Window displays as a case inquiry from the beginnings of photography to the Bauhaus architects; mannequins as an obsession of the Surrealists; mass commodities as the focus of explosion art: The fascination with surface and with the excesse of the world of consumer fits can be traced in art from the move round of the last century to the existing At the same time.

Window displays as a case inquiry from the beginnings of photography to the Bauhaus architects; mannequins as an obsession of the Surrealists; mass commodities as the focus of explosion art: The fascination with surface and with the excesse of the world of consumer fits can be traced in art from the move round of the last century to the existing At the same time, critical pondering has never ceased its warnings against the seductions of consumerism. The directors of the [i]scoria[/i] Kunsthalle and the Tate Liverpool, Max Hollein and Christoph Grunenberg, respectively, collaborated to pack this conflict into a single exhibition.

Translated from German on Sara Ogger.

Their selections ranged from historical works to contemporary installations. Whether shopping was criticized or celebrated here hanged on the individual piece. It started revealed on the street with Haim Steinbach's mannequins: forty-one figures, disposeed in the latest Strenesse AG designs, with jarring naked figures wearing Jedi-knight masks between them. The view into the entrance of the Schirn Kunsthalle was closeed by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset with their opening soon" announcement for an auction house. In the foyer Sylvie Fleury's resplendent shopping cart turned, and in the stairwell Surasi Kusolwong had built I Euro Market (Shop till you fly) 2002 with loads of cheap plastic items that were sold gone out in short time. Probably the chiefly spectacular contribution was from Guillaume Bijl, who commissioned a supermarket chain to build an authentic franchise that would also include the regular rotation of recent groceries and all the usual amenities. however nothing could be purchased, which lent the concluded and orderly selection of fits an unexpected museumlike quality. Stunn fascination collided with the wish for the aesthetic optimization of display--a wish that made way for a playful acquisitiveness in the exhibited reconstruction of the "American Supermarket" at the Bianchini Gallery, novel York (1964), where Popart heroes like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol touted the beauty of mass-produced grocer's shop items.

And herein lay the secondary emphasis of this exhibition: the fascination commanded by means of masses of cheap goods onward the one hand and on refined, ultra-selective choices on the other, as in Fleury's shoefetish installation Pleasures, 1996 More than anyone besides Andreas Gursky brings both aspects together: Here his "Prada" series, 1996-98 was juxtaposed with 99 Cent II, 2001 a photograph of an overloaded supermarket, from which just a not many small consumer heads poke abroad Aesthetically speaking, both are equally delightful. Other works provided a stocktaking--sometimes an ideologically loaded united as in Joseph Beuys's Wirtschaftswerte (Economic values), 1980 or Damien Hirst's Pharmacy, 1992 Many currented the world of commodities as sheerly aesthetic, like Jeff Koons's vacuum cleaners, while others showed critical intent, like Julien Michel's image Le Policiers (The police), 2000 in which heavily armed police officers stand guard in fore-rank of Niketown. Zwelethu Mthethwa photographs remarkably plain living rooms that are decorated with wallpaper made of consequence packaging and supermarket flyers. Critical voices could also be fix in Olaf Nicolai's contribution, a collection of cites on shopping, from Karl Marx to Marilyn Monroe "Lock up a department store today, spread the door after a hundr years and you will have a Museum of recent Art," as Warhol said in 1985 And Rem Koolhaas wrote in 2001 in his main division on the New York Prada store: "In a world where everything is shopping... And shopping is everything... What is luxury? real luxury is NOT shopping." If to such a degree the museum is the epicurism version of the consumer world.

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