Shopplacing

When and where art occurs, and for whom, are questions that have become significant through an ongoing collaboration we have been involved with since 2005. Shopplacing calls into question stagnate metaphors of meaning and subverts reifications attached to commodified objects. In contrast to shoplifting, where items are stolen from a place of commerce, Shopplacing is a creative activity where shopplacers place artifacts in specific contexts (e.g., stores, public spaces, and even within research journals) with the intent of creating unexpected situations and generous encounters with artworks. It has been a project that has provoked us to rethink pedagogical contexts. These artistic disruptions of the everyday are positioned as gifts for their discoverers from artists and educators. For us, Shopplacing is a pedagogical détournement (Debord, 1967/1995; Aracagök & Yalim, 2010) that occasions a momentary disruption in habitual patterns of consumption. Shopplacing invites play, irony, pastiche, and everyday reordering to surprise a participant into new understanding by disrupting standard connections to objects, expected situations, and automated actions.

The Shopplacing advertisement placed in this issue of VAR references black-and-white advertisements found in magazines directed toward art educators. In the advertisement we have included the film stills from a Shopplacing intervention that was initiated in the spring of 2007, entitled “Pudding Placing.” In the video we document the making and placing of a photograph of a mathematical proof drawn in pudding with a short etymology of the phrase, “the proof is in the pudding.” The photograph and the etymological description were placed in the pudding section of our local supermarket. The piece is intended to play with a colloquial saying

in an everyday consumer space. The video serves as both documentation and as a satirical instructional video for art educators. Our advertisement invites art educators to use our instructional videos to “improve” their curriculum.

We believe Shopplacing as an intervention offers art educators a number of pedagogical strategies and features. First, while Shopplacing’s pedagogical implications are explicit to the artist-educators directly involved in the activity, it is a unique community art endeavor, in that the recipients, participants, and/or audience members are not always known in advance. This is unusual in community arts and provokes educators to question notions of prescribed learning outcomes and assumptions about who a learner is and how that person learns. Second, by referring those who find the shopplaced artifacts to an online social media site,¹ where they will encounter a statement about the project along with responses from other interventionist artists (Thompson & Sholette, 2004), Shopplacing becomes a socially engaged artistic practice (Helguera, 2011) that moves street art beyond the street into online venues where the art and resulting dialogue is not constrained to a fixed temporal space. And finally, as a caveat, while Shopplacing, as curricular inquiry offers classroom art educators and their students an opening to artistically explore, disrupt, construct, reform, and interpret an environment in a way that extends new interpretive possibilities by provoking novel connections and interaction, we acknowledge this interventionist practice is at risk of being co-opted by the very forces it evades. Therefore, Shopplacing is not an invitation to reproduce the oeuvre as a curriculum product, but to unwork or dés-oeuvré (Kwon, 2004) the already stagnate art curriculum.