Supermarket Sachlichkeit
Overrated shamanic poseur Joseph Beuys once made an installation called Economic Values. This was a cabinet filled with what he considered to be consumer goods with a certain sachlichkeit - anything in packaging that didn't make a fuss, that announced what it contained without dishonesty and cant. These packages were mainly taken from the former DDR, where presumably consumerism was unencumbered by the need to aggressively flog the product - a familar Ostalgie trope, as seen in sites like the Sammlung zur DDR-Alltagskultur - and one that rests more of the unchanging nature of the design, where it is seemingly 1960 forever, than the properties of the design itself, which has much in common with midcentury design in the west - accordingly, a few BRD boxes had crept into Beuys' cabinet as well.
If there is a contemporary British equivalent to this it would be the various no frills ranges of the supermarkets. Arguably, the plain facade of the Tesco Value package is in some sort of lineage with DDR design and its 1920s antecedents - a decidedly Fordist approach, reminding of why Throbbing Gristle were so fixated with the place, slotted alongside Dalston and the Death Camps in their geography ('Tesco Disco' indeed). By far the finest though is the Sainsburys Basics Range. While the design lacks the strictness and starkness of its competitor, it impresses most because of the terse little slogans that they feature. They have a curious function, seemingly intent on inducing a certain shame in the purchaser while ostensibly trumpeting the attractiveness of the product despite certain defects which we acknowledge.
So, yesterday I filled a basket entirely from the aforementioned basics range, and can now regale you with a few of my favourites of these slogans. Simple, still in mint condition. Mixed bag, all colours and sizes. Less fruit, spreads more smoothly. No fancy packaging, just a good bar of chocolate. All shapes, all sizes. Simple recipe, brightens up meals. Washes, no added frills. Simple recipe, plenty to chew over. From concentrate, from around the world. Not so nutty, still crunchy. Less chunky, still meaty. Some broken, still fluffy when cooked. With 5% fruit, a real thirst quencher.
posted by owen hatherley at 4:26 pm
5 Comments:
My mother works in Sainsburys, and unfortunately we seem to get nothing BUT the Basics range. It's not merely the packaging but the food itself ("UHT Skimmed Milk" being the three most terrifying words in the English language) that's horrid - so bland it's _blank_. No wonder TG enjoyed this kind of stuff - an existential void in food.
P.S. I personally love Joseph Beuys; the problem people seem to have is a need to read a meaning into his work (or any 'modern art') that can be worded (I can't remember the proper verb); they want an art critic's meaning, instead of just allowing themselves to be _affected_ by it.
It seems like a sinister Bransonian trickle-down effect. In Melbourne I have only seen it manifest as the bottled water brand 'another bloody water'.
It is as though this marketing strategy functions as a softening of the blow, as the contrast between consumer fantasy and capitalist reality increases, and increasing amounts of compromise must be made to fit into the model of constant expansion.
Absolutely: the divide between Taste the Difference and the blandishments of Basics is the political faultline of contemporary consumer capital...
Part of my "big theory" is that it was that very lack of aggressive advertising in the Warsaw Pact that did for it. Losing the nuclear arms race was not nearly as catastrophic as losing the public-relations arms race. The mind control industries of the NATO countries, in cutthroat competition to increase the markets for private industry, managed to turn a very ordinary pair of blue denim trousers in the public imagination into the height of freedom, cool and sexiness. Consumerism in the 21st century West fills the void left by alienation, and in fact takes up most of the social function that religion had a hundred years ago as "the painkiller of the masses". The state capitalist countries had all the same alienation but none of the sophisticated consent-manufacturing. (Which can explain perhaps why Chinese "market Stalinism" is still going - they've invested in some good PR guys!)
I still say that to this day this is the vital question of Marxist cultural analysis - how exactly do we fight a PR industry that has become extremely good at managing even the basic terms of debate, and which we will never be able to compete with on terms of brute-force repetition?
Absolutely spot on. One of the main reasons why I'm (perhaps morbidly) obsessed with the 1917-34 period is that this is when there was a viable, attractive Communist counter-culture: just think of something like the AIZ in Germany, a magazine as glossy, as well designed, and with as wide a circulation as any of its bourgeois competitors. Not that this exactly helped stop the rise of Stalin or Hitler...which is an entirely different question.
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