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Selected
Reviews of the "Intense, witty, and laced with menace, Mr. Montague's installation, ''The Stray Shopping Cart: An Illustrated System of Identification'' (2003), consists of hundreds of itemized and carefully classified photographs of shopping carts abandoned throughout America, mostly in suburban areas. The result is a detailed taxonomy of the stray shopping cart. The carts are divided into two classes, which are then broken down into a series of sub-categories. Class A is for false strays, ones that have stayed close to their source, while Class B is for true strays, ones that left a parking lot and gone into the world. Mr. Montague has identified nine sub-categories of false strays and 21 sub-categories of true strays, all of which are documented with examples. The first time I saw this installation I thought it was a joke. But the more I looked, the more I realized it was ingenious. While the images of the stray carts sensitize us to this often overlooked blot on the suburban landscape, the classification system serves as a kind of vector for looking at the social makeup of a place. Vandalism is a good indicator. Mr. Montague might be young, and having his first
show in a serious gallery, but he is onto something. The show is a
coup, tapping into a quirky vein of American life."
Tongue Planted Firmly in Cheek: The first of six
artists still under 30 and full of it. Contemporary art is a young person’s arena, fermented with piss and vinegar and determined to upend the old order and make room for new ideas. The goal is not generally aesthetic, in the gentrified sense of things; rather, its agenda is more a matter of edge and angle than satisfying “standards.” Leave guarding the gates to those of middle age; the kids have no aspirations in that direction. What’s so interesting, then, about Real Art Ways’ new series of six one person exhibits is how wryly Hartford’s most ambitious venue for contemporary art has set out to celebrate the looming onset of 30 years of operation. Even as the old “alternative space” (carved from a former typewriter factory) makes itself comfortable in its posh remodel, RAW gives a wink and a nod to its rough-and-ready beginnings by sponsoring a competition entitled “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty.” (It was a competition open to any artist under the age limit and living in New England or in New York state.) The lure? A one-person show for each of the six most intriguing entrants. Intriguing is precisely the word. The central figures in the first exhibit of this series could not be more ubiquitous – shopping carts. Like the battered stars of some dysfunctional street opera, a number of these chunky vehicles are set out on low plinths in the middle of the gallery, surrounded on four walls by photographs documenting them in their natural habitat (the streets and alleyways of greater Hartford). The “images” that surround these “artifacts” don’t exactly look like art; in fact, they resemble the displays for some elaborate entry in a science fair. The artist, Julian Montague, makes his living as a graphic artist, specifically, designing instructional kits that he sells to middle school science departments. This exhibit is a wry inversion of this art, creating a classification of charts and flow ow-charts, mimicking the taxonomy of science to categorize shopping carts as if they were some rare species of plant or animal. Therein lies the whimsy – and the brilliance – of the whole assemblage. As you begin to read, you become engrossed in the oddity of the whole scheme – the supreme logic of systems of classification (carts in their natural habitat; carts that have been absconded with) on the one hand, and the supreme nonsense of them on the other (“habitat” for shopping carts? You’ve got to be kidding!). We’re talking about an artist with a full-blown respect for the most human of abstract acts - naming. At the same time what we’re looking at opens a cunning window on a virtually invisible corner of America’s consumer culture. Montague’s scrupulous documentation of the shopping cart in situ (as he finds them) offers nothing we haven’t experienced first-hand: the shopping cart as a homeless person’s equivalent of the prairie schooner; the shopping cart as utility vehicle for the car-less pedestrian; the shopping cart as flood victim/snow ploy casualty/urban baby carriage. Montague’s classification system takes it all in as an organic expression of human endeavor – critiquing not only his subject, but also his methodology. It considers the use, treatment, and modification of shopping carts as a reflection of the human condition in a consumer age. Just the initial breakout of categories is food for a chuckle. The broad designations that Montague considers are 1) the various situations in which shopping carts are found, 2) the conditions and human motivations that placed them there, and 3) the potential of a cart to make the transition from any one designation to the other. His photographic documentation vivifies a world completely familiar and utterly mundane – a cart abandoned at a bus stop blocks away from the store, with an empty soda can (and an opened back of chips) occupying the child’s seat. Like an archeologist’s find, one photo delights us with the ingenuity of some unnamed tinkerer, who repositions the cart’s wheels (for what purpose we can only surmise). Each image lands on two feet: utterly familiar, completely reinvisioned by means of Montague’s classification cation system. He asks you to consider, for example, stray carts. He provides classes and sub-classes of stray carts. He notes the difference between Class A (“false”) strays, i.e., carts which appear to have been removed from their original location, but which will likely to be returned and Class B (“true”) strays, i.e., carts which will never find their way home again. He documents each class and sub-class with photographs of actual carts, captured on film just as he found them on his field expeditions, as scrupulous and scientific as any naturalist in search of fauna. He provides parenthetical parallels in Scandinavian examples, positing occasional careful notations and a summation: “Hartford [demonstrates] a high level of cart activity and type diversity ...” It is this double barrel that gets to you. The humor
is irresistible.
Taxonomies, the first New York solo show of Buffalobased artist Julian Montague at Black and White gallery, explores themes of classification, ruin, and decay. The exhibition includes two groups of related work: 6 inkjet prints of insect work, and selections from the Stray Shopping Cart Project, composed of two found sculptures and 14 prints. Montague developed a system for classifying stray shopping carts and illustrated the method with photographs. The mock-science of the project allows for a large variety of subject matter in a singular context. Within the system of labeling, the shopping carts become metaphors for a large range of topics: the dilemmas of relocation, excesses of consumer culture, incorporation of trash in natural settings, among others. Montague uses a constant composition, but wide ranging palettes and varied elements allow entirely different aesthetic experiences for each piece. In several of the prints, the decaying natural elements (of riverbeds and creeks where the carts were disposed of) juxtapose with the geometric cart bodies, but to different ends for the viewer. One cart emerges from a riverbed covered in silt and debris, humorously presenting itself as a B-movie monster gawking at a camera. In another photo, the tone is much darker as the back right wheel of a cart emerges from a water skin covered in weary reflections of bare trees, while beneath the water, other rusting pieces of machines - a car door, tire, pieces of metal- resonate a certain despair in a culture of neglect. Throughout theseries, the anthropomorphized carts range in humorous and telling narratives, accompanied by the coding system of Montague's classifications. The insect prints detach from the narrative of the shopping carts, and engage a flat elegant overlaying of delicate lines. The dark brown forms are centered on either a light tan or baby blue background, with white delineation of the bug's forms. They are layered atop each other; often creating a density that requests the viewer's time to decipher all the forms. Montague derives all these pieces from the same seven insect shapes, which he scanned and combined in digital mediums. The elegant movements of the insect forms, and the many shapes created by their integration, create larger more grotesque insects - a wing of one emerges from the dominant form, offsetting the symmetry of the composition; in another piece, a thick, dangerous density of the composite implies the creature's implosion. In the gallery, one cannot and should not divorce
the series of insects from the series of stray shopping carts. The
insects are familiar objects of classification and taxonomy, which
add to the legitimacy of the taxonomic research of the carts; utilizing
similar composition and scale, the two sets echo across the gallery
space. The role of insects to decompose refuse in nature refutes itself
with the carts - which will never fully decompose, but only pile up
at the edges of terrain, accenting neglect and vandalism of nature
in consumer culture. The critique of cultural decay, as presented by
the marginalized voices of shopping carts and bugs, engenders a vast
commentary on all encompassing classifications within collapsing systems
of social order. The show, most importantly, is subtle, pleasing to
look at, gruesome, and, at times, even funny.
Exerpted from the Dateline Brooklyn column
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Selected
reviews of, and articles about: y The Taxonomy of Stray Shopping Carts LOST FROM THE SUPERMARKET Late evening, 1936, the Oklahoma City office of Sylvan M. Goldman, grocery store magnate. An unlikely time and place, one might think, for the seeds of revolution to be sown. That evening, with his country in the depths of an economic depression and some of his stores pillaged by growing legions of the unemployed, Goldman eyed a metal folding chair across the room, and a vision surfaced in his mind's eye: an oversized mesh basket, fitted with handle and wheels. He had conceived the shopping cart, that omnipresent, wobble-wheeled retail mule bound by duty to spend its days within the confines of parking lots the world over. As revolutions go, Goldman's may seem prosaic. His goal, no doubt, was simply to soothe the weary arms of his customers – mostly women – who were stuck lugging baskets overburdened with heavy purchases. And, of course, allowing them to buy more. But to hear Terry Wilson tell it, it was no less than mass socio-economic upheaval. "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," he wrote, quoting Thomas Carlyle, in his 1978 biography of Goldman, The Cart That Changed The World. "Goldman stands almost alone among America's twentieth-century pioneers as a developer of the business frontier of a nation," wrote Wilson, at the time an academic at the University of California at Berkeley (and a native Oklahoman), calling him "an extraordinary man living in an extraordinary period who made extraordinary contributions to humanity." (It should be noted that Goldman also invented the airport luggage cart.) To be fair, the shopping cart has become a constant, if unremarkable, feature of our everyday lives. Wobbling through the war period, adding a child seat in the baby boom, and crossing ever-greater distances from store to car in the expanding parking lots of the early – and continuing – eras of suburban growth, it is a silently accommodating beast of burden for our voracious consumer lives. Lacking the stubbornness of their flesh-and-blood counterparts, they have nonetheless come to share at least one unwelcome characteristic: a predilection for wandering. This is where Julian Montague comes in. Last year – which, as it happens, was the 70th anniversary of Goldman's vision – Montague, a Buffalo artist, published his own take on the shopping-cart revolution, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. (Last month, the book was the winner of Britain's 29th Diagram Oddest Title of the Year award.) At first glance, it is exactly what it says. Since 2001, Montague has dutifully foraged the urban environs in his hometown for errant carts. Or as he explains in a section titled "Geographic Relevance:" "The Buffalo area was used as a systemic template due to its high level of cart activity and the drastic seasonal changes that allow the presence of snow-related Types." With all the authority of a field anthropologist, he begins with two basic classifications, which are then broken down into increasingly specific categories: Class A: "False Strays" describes a cart that is either a) on its "source lot" (the store that owns it) and used for something other than hauling groceries, or b) "appears to be a stray cart but is ultimately returned to service in the source lot from which it originated." Some examples of the 11 Class A classifications: A/2, the "Plaza Drift," a cart "situated in a foreign lot connected to the source lot by the continuous pavement of a shopping plaza;" A/3, the "Bus Stop Discard;" and A/6, "Plow Crush at Source." Class B are the "True Strays:" "a cart that will not be returned to the source from which it originated." They are also far more plentiful, 22 types in all, including B/7, "Transient Imposter," a true stray found on a foreign source lot; B/9, "Snow Immobilization;" and B/12, "Simple Vandalism," illustrated in the book and on this page with a photograph of a cart dangling from a One Way sign. ("This specimen is a relatively rare example of a B/12 that involves moving a cart upward," reads the helpful description. "In the majority of cases, carts are moved in a downward direction.") Goldman likely never imagined such fates for his contribution to humanity, let alone a complex taxonomy created specifically for them. (The grandiosity of his creation owes mostly to Wilson's fulsome prose. Goldman sums up his own invention by saying, "If I hadn't thought of it, someone else surely would have.") Goldman's modesty, in fact, underpins Montague's project. "What I want the project to do, and what I look for in art myself, is illuminating the mundane, something that you pass by every day," Montague says. "What I love is when people come to me and say they see shopping carts everywhere, where they never did before. I love that, because it means I've taken this peripheral space and pulled it to the centre of their vision." To be sure, the shopping cart, with its vast utility – as a laundry porter in apartment buildings, say, or a mobile home for the homeless or a handy storage device in the garage (B/4, "On/As personal property") – is nonetheless a barely visible feature of the urban landscape. Or, as the Los Angeles-based Centre for Land Use Interpretation put it recently, a "nearly substanceless, ubiquitous urban form, like a pigeon." Montague takes that substanceless urban form and freights it with significance. His classification system, coupled with the book's broad catalogue of "specimens" photographed in their various "natural" states – "I never pose carts," Montague says. "I actually am trying to assess, to the best of my abilities, how to make this system work" – doesn't assign import to the cart itself as much as it twigs the normal impulse to defer authority to the even vaguely scientific. "The big idea about the project was how scientific language and classification shape the perception of our world," he says. "I'm really interested in playing with that power you have – even with this ridiculous sort of thing of naming all these shopping carts, and how that shapes one's perception, even unwillingly." In furtherance of his project, Montague has happily played his part. "I think of it as writing it in a character," he says, "someone who takes it very seriously." For the past four years, he has presented the project to an annual sociology conference in Buffalo. "The first year," he says, "I did it straight. The students were very confused." The reactions represent a broad spectrum, from the perplexed, as in that first presentation, to the hysterical to the thoroughly creeped out. "Reading the blogs," he adds, laughing, "there are a lot of people out there who just think I need to get a life." Still, all is not played for laughs. Montague's carts, photographed in various states of abandon, sit as documents of our disposable consumer era. For the record, it's an interpretation he shies away from. "People who feel strongly about these things see that in the work," he allows. "I leave it really open to that." But to disavow it completely would ignore the cart's silent facilitation of our retail-skewed lives – and, it would seem, their inevitable fate. Divorced from their prosaic mission, the carts hardly seem the helpful innovation Goldman intended, nor, to say the least, the "extraordinary contribution to humanity" Wilson perceived. They are, like so many of the things we use and throw away, strays – the unwanted, unneeded detritus of a consumption-crazy world that they helped create.
Off his trolley? The author who won 'oddest book'
award Julian Montague spent six years roaming the streets of America, photographing an integral element of the industrialised world: the stray shopping trolley. Although dismissed by the majority as a blight on the urban landscape, Mr Montague has created a field guide so any trolley- spotter can identify specimens in canals, parks and back gardens. The taxonomy of "false" and "true" "strays", the "simply van- dalised" and "bus-stop discarded" is for the first time detailed in the guide. Montague's book The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification received its first award this week. It has been named the oddest book title of the year by The Bookseller magazine. Montague, 34, an artist and photographer living in New York, said: "It started when I noticed stray shopping carts lying around. There's an intersection where I live and there are shopping carts everywhere - in strange positions in people's lawns, abandoned in bushes. So I created a language to illuminate this peripheral phenomenon. People who have read the book tell me they now notice shopping carts where they never would have done previously." He said that his work began as an art project, then became an exhibition at the Black and White Gallery in New York and a postcard collection, before finally being turned into a book. "I didn't spend every day for six years working on shopping trolleys," he said. "But it's not a niche book. It casts new light on this mundane part of the world." Montague said he was surprised to have coined the oddest book title of the year. "I was so deeply into the project I was a little numb to the fact that the title could surprise other people." More than 5,500 people voted through the Bookseller.com for this year's Diagram Prize, and Montague's title gained 1,866 votes. The second most obscure title was Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, with 1,365 votes. Third was Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence with 685 votes. Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said: "We are delighted to reward a brilliant piece of niche publishing again this year. For everyone who has ever seen an abandoned supermarket trolley and wondered how it got there, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America is an indispensable guide." The prize is not based on content, Rickett said. However, reviews of the guide on Amazon have been favourable, with one post describing it as, "One of the most complete and well thought-out works I have ever encountered." It goes on, "Montague's language coupled with his beautiful photography give the lowly carts individual personalities. Refreshing, for an art piece, it never takes itself too seriously. It will change the way you look at the urban environment, and most importantly it's endlessly fun." Deborah Aaronson, editor of Montague's book, said: "I think the book is unique because it is, at once, incredibly rigorous and totally absurd. Not only does it contain this extraordinarily detailed system of the ways that stray shopping carts can be classified, but it practically humanises them. You find yourself looking at images of carts that have been abandoned by the side of the road, pushed into rivers, or damaged and tossed into piles and you can't help but feel bad for them. It's really strange." Montague, who continues to add photographs of "recently documented specimens" found near his home in Buffalo to his web- site www.strayshopping-cart.com is starting work on a new project. "It will be indoors," he said. "And will involve spiders."
JULIAN MONTAGUE has spent seven years spotting shopping
carts buried in undergrowth or pond muck. An artist who lives in Buffalo,
he has also taken thousands of photographs of carts that ended up far
from their original homes.
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