The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is one of the most celebrated Chinese artists of our age. He operates in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and fine art. His work displays a deep interest in business; he appears at once charmed and horrified by commercial life. In recent years, he has become especially fascinated by supermarkets. He’s interested, in part, in how lovely they can be.
Xu Zhen, ShanghArt Supermarket, 2007/2014, Installation Xu Zhen loves the alluring packaging, the abundance (the feel of lifting something off a shelf and seeing multiple versions of it waiting just behind) and the exquisite precision with which items are displayed. He particularly likes the claim of comprehensiveness that supermarkets implicitly make: the suggestion that they can, within their cavernous interiors, provide us wit
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Artists and supermarket tycoons
The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is one of the most celebrated Chinese artists of our age. He operates in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and fine art. His work displays a deep interest in business; he appears at once charmed and horrified by commercial life. In recent years, he has become especially fascinated by supermarkets. Heās interested, in part, in how lovely they can be.
Xu Zhen, ShanghArt Supermarket, 2007/2014, Installation Xu Zhen loves the alluring packaging, the abundance (the feel of lifting something off a shelf and seeing multiple versions of it waiting just behind) and the exquisite precision with which items are displayed. He particularly likes the claim of comprehensiveness that supermarkets implicitly make: the suggestion that they can, within their cavernous interiors, provide us with everything we could possibly need to thrive. At the same time, Xu Zhen feels that there is something quite wrong with real supermarkets ā and with commercial life in general. The products they sell are rarely the things we genuinely need. Despite the enormous choice, what we require to thrive isnāt on offer. Meanwhile, the backstories of the brightly coloured things on sale are often exploitative and dark. Everything has been carefully calculated to get us to spend more than we mean to. Thereās cynicism throughout the system. In response, the Chinese artist mocks supermarkets repeatedly. His work involves recreating, at very large scale, entire supermarkets in galleries and museums. The products in these supermarkets look real; youāre invited to pick them up, but then you find out they are empty, as physically empty as Xu Zhen feels they are spiritually incomplete. His checkouts are similarly deceptive. They seem genuine: you scan your products at a high-tech counter, but you then get a receipt that turns out to be a fake; youāve bought nothing of value. The supermarket installation takes us on a journey. At first it gets us to share the artistās excitement around supermarkets, then it punctures the illusion: itās a giant, deliberate let down. Itās significant that Xu Zhenās critique of supermarkets is ironic. We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but donāt feel weāll ever be able to change. Itās a manoeuvre of disappointment stoically handled. A lot of art is ironic in its critiques of capitalism; weāve come to expect this. It mocks all that is wrong but has no alternatives to put forward. A kind of hollow, sad laughter seems the only fitting response to the compromises of commercial life. Xu Zhen is trapped in the paradigm of what an artist does. A real artist, we have come to suppose ā and the current ideology of the art world insists ā couldnāt be enthusiastic about improving a supermarket. He or she could only mock from the sidelines. Nowadays, fortunately, weāve loosened the restrictive definitions of what a ārealā man or a ārealā woman might be like, but there remain strict social taboos hemming in the idea of what a ārealā artist could be allowed to get up to. They can be as experimental and surprising as they like ā unless they want to run a food shop or an airline or an energy corporation, at which point they cross a decisive boundary, fall from grace, lose their special status as artists and become the supposed polar opposites: mere business people. We should take Xu Zhen seriously, perhaps more seriously than he takes himself. Beneath the irony, Xu Zhen has the ambition to discover what an ideal supermarket might be like, how it might be a successful business, and how capitalism could be reformed. Somewhere within his project, he carries a hope: that a corporation like a supermarket could be brought into line with the best values of art and assume psychological and spiritual importance inside the framework of commerce. Thousands of miles away from Shanghai, in the flatlands of East Anglia in the northeastern tip of southern England, just outside of Norwich, lies an impressive modern building completed in 1978 by the architect Norman Foster. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts is filled with some of the greatest works of contemporary art: here we find masterpieces by Henry Moore, Giacometti and Francis Bacon. The collection is made possible thanks to the enormous wealth of the Sainsbury family, which owns and runs the large supermarket chain that bears its name. Discounted shoulders of lamb, white bread and 3-for-2 offers on tangerines have led to exquisite display cases containing Giacomettiās elongated, haunting figures and Barbara Hepworthās hollowed-out ovaloids.
The interior of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Copyright: Oxyman, 2008 The gallery seems guided by values that are light years from any supermarket. It is intent on feeding the soul. The patrons and curators are deeply ambitious about the emotional and educational benefit of the experience: they want you to come out cleansed and improved. From a very different direction, the Sainsbury family arrive at a strikingly similar conclusion to Xu Zhen. Art and supermarkets are essentially opposed. Like Xu Zhen, the Sainsburyās are caught in an identity trap, although a very different one: that of the philanthropist. The philanthropist has been imagined as a person who makes a lot of money in the brutish world of commerce, with all the normal expectations of maximising returns, squeezing wages and focusing on obvious opportunities āand then makes a clean break. In their spare hours, they can devote their wealth to projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the patient collection of Roman coins, Islamic vases or modern sculptures. But the philanthropist knows that if they ever took an art-loving attitude to their businesses they might suffer economic collapse. Instead of making big things happen in the real world, they would become mere artists who make interesting little things in the sheltered, subsidised world of the gallery. The situation is strangely tantalising. The artist finds a little that is loveable and much thatās wrong around supermarkets, but canāt imagine running or bringing the ideals of art into action in one. The supermarket owners love art, but canāt imagine bringing their psychologically and aesthetically ambitious sides into focus in their business. These two parties are both like pioneers, at the edges of unexplored territory. There is a huge idea they are both circling round. The goal is a synthesis of business and art: a supermarket that was truly guided by the ideals of art, a capitalism that could be compatible with the higher values of humanity. Up to now, we have collectively learned to admire the values of the arts (which can be summed up as a devotion to truth, beauty and goodness) in the special arena of galleries. But their more important application is in the general, daily fabric of our lives ā the area that is currently dominated by an often-depleted vision of commerce. It is a tragic polarisation: we encounter the values we need, but only in a rarefied setting, while we regard these values as alien to the circumstances in which we most need to meet them. For most of history, artists have laboured to render a few square inches of canvas utterly perfect or to chisel a single block of stone into its most expressive form. Traditionally, the most common size for a work of art was between three and six feet across. And while artists have articulated their visions across such expanses, the large-scale projects have been given over wholesale to businesses and governments ā who have generally operated with much lower ambitions. Weāre so familiar with this polarisation, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is ā a cultural and commercial failing. Ideally, artists should absorb the best qualities of business and vice versa. Rather than seeing such qualities as opposed to what they stand for as artists or business people, they should see these as great enabling capacities, which help them fulfil their missions to the world. Xu Zhen will probably never get to build an airport, a marina, an old peopleās home or a supermarket, but the ideal next version of him will. We should want to simultaneously raise and combine the ambitions of artists (to make the noblest concepts powerful in our lives) and of business (to serve us successfully).
Science fiction is one of the most popular but at the same time least prestigious of the literary arts, frequently dismissed as a subgenre consumed primarily by young males obsessed by the goriest or oddest possibilities for the future of our species Yet science fiction is a much-underestimated tool in business; in its utopian versions, it invites us to explore imaginatively what we might want the future to be like ā a little ahead of our practical abilities to mould it as we would wish. Science fiction may not contain precise answers (how actually to make a jetpack or a robot that loves us) but it encourages us in something that is logically prior to, and in its own way as important as, technological mastery: the identification of issues we would like to see solved. Changes in society and business seldom begin with actual inventions; they begin with acts of the imagination, with a sharpened sense of a need for something new, be this for an engine, a piece of legislation or a social movement. The details of change may eventually get worked out in laboratories, committee rooms and parliaments, but the crystallisation of the wish for change takes place at a prior stage, in the imaginations of people who know how to envisage what doesnāt yet exist. In his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in Paris in 1870, Jules Verne narrated the adventures of the Nautilus, a large submarine that tours the worldās oceans often at great depth (the 20,000 leagues ā about 80,000 kilometres ā refer to the distance travelled). When writing the story, Verne didnāt worry too much about solving every technical issue involved with undersea exploration: he was intent on pinning down capacities he felt it would one day be important to have. He described the Nautilus as being equipped with a huge window even though he had no idea how to make glass that could withstand immense barometric pressures. He imagined the vessel having a machine that could make seawater potable, although the science behind desalination was extremely primitive at the time. And he described the Nautilus as being powered by batteries ā even though this technology was in its infancy.
āWouldnāt glass shatter at that pressure?ā Keeping certain questions at bay for long enough to shape a vision. Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou, Illustrations for Jules Verneās Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871. Jules Verne was not an enemy of technology. He was deeply fascinated by practical problems. But in writing his novels, he held off from worrying too much about the āhowā questions. He wanted to picture the way things could be, while warding off ā for a time ā the many practical objections that would one day have to be addressed. He was thereby able to bring the idea of the submarine into the minds of millions while the technology slowly emerged that would allow the reality to take hold. The key mental move in science fiction ā āwhat would we want life to be like one day?ā ā has traditionally been focused on technology. However, there is no reason why we would not perform equally dramatic thought experiments in quite different fields, in relation to family life, relationships and, as weāre about to do here, capitalism. Asking oneself what a better version of something might be like, without direct tools for a fix to hand, can feel immature and naive. Yet itās by formulating visions of the future that we can more clearly start to define what might be wrong with what we have - and set the wheels of change in motion. Through science fiction experiments, we can get into the habit of counteracting detrimental tendencies to inhibit our thinking around wished-for scenarios that seem (in gloomy present moments at least) deeply unlikely. Such experiments are often deeply relevant, because when we look back in history we can see that so many machines, projects and ways of life that once appeared simply utopian have come to pass. Not least Captain Kirkās phone.
Sometimes ideas drafted in science fiction pave the way for real-life developments. Captain Kirkās ācommunicatorā from Star Trek. Copyright: NBC Television, 1968 We all have a science fiction side to our brains, which we are normally careful to disguise for fear of humiliation. Yet, as Verne showed us, our visions are what carve out the space in which later developments can occur. What follows is an attempt to work out aspects of a wiser future for capitalism.
