Pop Shop

Poking Fun at Consumerism in Matsune & Subal's Store.


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Published: Aug 27, 2008

Art is business and performance is product, says Viennese artist Michikazu Matsune. And that's what Live Arts Producing Director Nick Stuccio found out after following a trail of masking tape through the tiny streets of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He ended up at Store, a "temporary retail concept" in which audience members become customers and the artists sell their services.

Nick Scando

It was created by Matsune and his art partner, David Subal, along with executive producer Richard Vague. Store will set up shop in the U.S. for the first time at this year's Live Arts fest.

The humorous poke at shopping, says Matsune, is meant to inspire audience members — consumers all — to consider the impact consumption makes on everything from material goods to art and theater. "There had been many themes emerging in the process of creating Store," says Matsune, in an e-mail interview from Europe. "We wanted to play with a very general act used in our daily lives, which is the act of purchasing." In Store, audiences literally pay for what they want to see Matsune and Subal perform, with more than 60 "products" to choose from. Categories include Delivery Service, Cheap Copies, Today's Special, Pure Theatre and Take Away.

"As we perform, we are often creating some products with paper, plastic bags, hangers, etc., and audience members can receive the product as take-away or get it delivered as a delivery service," he says, with aesthetic concepts inspired by Andy Warhol and Botticelli. While attendance is free, paid services range from 80 cents to $5 each.

Matsune says for the "Eraser Head" piece, for example, a customer pays $3.90 to stand on a pedestal and have Subal draw a portrait of him or her. Matsune then rubs out portions of the portrait with an eraser and the crumbs from the subtraction are then handed to the customer in an envelope. The manipulated portrait remains on exhibition.

In another performance called "Boxing," the artists each carry empty cardboard boxes out to the street and back into the store before shipping them to a paying customer's home address. And in "The Right Sock," a white sock being tossed onto the floor inspires the pair to verbally describe the action before a customer pays to take away the sock.

"It's beautiful for us to imagine our product lying beside the TV in someone's living room after they bought our performance in Store," says Matsune, who has been collaborating with Subal since 2004 on interactive performance art involving such subjects as live horses and video installations in 24 cities worldwide. "These products are traces of our performances, maybe some kind of memory. Or it is just garbage created by us. It's up to the audience," he says.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

By turning the everyday practice of shopping into a surreal experience, the team also makes art accessible in a completely pop way. "The act of selling and buying is accepted as a global rule and method in our society nowadays, and it also has a long tradition," says Matsune. "The theater and performance worlds are no exceptions: Audiences buy tickets."

Store has already been performed in cities including Vienna, Salzburg, Oslo, Paris, Bucharest and Kyoto. "Every time we open Store in a new city we create special products using the location, the street front, and collaborating with neighborhood shops," says Matsune, who admits that performing in a busy public or retail space is vastly different than in a black-box theater. The piece also attracts people who may not ordinarily attend a show.

"We have two different kinds of audience in Store: The audience who will come to Store by knowing about it from the festival," he says. "And the other half, who are just passers-by, neighbors and people who came to shop at the neighborhood shops and happen to see our performance store." The setting for Philly's version of Store — South Street between Second and Third — promises a steady stream of befuddled passers-by.

Which is good for business. During a recent performance, an entirely different scenario introduced itself that gave Matsune and Subal a new way of considering both the reality and surreality of Store. "We had no one, one day," remembers Matsune. "We didn't sell anything."

(n_mcdonald@citypaper.net)

Store, Sept. 1-6, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 3-6 p.m., free, 244 South St.