Happy Birthday to me, on the 15th no more a teen, now I have reached 20, there’s a tutorial for me.

I had my first tutorial of year 2 with my new tutor Liz Peebles. After a long conversation surpassing the allotted half hour time slot, I came out with a lot of areas to this about and look at.

These were the agreed upon actions:

To think about what my critical relation to the digital aspects of my practice is – what is it that interests me in the digital in order to better understand the motivations behind my work and how this may manifest itself.

To work out what part of that interest is important in my work and see whether the digital should continue to be used as source material for painting.

Build a 3D environment to explore the way in which I want to connect with an audience, via still, interactive or moving media.

Research into the specified artists and designers mentioned in tutorial: Louis Khan, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus School, Eileen Gray, Mies Van Der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Gerhad Merz, Franco Berardi, Hito Steyerl, Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick.

Something else that came up was the idea that my mini hypotheses that I often come up with when just pondering about the strange should be written down as noting down these little suggestions about the world would be useful to inform my practice.

So the first little instance of this will be a question about the role of the supermarket as the modern day temple of worship.

I came up with this question when passing an Aldi on the way back to Croydon. It occurred to me that people come to these sites more than just as a means of attaining food, for there are markets and smaller shops around to dip into. When buying food for a family it seems to be obvious that this is a means of convenience, a place to park a car to load up for four for a week. However very particularly for people who are there just to support themselves, with no car and where buying a lot of food isn’t very convenient as it goes off and fridge and storage space (especially when sharing with others) is limited, why the supermarket?

In the abstract sense, the supermarket is the temple of capitalism, where the major gods of Unilever, Nestle, Coca-cola and Kellogg’s survey their domain in an ever shifting series of forms. We find comfort in seeking the known gods as opposed to the the imitators whose price of worship is less but who promise a lower return.

These false idols are pedalled by false prophets – uniform-less, conveyor-belt-less workers who stand behind high desks laden with trinkets and a promise of divinity. But the location of these shrines is interesting. In my business I have recognised the convenience store to be a more common entity within the vicinity of those grand temples. It is an echo of the placement of shrines around a more traditional temple, the smaller, open longer sites that orbit the rigidly structured house of worship. The further from the supermarket you are, the fewer convenience stores one sees, it interests me as to why there is this congregation to the centre of the town, it obviously provides a higher footfall but when there are 4 stores with the same wares within a 2 minute walk of a supermarket, I question the reasoning.

Categories: ResearchTags: Art, Chelsea, Eileen Gray, Franco Berardi, Gerhad Merz, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, liz, Louis Khan, Marcel Breuer, Mies Van Der Rohe, peebles, Robin Leverton, Sarah Morris, the Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius