״Where Are We Going?״ Chiaru Shiota / Le Bon Marché
Seven months ago we set out to reorganize our library and sort out which of the hundreds of books we collected throughout our lives would remain with us, and which ones would be left behind. Most of the books we eventually kept, packed into boxes and tucked away in the attic of the apartment, which had meanwhile become entirely emptied of the thousands of objects that once filled it. We gave away everything (everything!) to friends and family and, equipped with only four suitcases, boarded a plane to Paris. I was reflecting on this formative experience, which continues to echo with us every day, while admiring the impressive installation by artist Chiharu Shiota, currently on display at Le Bon Marché department store in Paris.
Shiota, a Japanese artist living in Berlin, exhibits works that shift between installation and performance, which wrap and engulf the visitor, also engaging in significant collaborations with various performance artists. Her works are marked by implicit or explicit references to the unconscious, to dreams, to movement and to time, and she often employs materials associated with laborious feminine work, such as textile and yarn.
“Where are we going?” Shiota is asking us, or more precisely the visitors to the “Cathedral of Commerce,” as Emil Zola aptly called it. Where can we be going, trapped and entangled as we are in a coweb of habits, preconditions, social, emotional and moral obligations, and of course in hundreds (thousands?) of consumer products, those same objects that we meticulously collect as we wander across magnificent shopping halls, surrendering to marketing mechanisms invented and perfected here at Le Bon Marché.
Shiota’s installation is built from an intricate and sprawling web of white yarn that locks in — or rather generates — various structures, spaces and objects from the worlds of sailing and navigation. It spans three zones in the department store: the large display windows (a landmark of the marketing model developed by the Boucicaut couple, the founders of Le Bon Marché) were threaded with yarn that weaves into itself compasses, a map and a telescope, inviting the crowd on the street to step inside the store, where the installation continues in the main hall. Above the cosmetic counters and in between the pair of escalators (yet another emblem of the store) hover 150 objects, constructed of slender black iron poles, the white yarn intertwining within and around them to sculpt elements that resemble boats, huge feathers or floating autumn leaves.
At the back of the store there’s a third area, a tunnel similarly made from an intricate web of white yarn, and inside it we can watch a video documentation of the work, receive more information as well as — inevitably — buy souvenirs such as bags, notebooks and keyholders decorated with motifs from the installation (white yarn); and to be reminded, on that occasion, that we are part of the tireless marketing machine of LVMH, the luxury goods corporation that currently owns Le Bon Marché. The context of marketing is inseparable from the installation: visitors are handed a fact sheet explaining that the white color of the yarn stems from “White Month”, a term coined by Boucicaut to announce sales on home textile that were once customary during the relatively “weak” month of January, following the record sales of Christmas.
Department stores were the first public spaces to be heated and illuminated by electricity. Their design was influenced by theatrical stage design and they hosted spectacles, exhibitions of curiosities, music concerts and world cultures fairs in order to allure and entertain the (mostly female) buyers — and no less important, to keep busy the husbands and children that accompanied them, thus relieving the women of any burden and familial obligation. As part of this tradition, in recent years various artists, including the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the American designer Thom Brown, were given a free hand (Carte Blanche; remember, it’s White Month) to create art installations inside the store, all purely based on the color white.
“Where are we going” Shiota is asking as she maps endlessly intersecting roads that obstruct choice and progression: an intricate web of nomadic dreams, latent and manifest, is woven onto the fabric of social, emotional and material obligations that narrow our steps, sometimes canceling them altogether or postponing them until further notice. Yet on the other, complementary side, this same cobweb forms the basis of culture and guarantees our very existence. How, then, to capture the dream and let it live free and happy?
Such duality and inner tension also characterize the department store itself, a sophisticated and magnificent marketing machine that has done well in capturing and pulling in (mostly) women, alluring them to surrender to external and superficial expressions and to identify with the variety of consumer products that it temptingly and accessibly showcases. Thus advancing the perception of women as objects that can be bought, used and discarded, but at the same time this very mechanism contributed to the empowerment of these women by creating a public space dedicated to them alone, in which they could spend their time released from familial or social obligations, meet each other and establish personal tastes. Moreover, Le Bon Marché provided a reliable, quality source of livelihood for the tens of thousands of women it employed. These workers received far-reaching social benefits (for their time) and were able to live on the premises, to pursue education and to advance professionally.
Department stores and museums are two public institutions born and developed in the late 19th century — parallel to the entrenchment of the bourgeoisie and to the shift of focus in society from production to consumption — into environments that put time on hold, inviting visitors to wander around a delimited and protected urban space that generates a sense of illusion and seclusion. Shiota’s work invites us to examine the progressively blurring line between them, to do so, furthermore, at the height of an era that is marked by an ongoing migrant crisis. She brings to the fore — in between fitting cabins, or while sitting at the top-floor restaurant that overlooks the installation in all its splendor — questions about the private and the public, capitalism and art, and the direction the world is taking in 2017.
