Grocery Shopping is Performance Art
From the Bad Art newsletter.
When my husband and I exited college and installed ourselves in the first of a series of apartments, we had this issue with running out of cash. I know, imagine it. We weren’t sure what exactly was going on (Answer: Not enough money! Not enough money is your answer there). In response, we got creative.
We figured we’d better invent ways to stretch money, quick. So we got good at sales, coupons, and cheap entertainment, like packing a couple sandwiches and going for a hike. I still contend the best meal is a sandwich eaten while sitting atop a sunny rock next to a stream in a redwood forest.
This may not sound like art, but hear me out.
Everybody invents. We have to. We devise responses to our lives all day every day. And isn’t that what artists do? Respond to the world? Combine elements in novel ways? Problem solve in real time? Think really hard? Who hasn’t invented a new sandwich made from exactly what ingredients are present in your kitchen at any given time, with even the bread being optional?
Everybody around us is doing their own form of performance art, too. Balancing the hours in the day between unrelated responsibilities. Finding that next place to sleep at night. Figuring out how to ask out that one cute person. And, devising tricky ways to get the most out of that trip to the grocery store. There are so many ways.
(Some people get super creative and bypass that whole grocery checkout thing entirely. This is known as shoplifting.)
The job of the creative person is to not really know what is going to happen, and respond anyway. Without unpredictability, nothing would ever get invented or solved. Art is problem solving. So, life is art.
Fancy-butt art collectors probably don’t spend much time getting creative with the groceries (cue that clip of George H W Bush being amazed at how the conveyor at the checkout worked). Or other life skills. Throwing cash at a problem, to my mind, is kind of the height of non-creativity. Anybody can buy a product. But can you re-create that product out of cardboard? Or ramen?
Don’t count out the kids whose art and music classes ceased to exist in their schools long ago. They are figuring stuff out all day every day. Just not with arts funding, is all.
Imagine what would happen if we gave those students back art as a real thing that you do, where you put out ideas and work with yourself? Because kids are already doing that. Shoot, every toddler is a surrealist, obviously.
Ideas are a thing we are going to have, whether or not we possess a fancy studio or set of colored pencils. The arts call out this aspect of ourselves, and celebrate it, and help us get better at it.
So that’s my thought for today: Maybe we are all making art, all the time. Maybe we shouldn’t stick “art” off in a corner, any more than we should do that with language or math, like the math you do when you find out your checking account is empty again.
Congrats, you’re an artist all the time. I’m going to call this next performance piece, “Click send and go get more coffee.”
May you create something groovy with whatever you’ve got, may you find the time to listen to a very good album and pet a good dog, won’t you be my neighbor?
— Betsy
Betsy Streeter is an artist and writes the Bad Art newsletter.
