By Annetta Kapon
The uncritical critique of consumerism often singles out affluent middle-aged women as representatives of everything that is repugnant about capitalism. This misogynist scenario is still perpetuated in art that targets women as objects (never subjects) of a facile criticality that assigns men to production, and relegates women to consumption.
Renee Petropoulos makes an intervention in this contested territory with her work Nearly Ten Months, an installation with recorded soundtrack and translucent writing on the window of Weathervane, a women’s clothing boutique on trendy Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, CA from February 2003 to July 2003. In capital letters, on translucent acetate of various colors were fragments of conversations between employees and customers, and among employees. Quotes ranged from the boutique-specific “It’s OK that it stands out from your waist?” or “I can sell it to you” to the Krugeresque “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”, to the chilly “My husband is divorcing me,” which was taken out because it made the women in the shop uncomfortable. It was then visible “under erasure,” as viewers had to look at a black line where the statement would have been. The soundtrack of the recorded conversations was a 90 minute loop that played during the opening hours of the store between 11-3 pm, and it was audible only inside the store, with jazz woven in. Thus the soundtrack became a kind of perverse biofeedback for the store workers who were the most immediate and constant consumers of the work they themselves had commissioned. The loop was both the magnetic tape, and also a loop in which employee, artist and consumer are all engaged. In a kind of Brechtian distanciation effect the women see their own words materialized on the glass, holding up a kind of mirror, experienced however as external.
The “Ten Months” of the title refer to the time it took Petropoulos to collect, record, and organize the installation. The activity of planning and production, the regularity of visiting the shop, took on a low-key aspect of a performance that became integral to the process of the work. The echo of gestation is not accidental, as the artist became engaged with it as it developed and unfolded in a cycle of mutability.
Even though this daring intervention was on a street window and inside a boutique, I think that the store was not its real discursive site. Rather, I see the work as located in the abject (for the art world) terrain of affluent women and the unsteady division between seller and shopper, subordinate and peer, gallery and boutique. Here women solicited the production of art and also consumed it. The employees that generated the quotes of the installation were the same ones that were now consuming and commenting on the work; in fact the owner of the store was the one that suggested to Petropoulos the possibility of an artwork. It reflects their unambiguous relationship of camaraderie (in terms of class and age) between the employer, employees and shoppers. Rather than legitimating the tired dichotomy of, say, art against commodity, or indulging in the ecstatic embrace of shopping-asart, the installation exists in a shop that sees itself as a gallery in the first place, with no fixed division between aesthetic, sexual and acquisitive desire. The installation asks: what kind of desire is generated here, and where does it belong? How is a shop different from a gallery? What relationships are taking place, and what is the quality of these relationships? The statements and fragments written on the glass are at once banal, personal and cryptic, suggesting that the conversations are more crucial to the shopping transaction than one might at first think. While the work can be consumed it cannot be purchased, thus resisting traditional commodification.
The spirit of the work is similar to another of Petropoulos’s installations, Flatter Me For Ever in “A Hundred Artists See God” at the Laguna Beach Museum in July-October 2004. It consisted of a video showing the artist engaging in a mutual mirroring game with her twin babies on a big bed. A large sitting stool for the visitors was covered in the same fabric as the bed in the video. Woman and babies are wearing pajamas matching the polka-dot pattern of the sheets. Flatter me Forever recalls, through a metonymic skid, the expression “imitation is the best flattery.” But who is aping whom here? The twins, by definition a kind of doubling, and the mother, are engaged in an endless intersubjective loop. In this post Post-Partum Document piece and also in Almost Ten Months I see taboo subjects for art making: affluent women, shopping, babies. The other thing the two works have in common is mirroring (literal and metaphorical) and the idea that subjectivity is formed in imitation of something that we perceive as external.
In both works there is a kind of subject and object dialectic in which oppositions of worker/customer and parent/child are not resolved in favor of one over the other, but in setting into motion the whole question of subjectivity and individuality. (Note that “individual” really means “indivisible, inseparable” from the Latin individuus.) A third example of this process is Petropoulos’s work for the Metro Station in El Segundo in which sentences such as “I am here”, “you are there”, “are you really going?” “Did you pay them?” are inscribed in English, Spanish and German on a wall and in stone. Perhaps they recall a domestic argument, or perhaps they approximate the thoughts floating in our minds when we travel between places and therefore between identities.
Most people equate “personal” with “secret or private,” but for Petropoulos the personal is the everyday and everybody. This is why she has employed text in much of her work displayed in public. Her sentences reflect personal relationships and thoughts that can only be located outside the mind. Paradoxically, her gesture comes from an understanding of the instability of language, which, she says, can never give our feelings their full gravity; nevertheless it’s all we have when we try to describe something to one another. Public Art is a contradictory discourse: On the one hand it has an implicit superiority, as if art outside or outdoors is more radical or subversive than inside the “white walls.” On the other hand it is also seen as inferior, because it does not allow the artistic autonomy that is considered necessary. Nearly Ten Months is predicated on moving the site of discourse into a realm that does not sanctify or debase the work. Not sponsored by the infrastructure of a city or a gallery, the installation nevertheless functions in a place fully involved in commerce and exchange. It raises compelling questions about the relationship of the private to the personal, art to commerce, and public to art. Public art, here, has two meanings: Art in Public, but also art for the public as in: “people,” including women.
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