Public (E-Journal, York University)

Dunn, Sam

Lands of Fire and Ice: An Exploration of Death Metal Scenes

Kurasawa, Fuyuki

Cinema, or an Art of Urban Memory in an Age of Forgetting

Smith, Christopher

"Whose Streets?": Urban Social Movements, and the Politicization of Space

Ouellet, Pierre

The Image of the Local in Early Modern Canadian Poetry

Hlynsky, David

Window Shopping in the (Evil?) Empire 
David Hlynsky 
I shop comfortably, mindlessly, compulsively; sometimes purposefully; 
often in a daze. I scrutinize merchandise with the privilege and prejudice 
of a Westerner. Consumption is my cultural responsibility and patriotic 
duty. This cornucopia is my birthright and I understand it well. 
Shopping synchronizes my heartbeat with the rhythms of industry. It 
teaches me my place in the social hierarchy. It initiates me into my many 
temporary tribes. Watching television is shopping, just as reading the 
news is shopping. I shop for information and knowledge. I shop for vali- 
dation. Meeting people is shopping. I shop for human contact. Travel is 
shopping. Shopping is choosing a momentary self out of a ceaseless cata- 
logue of disposable identities. I shop for experiences; for travel and enter- 
tainment; for social associations and interactions. Some kind of shopping 
must always precede choosing. To not shop is to not pay attention. 
I shop for things, too. We all shop for things; for food, clothing and 
furnishings; for health, shelter and culture. It's difficult to list very many 
personal possessions, which haven't first been presented to me as desir- 
able commodities. Watching a presentation is shopping. Shopping is not 
necessarily buying-but the simple act of opening one's eyes in a city is 
always a will to shop. 
Even the few things I invent for myself as an artist are coloured with 
the belief that they are more special than the things I once shopped for. 
Sooner or later I always shop for an audience. I shop to find them. I shop 
for ideas to  show to  them. 
The unfettered torrent of consumables is the root pressure sanctifying 
the Western marketplace. "Consumer choice" is marketer's jargon. "Free 
market economy" is the dogma. This sanctification of shopping is an 
implicit permission to satisfy as much appetite as I am worth. Or at least 
as much as I can get credit for. I absorb the myth of self-determination 
and dispose of its physical evidence whenever the scene calls for a cos- 
tume change. Fashion beats a fast drum. And fashionable gadgets are 
built to  conquer last year's fashionable gadgets in some mechanically 
macabre, Darwinian roulette. Green-eyed computers litter the curb-side. 
When my arms are full, I am encouraged to throw away as much as I can 
carry. Shopping will never stop. 
My public identity is a synthesis of possessions and experiences I once 
went shopping for. But the steady momentum of my habitual shopping 
has also channelled me into a narrower canyon of choice; a self-limited 
future. I can't afford to buy everything, after all. Shopping demands that I 
proclaim my tribal allegiances. The data farm quietly tends to my further 
cultivation. Shopping has made me more conservative-more fixed- 
comfortably less mercurial. 
Between 1986 and 1990, I made approximately 8,000 colour images on 
the streets of Communist Europe. I purposely avoided dramatic moments 
and newsworthy events. In a cityscape without commercial seduction, 
banality seemed to signify everything. At first I was interested in simple 
pedestrian traffic. Later I doggedly documented hundreds of store win- 
dows. These seemed to signify the real difference between East and West. 
Without the garish ad campaigns of the West, these streets felt more neu- 
tral.. . devoid of trumped up and pumped up urgency. But for some West- 
ern visitors, these windows may have seemed uncomfortably vacuous; 
scary enough to rationalize the Cold War. 
If I had been born in Eastern Europe in the middle of the twentieth cen- 
tury I might have read these windows more pragmatically; perhaps even 
critically. Through chronic shortages and stock-room pilfering, window- 
shopping had been distilled down to its more pragmatic essence; survey- 
ing the leftovers. Even a faint whiff of the Western carnival must have 
been excruciatingly tantalizing to the young; and the black market offered 
much to  sniff about. And so, through some accumulated erosion of faith 
(and a systemic current of sabotage), these Communist windows began to 
symbolize a quagmire of bureaucratic inefficiency. 
In those dying days of the Cold War I saw a vast, ad hoc museum of a 
great failing utopia. The Socialist dream had been made fragile by a simple 
but terminal misreading of human desire. Suddenly in 1989, this museum 
closed without fanfare or notice. History rightly marks that moment by 
what was born rather than by what fell away.. . but what did fall away? 
Soviet culture was serviced and supplied by a single, no-name producer; 
the State. Without competing corporations, the need for advertising and 
packaging was reduced to almost none. By contrast, the Western urban 
landscape is an ever-changing canvas of machismo, fantasy, irony and sex 
due entirely to the cunning efforts of well-paid, commercial artists. Their 
task is to paint somewhat arbitrary but exaggerated distinctions between 
one bunch of bananas and the next. As the Medicis funded the visual cul- 
ture of the Renaissance, Madison Avenue has almost single handedly cre- 
ated the visual culture of late Capitalism. Holy logos, Bat Girl! Fine 
artists may bristle at the thought, but their more mercenary commercial 
cousins do get paid a lot better for a day's work-and have a much larger 
audience. Branding is their only important task. Westerners shop to pay 
top dollar for the privilege of wearing heraldic designer advertisements on 
their chests, defending the Kingdom of Tommy against the Kingdom of 
CK. Generic designs are relegated to the bargain basement. To the West- 
ern shopper, Soviet consumer culture was so notoriously nowhere pre- 
cisely because it was so blatantly NO NAME. 
My pictures of Soviet-era store windows describe a culture supplied 
with generic products; a landscape without advertising. Here the graphic 
artist's task was not branding but labelling. The creative challenge of get- 
ting or keeping consumer attention was not even part of the equation. In 
a marketplace of only generic products, the excitement of shopping itself 
was almost flat-lined. The experience barely resembled its over-stimu- 
lated, Western counterpart. 
Consumer shortages were announced through the grapevine as were the 
sudden arrivals of new inventory. Neighbours stockpiled whatever they 
could and traded goods, person to person. Advertising was replaced with 
rumour and gossip. Social skills, personal connections and diligence did 
ultimately stratify East Bloc society into relative levels of wealth and com- 
fort. Shopping was not nearly as important as strategic networking. I was 
surprised to find Western books and music in the homes of East Bloc 
artists. These same books and music would have been difficult to find in 
suburban North American shopping malls; not because of short supply 
but because of disinterest and the aggressive distraction of mainstream 
plonk. And if suburban malls ignored some of the most interesting mani- 
festations of Western culture itself, they were almost totally blind to East 
Bloc culture as well. Could it be that a clumsy marketplace stimulated East 
Bloc intellectuals to become more cagey shoppers? Repression does whet 
the appetite. Does the flood of fluffy stuff in Western malls dull suburban 
senses? Secret Agent 007 definitely did not spill the answer to this one. 
Downtown shoppers in big Western cities do have an enormous range 
of choice. Our big cities seem populated by a myriad of small tribes while 
suburbia remains more homogenous. As I said at the start, the urban cor- 
nucopia is my birthright and I understand it well. What was mysterious to 
me during my Cold War travels was the nature of consumer culture in the 
enemy camp. If branding is the Western model and labelling was its East- 
ern parallel, what were the differences in the art of display itself? This is 
where my fascination with East Bloc windows begins. 
Labelling starts with typography. It was easy to navigate East Bloc com- 
mercial landscapes by learning a few words of signage: "meat," ''poultry? 
"milk," "grocery," "sport," "fashion," "restaurant," "hotel." Some stores 
were announced only by pictographs. Generic labels for generic purchasing 
experiences. 
But even in a repressed marketplace, the act of shopping can be a joyful 
experience. The hope of having is more pleasant than the disappointment 
of not having. East Bloc markets frequently projected pleasure through 
cartoon mascots, cartoon products and cartoon images of nature. West- 
ern advertising does much the same but with the turbo-charged stamina 
and vigour of an Ever Ready Bunny. 
These windows also contained tangible evidence of the storekeeper's 
personal pride or abject lack of it. Some shops were very tastefully pre- 
sented to pedestrians. Others were simply matter-of-fact. Some were 
hopelessly ill designed. Perhaps a few were recklessly ironic. But my point 
is that I seemed to find evidence of shopkeeper's touch and personality in 
all of these windows. 
Without an overarching ad machine to design seductive, point-of-pur- 
chase displays for these shops, the shopkeeper was often left to his or her 
own artistic devices. These talents were uneven to say the least. Many 
storefront displays embellished product presentations with craft paper 
cut-outs of child-like joyousness. Butterflies and flowers. Imagine your 
grade two teacher moonlighting as an art director. 
In other windows, the art of collage became more intellectual. Student 
portraits poured through an hourglass. A druggist used poster paint and 
collage to remind passers by that their bodies were temples of nature and 
that they ought to refrain from drinking and smoking. Some windows 
had the echoes of Constructivist design or awkward references to Art 
Nouveau. Others leaned toward Modernism and in a few cases Socialist 
Realism. Sexual innuendo was extremely rare but not, I think, because of 
some puritan modesty. There was porn in the magazine kiosks in 
Budapest and a Casino floating on the Communist Danube. It seemed 
that sex wasn't employed to sell anything but itself. In Prague, a black 
and white photo of women getting their toenails filed announced a pedi- 
cure shop; no glamour implied. In a rare instance, a cartoon figure of a 
neo-classical woman in a Moscow juice store has allowed her toga to slip 
revealing a single bare breast. But the signage above her head proclaims a 
seductive pair of questions and their rhetorical answer. "Ambrosia? Nec- 
tar? (no, it's) Juice!" Was it sexy? Yes, but the copy line was an obvious 
and ironic inversion of capitalist marketing strategy; the reduction of 
expectation rather than its inflation. How many times have I been mes- 
merized by a trip to the Mall only to return home feeling conned by my 
purchases? I never felt conned in East Bloc shops and I must confess a cer- 
tain guilty pleasure in shopping a landscape so devoid of glitz and seduc- 
tion. But then again, I always had the luxury of a passport to elsewhere. 
These windows also contain evidence of traditional craft and mundane 
labour. A large percentage of shop windows were backed with lace cur- 
tains, perhaps a carry over from nineteenth century European taste. There 
were few mannequins but many bits of flat art. Things seemed perpetually 
suspended from visible strings and wires. Window frames had decades of 
cracking enamel and varnish. Windowpanes were carelessly splattered 
with drips of paint. Stonework was chipped and cracked. While these 
were evidence of sloppy workmanship and a poverty of building supplies, 
they also formed the patina of human occupation. Western commercial 
aesthetic strives to keep as much of its face sparkling and new but that 
alone ought not justify our pity for an urban landscape more scarred by 
the human touch. Wear and tear is nothing to be ashamed of. 
Once upon a time in the Cold War we tempted global suicide over the 
content of our respective shop windows. Perhaps I'm too cynical. Clever 
dramatists called it a fight for freedom. But that too seems like spin from 
a beltway speechwriter. As it happens, the East Bloc collapsed not because 
it was entirely "evil" but because its own marketplace of ideas and things 
finally ran out of promise. Compared with other political revolutions, the 
disintegration of the Soviet Empire was relatively painless. Even without a 
formal democratic process, the people simply decided to try a different 
experiment. It was not so much a victory for cowboy brinkmanship-it 
was a miracle of collective self-respect. 
For now at least.. . and for better or worse, the freedom to shop is 
billing itself as one of the grandest freedoms of all. But that chapter is far 
from over. The Information Age is still new. Will the coming flood of 
electronic expression celebrate the multiplicity of human experience? Will 
information keep our collective needs in balance? Or just pave the imper- 
ial horizon with more franchises and parking lots? How much growth can 
our global environment afford? How many costume changes can our 
identities endure? During an age when our own systemic gluttony is our 
most formidable enemy, it might be useful to reflect on a place where 
shopping was less frenetic. But have no fear. That reflection will probably 
change nothing. 
Eastern windows are already filling with the Western simulacrum.. . a 
new utopia built of flash and seduction. But, contrary to myth and pro- 
paganda, the East Bloc windows I photographed were far from bankrupt. 
Lack of market competition produced an urban landscape that felt 
stripped of fluff; an uncommon inventory of our most common human 
needs. Beneath the skin of ideology, we're all shopping for the same basic 
stuff. That knowledge alone ought to have brought us together in peace. 


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Lands of Fire and Ice: An Exploration of Death Metal Scenes

Cinema, or an Art of Urban Memory in an Age of Forgetting

"Whose Streets?": Urban Social Movements, and the Politicization of Space

The Image of the Local in Early Modern Canadian Poetry

Window Shopping in the (Evil?) Empire

Debt, Dollars, Democracy and Dictatorships

Belfast Tinsel: Letters to Gerald

Millenial Spurn

Offensive

Dead Risks

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