Shopping Is In The Bag
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday September 8, 1988
I SHOP - therefore I am" is the message of the Hyde Park Barracks' latest exhibition, Carried Away, which opens on Wednesday. The show features part of the shopping bag collection of the Baldenwegs, a Swiss family now resident in Sydney, plus loans from other collections.
Marie-Claire Baldenweg has been collecting bags since the 1970s and admits to a personal collection of about 4,000 plastic bags.
"They are very often on the edge between something precious and being trash," she says. "More and more, these bags have become part of my life."
A self-taught painter ("a sort of trans-realism"), she began to use plastic bags as part of her paintings 10 years ago. Marie-Claire has painted several pictures to accompany Carried Away. Most of them will hang in the Hyde Park Barracks cafe and one will be in the exhibition. "Art is serious," she says, "but bags are not so serious."
Shopping bags are as much a part of the Reebok generation as croissants for breakfast and baggy jeans. Shopping bags provide instant identity ("you are where you shop"), along with a special sense of intimacy with a larger, more powerful force. Shopping can be a religious experience.
Like the endless wanderings of the ancient hunter-gatherers, shoppers of the '80s are driven from shop to shop by primitive desires as intense as the sexual urge. "Born to shop" is a popular slogan in New York, where shopping-as-a-way-of-life was invented. Bloomingdales, the retailing giant which helped create this miracle, calls these obsessive shoppers "the Saturday generation".
This force is so powerful that armies of architects (always willing to serve), advertising agents (ditto) and retailers have been mobilised to meet these dark needs. The result so far? The suburban shopping mall (the major architectural contribution to the late 20th century), the glamour retailer and the designer shopping bag.
The raging virus of affluenza is responsible for this acquisitive Bag Culture. Mere possession of consumer goods is not enough. Where one shops has become the critical matter. This makes the shopping bag even more important. "It ain't what you bought - it's the place where you got it" is an apt paraphrase of an old tune.
Curiously, it wasn't that long ago that "bagging" was a slang term for disparaging comment and "rough as bags" meant uncouth. However, "bagman" or"bagwoman" still persists as a nasty term, just as the phenomena of these urban wanderers lingers. The summer season approaches when the bagpeople reappear, as surely as the frangipani and the jacaranda.
Among the theories advanced for the persistence of the bagpeople, the diagnosis of "shopping burn-out" is the most convincing. The theory argues that bagpeople are refugees from the leisure class who have cut up their gold cards and taken to the streets. Unable to abandon the material world entirely, they cling to their tattered shopping bags for comfort, hovering near the bronze doors of the fashion emporiums.
Shopping bags have become such icons of the consumer culture that the US Smithsonian Institute collects them. There are several books devoted to the study of shopping bags, such as Shopping Bag Design (a modest $130) and The Shopping Bag ($42.99). Both these glossy volumes are available from Lamella in Darlinghurst, which, by the bookstore's own admission, has rather pedestrian shopping bags.
Exhibitions of shopping bags have been held by museums and collectors throughout the world, and David Hockney, Frank Stella and the architect Michael (I'll design anything) Graves have created original shopping bags. Even the late Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Andy Warhol have been resurrected and pressed into service on bags.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald
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