Interview with Matthew Kenyon

October 29, 2009 7:23 pm

Interview with Matthew Kenyon, who presents Consumer Index with Doug Easterly at Share Festival 2009 Market Forces exhibition curated by Simona Lodi.

Simona Lodi: what it mean and why are you interest to develop art and goods in supermarket ?
Matt Kenyon : Today’s supermarkets are an externalized landscape of human desire, this sea of desire negatively influences the wisdom of our culture’s cumulative decisions. For example: There is this fantastic experiment that Jonah Lehrer and Antonio Damasio write about where members of both the control and the experimental group are asked to remember a series of numbers. The experimental group is asked to remember seven numbers (which is somewhere near the upper range of what an average person can remember) and the control group asked to remember two or three digits. While each group is trying their best to remember their series of numbers, both groups are presented with a choice- as a treat, would they like a piece of a) chocolate cake or b) nutritious fruit cup.

Overwhelmingly the experimental group ends up eating cake-and the control group eats fruit. When we are overwhelmed by choice or otherwise distracted, we suffer a failure of judgment and end up listening our impulses.  Retail psychologists have designed today’s supermarket to maximize this effect. This experiment is an example of how consumer culture manipulates us via our biology. This topic is addressed in our recent artwork, Consumer Index. This work creates a caricature of this by amplifying cretin elements to draw this unseen ritual to the surface.

S.L.: Why you decide to work on it through art?
M.K: Art is an alternative way to investigate the consumer space that is aggressively becoming the prime preoccupation of western consumer culture.  In this manner art is an alternative life style for co-opting the anti-creative environment for creative expression.
These spaces are thought of as anti-creative because their ostensible function as economic exchange, however this does not preclude them
from being exploited for cultural critique.  Supermarkets are constructed out of the practice shopping of not out of isles of cheap available goods.

S.L.: Have you learned anything from all the project? I mean what do you want to prove?
M.K.: In addition to the original points of concern, the process of constructing and performing these projects provide insight that cannot be fully predicted.  Mass-culture exists as both a ridged grammatical structure (rules of what to buy and what not to buy), as well as individual utterance (and individual’s specific motivation).   For example somewhere there is a person who is buying a 28 ounce bottle of Johnson and Johnson’s ® no more tears baby shampoo because they want to stop crying in the shower.  We want to expose the reality that we are more than our choices between goods and services.

S.L.: thanks Matt!