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Customers without Customs

-    The Paradox of Supermarket Performance and other Cultural Selections

This work investigates both the spatial as well as the social aspects of the food market, especially its contemporary expression the supermarket with its uniform but ever changing environment. An environment that seemingly provides us everything in the form of ‘objective’ products (itself a collective Western and global symbol of abundance and affluence), but perhaps surprisingly little (or nothing?) in the form of ‘subjective’ rituals or social and political meaning?

Food shopping, and markets, are often deemed part of an everyday culture and a form of ‘event’ often relegated to the mundane and somewhat unreflective part of our lives and behavior, within environments (supermarkets often) that spatially and socially seem to correlate well with these low expectations, mirroring the sentiments of the protestant ethic:
 ‘When the goods from the trolley have been stowed in the car, and the car is back home, a fuller and more human identity is ready at the turn of a key: a family, a marriage, children, relatives, friends.’ 
The experience the individual customer gets in a contemporary supermarket, is tried summed up by sociologist Sharon Zukin, ’Like going to the movies, shopping engaged them in a public culture – but in a private space of their own’ 
But how did we get there?

The marketplace, or agora, is traditionally not just a private place of consumption but an important civic space too, where both theatre and politics were ‘played’ out – to the disappointment of Plato who considered both evils that would turn citizenship into spectatorship – or the ‘Fall of Public Man’ later acknowledged by sociologist Richard Sennett as actually occurring in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This ‘Fall of Public Man’ is believed correlated to the rise of standardization both of products and spatial public design, as well as the lack of ritualized and expressive sensual performances in public – where (increasing) movement and focus on intimacy supersedes and makes superfluous all other forms of interaction, and often hinders abstract political debate; we trusts brands not products, personalities not ideas - the customer may always be right, but what about the citizen?

These questions are sought answered in my newly written Performance-design Master’s Thesis ‘Form Matters’, and will be elaborated on at the conference.

Yours Sincerely

Morten Hedegaard Larsen

Performance-design and Teksam International

Roskilde University