Retail Values: Addressing the Carcass

For the last three years while at art college, I have also worked as a butcher for a large supermarket chain, surrounded by the familiar ‘front stage’ landscape of ordered aisles and the coloured glaze of fluorescent light, and the perhaps less familiar ‘back stage’ reality of work in cold, congested storage rooms; the layers of spilt blood, frozen and slippery, on tiled freezer floors; the nominal staff training for dangerous workspaces and equipment concomitant with pressure on staffing levels and wages.

The recession has exposed to many the dubious social values that underpin the market place, and nowhere have those values been more skilfully masked than in the retail sector by the creative management of the visual landscape; where colour, texture, visual composition and organisation, the tricks of the artist’s trade contribute to the manipulative power of image and appearance. A market disconnected from ethical priorities wilfully exploits a naïve but generally shared belief in visual truth.
Signage declaring ‘Butcher in House’ exists side by side with the reality of mass-produced meat lines and centralised slaughter and packaging plants that ship their plastic-wrapped sides across the country. In the theatre of retail commerce the butcher has been reduced to a costumed mannequin; the steel gloves, white suits, cutler’s knives, aprons and the white-gauze trilby hats only props in presenting a sometimes false image of professional quality and good faith.

This is not a theatre of merely marginal power and influence. In little more than a generation we have seen control of the point of sale devolve to a relatively small number of outlet chains, such that, even with no direct involvement in production, they now largely determine its site, scale, unit price and the working conditions of its producers.

Forces within the Art market are, of course, not wildly removed from those of the supermarket. As artists we have witnessed a drive towards comparable new relationships to the act of production; where the artist assumes the role of foreman in organising and managing the creation of work, sometimes by other hands; where concept is valued over labour; and the successful artist is increasingly a brand that most closely expresses the market’s needs at any point in time, and one promoted by a gallery and curatorial management who have both displaced and masqueraded as the independent critic.

From the steel gloves and ‘Butcher in House’ signs of the Supermarket to the wine and declarative artist’s statement of the gallery we are never far from the dramatic props that establish the Bona Fides of the point of sale.