commodity fetishism gone right \/\/ buckaroo’s mercantile, boston
Cohesion, external or not, is a pretty attractive idea when it comes to art, especially because of the fact that art itself lacks any hard or fast definition. The navel-gazing that we know today as art history originated during the Renaissance with Italian painter and artist biographer Giorgio Vasari, who collectively grouped the three disciplines of painting, sculpture, and architecture to identify the term. The poets and musicians obviously weren’t too happy about being left out of all the fun, so by the Neo-Classical era they managed to kick and scream their way into the club.
It must have been a great time for all of those high-brow, wine-drinking artists who caroused with aristocrats and the wealthy. Not only did they enjoy a privileged status in society, but they conveniently dismissed the common class of welders, weavers, woodworkers, and other craftspeople from their ranks. For a while there, the Fine Arts more or less exclusively encompassed the tastes of the rich, though even the skilled artisan who fabricated the king’s elaborate furniture likely never would have been considered an artist.
Leave it to a French guy to wake up one morning over baguette and café au lait and decide, “Ou la la, wouldn’t it be fun to fuck with the establishment?” Marcel Duchamp willfully mocked any set formulation of what art could or should be, brazenly declaring that ”I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” Spearheading the Dadaist movement that gained prominence in the demoralizing aftermath of World War I, Duchamp and his ilk shattered the concept that art should have boundaries in terms of classification.
As if to literally piss on the grave of Vasari and his elitist followers, Duchamp introduced the idea of “readymade” found objects into the lexicon of artistry, notoriously embodied by his presentation of a stolen urinal entitled Fountain. Submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917, the piece was rejected by the committee as “not art,” which led to Duchamp’s subsequent resignation from the society. The sting of rejection must have felt like failure, but as fellow author Ari G so eloquently put it, isn’t that what being avant garde is all about?
Plenty of people have blamed Duchamp for the so-called decline of art since then, but there’s no question that his subversive stance set off an explosion that would propel the form in directions it might never have gone otherwise. A century later, film, fashion, photography, graphic design, artisanal craft, performance, and yes, found objects, can all take shelter beneath what was once a tiny umbrella of terminology.
Anything and everything can ascend to even the blue-chip level of art, from a 12 million dollar stuffed shark in formaldehyde to an installation of shredded, pissed-on phone books and broken beer bottles envisioned to resemble a hamster’s nest. All of those scarves your grandma fastidiously knitted are also up for the art label, so long as you can convince her that she happens to be an artist. Why make any distinctions between art, craft, or concept?
"Nest," by Dash Snow and Dan Colen: Deitch Projects, July 26-August 18, 2007 (Photo credit: Deitch Projects)
The spirit of Duchamp is alive and well in Boston at Buckaroo’s Mercantile, a modern variety shop boasting to be “the land of everything you want and nothing you need.” A short walk away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge’s Central Square, where music venues, bookstores and cafés line the streets, Buckaroo’s Mercantile is a pop cultural superstore stuffed from top to bottom with vintage or DIY knick-knacks of every sort, including old toys, 50s pinup girl calendars, WWII-era kitchenware, robots, John Waters movie posters, miniature robots, retro print t-shirts and tote bags, and even Virgin of Guadalupe Mexicana.
After a childhood in the southwest spent frequenting thrift stores and flea markets, Brooks Morris opened Buckaroo’s Mercantile in 1996 with the intention of setting up a local business filled with all of the nifty objects he’d come across throughout the years. “My mother and sister at some point took to calling each other Myrtle and Zelda while out shopping or wearing the spoils of their ventures, like beaded flapper dresses or rayon bowling shirts,” Brooks explains, “so I’d always had it in the back of my mind to open a shop that would sell the sort of stuff that brought me back to those days of cowboys and hula girls.”
Call it chintzy, call it cheap, or call it in poor taste: Brooks has heard it all, and doesn’t really care. “There are plenty of folks who come in here wondering out loud how the hell I make a living doing what I do,” he admits. “But for every one of those, there’s someone who comes in here and gets that sparkle in their eye over some crazy thing I picked up at a flea market.”
Brooks fabricates or remodels a significant chunk of the stock himself, so you can really pick up something that nobody else will offer, from vintage potholder and oven mitt sets silkscreened with old postcard images ($12.00) to two-sided Day of the Dead pendant necklaces ($10.95). But the best aspect of the shop just might be that customers can choose from the extensive image library available on their website in order to create completely unique pieces using the wide selection of retro prints and graphics.
Brooks’ target client is simply anyone who digs the shop and what they do. Regular customers range from a 7 year-old who can recite every line from Hairspray, to jaded hipsters (who want to smile at the stuff on the shelves but can’t allow themselves) to silver-haired grandmas. When I visited the store I even overheard an enraptured rockabilly couple inquiring as to whether they could include some of the napkin and tablecloth sets on their wedding registry. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, indeed.
What is art, really? Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History at Sweet Briar College, asserts that “an object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of ‘art’ and the idea of the ‘artist’ are relatively modern terms.” The better question might actually be: What is art to you?
Art is any object or experience that inspires or provokes you, whether it makes you laugh, cry, or think. It’s profoundly personal, and based on individual observation: the treasured, tattered copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra handed down to me by my mother was a work of art, as was the grotesque sight of the book after one of my best friends from college (coincidentally, a fine arts major) vomited all over it after an evening of binge drinking, along with the new copy she gave me in contrition after the fact, inscribed with her ink drawings on the front page. Had we been savvy enough at the time to videotape the entire process, we would have submitted the piece to Larry Gagosian and might have been poppin’ champagne like we won the championship game for the rest of our lives since then.
The current zeitgeist can be a profound source of frustration during an age ruled by the endless digital flow of links to a mind-boggling body of ideas, objects, and information out there to hit or miss. Can’t you just picture Duchamp giggling from his grave at youtube.com, the platform on which anyone can be an artist? Given the desultory trajectory of whatever might be the next big thing, it’s tempting to crave the times when certain clearly unified trends made it easy to develop tastes that could define one’s identity.
While ostensible lack of cohesion may be the first impression upon entering a store so haphazardly arranged as Buckaroo’s Mercantile, a longer and closer inspection reveals the true sense of internal harmony Kandinsky described in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art: the carefully-selected assortment of found and modified objects begs you to consider what it is that captivates you. Forget about whatever happens to be in fashion, or what everyone else thinks is valuable. Pick up a cookie jar that takes you back to the comforts of your grandma’s kitchen, a set of refrigerator magnets of John Waters muse Divine, or a mousepad custom-printed with the tantalizing image of your favorite 1950s sex siren, but don’t ever apologize for any predilections that might be considered kitsch. In the absence of cohesive cultural direction, the only criteria that can define art is the value that we, the spectators, assign to any object or experience.
BUCKAROO’S MERCANTILE: 5 Brookline Street | Cambridge, MA 02139 | (617) 492-4792 www.buckmerc.com
Image Credit: Yelp, Buckaroo’s Mercantile, MadSilence
Stay tuned for next week’s musings on Dostoyevsky. And make sure to holler at my TAG team homeboy Paul Boshears; he has all sorts of interesting ideas about everything from existentialism to Lil’ Wayne.
Brilliant post (not only because you referenced my site). The internet is amazing, it’s beautiful on one hand, disgusting on the other. I make a living there, but at times I long for something real. There is no art, or everything is art. Hard to decide.