are the real thing.
Perversely, their authenticity simultaneously marks them
as material no one would dare reproduce while emptying the
notion of authenticity. I should come clean here and say
I am rolled into that latter group of desperates. However,
I would like to argue that there is both perversity and
productivity which arises from such desperate artistic matters.
The
ugly op shop of the present & the over-designed present
This
op shop of the present - this ugly, ugly, realm frantically
trying to escape any legitimate codification - for some
time has been a territorial marker of aesthetic investigation.
I use the word 'aesthetic' in a hard sense, in that something
as dumb, smelly and arbitrary as aesthetics (like, who really
cares what's good or bad anyway?) is an effectively confounding
escape from other theoretical discourses which cling to
bodies of art like weeds from a stagnant pond. Granted that
on the one hand this mega-ugly realm is in itself an escape
from the high-style design-conscious neo-sophisticate retro-informed
present, but on the other it feels like a healthy reflex
against a saturated postmodernism. Most importantly, the
anti-aesthetic ethics (ie. not anti-art statements but discursive
rejections of any codes which could align you with the act
of making a statement) of this nauseous op shop is a migratory
site which attracts those who do not want to be confused
with those who are desperate to become artists. It doesn't
take a sharp cultural analyst to see that architects, interior
designers, environmental designers, jewellery designers,
graphic designers - they all deep down think they are the
real artists, and those who carry the socio-cultural label
of 'exhibiting artist' are somehow mere ideas people incapable
of living in the 'real world'. While clearly being in the
majority in this day and age (you can't walk anywhere now
without somehow being manoeuvred through some terribly complex
pre-designed space/ambience/zone/whatever), this group of
crafts people and designers are no more than the bastard
children of early 70s post-object art: earth sites, spatial
environments, mobile mechanisms, body art, light sculptures,
etc.
There
is a simple way of putting all this. Art fucked up. It literally
interpreted all the pre-postmodernist delinquents between
Duchamp and Warhol who were lucky enough to be in the wrong
spot at the right time to correctly say the wrong thing
about art. This gang of conceptual delinquents collided,
fused and melted popular culture into the gilt-edged zones
of true art; they were frivolous, devious, strategic. What
is often forgot is that once artists utter anything about
the concept of art (as opposed to themselves or nature or
boring stuff like that), their statements - however transient
- will gravitate toward that swirling gaseous asteroid of
'the meaning of art'. New atmospheric conditions follow,
causing a realignment of all previous statements about art.
Duchamp and Warhol concurred: anyone can be an artist. The
fallout from that statement 30 years later? Everyone is
an artist, from my mother to a plumber to a cooking show
host to the bass player in a funk band to a curator to the
art director of a new tampon ad campaign. In such a climate,
can you seriously blame artists trying out any knee-jerk
reaction to get away from the seething mass of pod-artists?
Can you blame artists becoming as restless (and deluded)
as to want to be rock stars, film directors, novelists,
actors?
Kitsch
cinema, bland cinema & arthouse cinema
The
'over-designed present' is inescapable - a realm where government
funding is directed into beautifying and aestheticizing
the streets with blobs of hand painted tiles and metal figurative
stick people. This outside world is a nightmarish vision
of tasteful decor, pathetically controlled by people who
probably wish public transport users showered more often.
Much of the arts patronized by such delicate, sensitive
people is similarly decor-oriented. The cinema - especially
arthouse cinema, which ... um, must be cinema that can be
labelled art - promotes images of that same nightmarish
outside world; a world brimful of hope, humanism, ethnic
food and sumptuous landscapes.
Yet
when arthouse cinema shifts gear from the exotic into the
'poetics of the everyday', a dreadfully predictable bind
rears its head over and over again: how do you show uncultured
people with warmth, respect, dignity, devoid of judgement,
or simply as a non-hierarchical piss-take? Australian cinema
is particularly afflicted with this inability to depict
anything 'non-stylish' or 'not-upper-class' without resorting
to gross caricature and gaudy excess. From Hills clothes
hoists to VEGEMITE jars to garden gnomes, the intelligentsia
- those supposedly capable of a distanced perspective on
things - have rendered the dumb masses as living icons of
tacky op shop regalia. The point is that these icons were
skilfully satirized in solid comedy-drama TV series like
MY NAME'S McGOOLIE (late 60s) and RITA & WALLY (early
70s) - yet they still pop up in the early 90s boutique cinema
from SPOTSWOOD to MURIEL'S WEDDING. Why? Because these middle-of-the-road
films can't bring themselves to depict the iconography and
landscape of the suburban milieu or the grime of inner city
grunge. Where are the 7-11s and their Bionic Blue Bubble
Gum Slurpees? The Heritage coloured trellis work on TABARET
pubs? The yellow barn-like warehouses for BILLY GYATT'S?
The main streets illuminated by orange fog lights? Just
as soft core op shop is about pointing to the ugly whilst
maintaining a beautified distance, soft core mass culture
as depicted in arthouse Australian films is filtered through
a similar beautification by relying on an established semiotics
of kitsch iconography.
Few
films escape this. Maria Kozic's production design for BODY
MELT (1993) positions the film as an apt stylistic document
of the innate blandness of outer-outer-suburban living -
so much so that for many film industry people the film's
'look' was unintelligently bland. If there were some screaming
kitsch icons in it, then the film may have been regarded
as 'witty', 'perceptive' and 'subtle'. This wave length
of design in BODY MELT is in synch with the op shop as desperate
artistic matter: it is effectively forced to become 'unintelligently
bland' in order to avoid being read as overt signage in
a saturated postmoderm environment. It sets up a dialogue
with other films which have been shaped by a rigorous and
unflinching design sensibility which seeks to retain the
bland, the ugly, the non-descript, the hyper-present: TRASH,
BAD, OVER THE EDGE, JEANNE DIELMAN, DESPERATELY SEEKING
SUSAN, MARRIED TO THE MOB, PULSE, THE GATE, BOILING POINT,
BEAVIS & BUTT HEAD, L'EST, MY NEW GUN, SAFE. These films
collectively share that desperately artistic op shop voice
by emptying themselves of all possible visual pleasure so
as to site their worlds in the decidedly a-cinematic telemovie
world where public transport ends and fast food takes over;
where domesticity becomes an inescapable universe. These
films are the cinematic equivalents of track suit tops,
grimy plaid flares and shiny quilted vests in an era dominated
by the gross widescreen perfumery of gorgeous, luscious
films like DIVA, LA BAL, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, THE
SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA, LIKE WATER OVER CHOCOLATE, BABBETTE'S
FEAST, THREE COLOURS.
The
terror of girlie stuff & the smear of grunge
Arthouse
cinema in some respects is the revenge of women's pictures
- meaning that their excessive poetic femininity and tasteful
eroticism in perfectly matches the hysterical maleness of
body-obsessed action movies. This is a blunt gender distinction
- because the distinction between these two markets of exploitation
is blunt. However, a more complex gender distinction in
contemporary art separates that which denies the op shop
and that which privileges it.
The
serious-looking stuff with sand on the floor, two hanging
light bulbs, a sofa coated in sugar cubes and a photo of
Maria Callas spinning on an old turntable (note: this idea
is non-copyright, so go for it) - that's art intent on transforming
op shop fodder. The stuff full of knitted poodle lamps,
crocheted ponchos, SCOOBY DOO place mats and scented with
PALMOLIVE soap - that's art intent on privileging op shop
treasures. The former results from men or women imbuing
the conceptual oil slick between Beuys and Keiffer and producing
conceptual art that is decisively intimidating. The latter
is often the produce of emerging women artists (and some
gays - Juan Davila is a supreme mistress here) crossing
belemia with art and vomiting up cute iconography from terrorized
childhoods. I've heard many a male comment about 'girlie'
(ie. neither feminine nor feminist) installations which
makes me wonder if 'non-girlie' found object collages are
validated only by the specious weight of their conceptual
thrust. 'Girlie' op shop art usually looks like ... well,
girlie op shop art. But that may be the point - that there
is no Teutonic philosophical cock behind it pumping into
our cerebral gaze. It is the stuff of bag women; prostitutes;
tired mothers; senile ladies; grubby daughters - all caught
in a seductive nightmare of therapy shopping, mall cruising
and bargain hunting. Kruger can make a PC (and very daggy)
quip by ripping off the uni student slogan "I shop therefore
I am"; girlie op shop art flaunts the teen-movie stupid
pleasure of "shop until you drop". If you don't think 16
CANDLES, THE BREAKFAST CLUB, PRETTY IN PINK and SOME KIND
OF WONDERFUL are incisive films, then you just won't get
it. (Try Pagan Kennedy's FANZINE! book for some kind of
insight.)
Grunge
makes an cursive intersection here. 'Real' grunge is downright
reactionary: all solid working class without the fucked-up
neuroticism which fuels heavy metal. Flaccid grunge is when
VANITY FAIR (1992) gets Leibowitz (patron saint of ultra-daggy
no-style New Yorkers) to photograph famous rich people to
dress up in - wow - cream 3/4 leather coats with floral
A-line skirts and green platform booties. The clothes actually
look great; the people look stupid, like footballers getting
married. The development of grunge is quite likely centred
on a soft gender war - between the guys who want to wear
their check flannelette shirts like a warrior code and the
girls who are sick of wearing floppy asexual windcheaters
emblazoned with their boyfriends' heroes. When girls start
raiding the op shop for outfits, the style starts mutating
and growing, giving us rowdy stylistic atrocities which
VANITY FAIR imperceptively lampoons and WHO bemoans. Sonic
Youth's choice of Mike Kelly's knitted dolls for their DIRTY
album is a key interstice. Having forgone the Germanic macho
tone of Gerhard Richter's candle series for their previous
DAYDREAM NATION, Kelly's dolls made a hard core Californian
op shop statement for a bunch of New York art rockers who
were mutating more and more with non-art fringes of grunge,
jazz and noise. Embedded deep within a semiotic strain of
grunge and post-grunge album covers based on 'original'
op shop art (Margaret/Walter Keane big-eyed prints, amateur
sex photos, 'outsider' weirdo/bad paintings, etc.), DIRTY
is quite possibly the definitive soundtrack for the art
student op shopper.
The
smell of art
When
did the op shop enter art? It's a hard one to fix. Perhaps
it starts with Duchamp's fixation with dumb utilitarian
store items like shovels, chocolate grinders and hat racks
early this century? No - the ironic spectre of Duchamp has
been filtered through Beuys to give us unfunny Germanic-style
art which mixes real objects in sterile gallery spaces so
as to make profound comments about the relationship between
art and the world (derh). Or perhaps it's Schwitter's merzbau
projects and their allowance for the outside world to grow
into and across the art frame and gallery space? No - such
meta-space projects persist today but more as a sign of
neurotic and compulsive artists who simply don't know when
to stop and move onto something else. So what about 'found
objects' and their elegiac or surrealistic aura, as evoked
in everything from Joseph Cornell's intricate boxes to Jan
Svenkmeyer's alchemical animation, all haunted by talismans
retaining a lost investment of humanity? No - the rash of
little trinkety-bits-&--pieces which covers much current
art and photography is so rarefied and tasteful that only
wood, metal and food stuffs are allowed by their old world
charm.
No,
the op shop is mundane by comparison. Remember what an op
shop is: the opportunity for the disenfranchised to obtain
contemporary possessions at less-than market value. The
real op shopper is independently poor, living in the shadows
cast by use-by dates: he or she would rather have you believe
they shopped at TARGET. The op shop in art is something
different: less found object and more sought object; less
ephemeral appearance & more ubiquitous presence; less
ghostly aura and more fresh corpse; less the scent of mysticism
and more the smell of disinfectant; less intuitive selection
and more reactionary consumption.
In
some respects, the original Pop artists (the more formal
aestheticians of them) celebrated this mundanity before
it became problematized by the critical reception and dissection
of their work. Thiebaud's cakes, Rosenquist's backgrounds,
Ruscha's gas stations, Rooney's cereal boxes - not one of
them was ever interested in popular culture as an academic
discourse, yet they were specifically attracted to the objects
of their obsession. Interestingly, the 70s wave of photo-realist
painting continued on this hard formalist bent by produced
some fascinating documents of ugly 70s Californian stuff
before it hit the op shops (and the critical revival of
Ruscha says a lot about this kind of conceptual and formal
continuation). Perhaps the early 80's style-conscious bring-back-image
artists went retro to separate themselves from any 70s aesthetics.
Sherman, Salle, Longo and Kruger cut a retro stance by mimicking
the 50s and 60s and scavenging mini skirts and wigs, skin
flick and cheesecake mags, futuristic corporate ads and
businessmen's attire. Scratch their personae: under Sherman
is Bridgette Bardot and Sophia Loren; under Salle, Fellini
and Bertolucci; under Longo, Tony Rome and Matt Helm; under
Kruger, Rod Serling and (?) Stevens. Not a whisper of the
70s; not a single archaeological dust speck of disco, glam,
metal or punk. A second wave of artists had cottoned onto
this by the end of the 80s (given a critical voice through
the deliberately-titled REAL LIFE journal), giving us the
deliberately problematized work of Levine, Prince, (?) and
Koons - all of whom archly reintroduced the dumbness of
aesthetics into their work under a conceptual post-Pop guise.
Melting
popular culture into Pop art
I
can't help whingeing about art's innate inability to deal
with the everyday, the trashy, the ephemeral, the transient,
the lost, the abused, the crappy, the dismissible, the forgotten,
the murky, the mass, the stupid, the fucked-up, the bland,
the empty, etc. without either (a) dwelling on and languishing
in a poetic sensation of these aspects; (b) rendering these
aspects hyper-sterile by scrutinizing them under the track
lights of the gallery-void; or (c) being plain ignorant
of the broader and more fertile references which the contents
of the installations establish. It could be that despite
all the great work produced within the post-Pop continuum
collectively says: there's a world outside my practice and
I have no way to deal with it and I'm real fucked-up about
it. The rise of installation art in the quake of 80s figurative
painting seems most traumatized by the spectre of the outside
world and intent on rebirthing the gallery space by turning
it inside-out so as to uncover some mystical core resonance
in the gallery-void. No doubt about it, this makes for some
intriguing and complex work, but so often that cerebral
buzz is dulled by artists making lazy inferred cultural
statements and randomly ejaculated references into popular
culture. Pop art was an intensely abstract movement and
had little to do with figuration and depiction, even though
it employed 'images' as its material and matter. It's my
thesis that Pop artists - and the crucial post-Pop artists
- speak through popular culture: they leave popular culture
unmediated and mobile, circulating as an unnamed meta-substance
whereby the outside world and the art gallery melt and become
interchangeable and indistinguishable. And when the op shop
is used in this way, the desperation of such a tactic is
productive.
My
strongest impressions of hard core op shop art are similarly
interchangeable and indistinguishable. One impression comes
from entering the official Victorian Police exhibit at the
Royal Melbourne Show around 1970. Stuck in the corner was
the 'pad of a drug addict': a mouldy mattress on the floor,
old newspapers on the wall, a badly dressed and badly posed
mannequin leaning on the mattress, and a single hypodermic
lying on the wooden floor. The wig was falling off, too.
Hilarious, nightmarish, minimal, tacky, existentialist,
deluded and unbelievable all at once. In a gallery today,
we could be talking post-Sherman/Koons/(?)-Brothers high-art
statement. At the Show back then, we're talking about a
cop (!) being forced into creating a tableaux in order to
illustrate an educational point, but coming up with the
kind of window display senile ladies put together for op
shops. Another impression comes from (?)'s installation
at a Biennale of Sydney over a decade later. A simple but
imposing work featuring a four-walled 'room' constructed
by towering, rickety wooden frames into which were stacked
old clothes. I walked into the walled space through a narrow
entrance and was overpowered by smell and silence. The clothes
smelt of moth balls and the clothing worked as acoustic
deadening - a major sonic sensation you almost never experience
in the church-like reverberation of wood-floored empty spaces
in galleries. The effect was both suffocating and liberating;
the sensation was like walking into the essence of op-shopness,
swallowed up in its wombic folds of lost children and dead
adult's clothed skin. This was and is op-shop-as-art, yet
emptied of all damp intellectualism and full of a visceral
dryness. I was in a gallery, trapped in an art installation,
and the last thing on my mind was art.
