As a result of my interest in multiples I have also accumulated a sizable amount of documentation on a closely related phenomenon: artists’ shops.
Many artists set up a shop one day or another, sometimes at the start of their career.
Claes Oldenburg sold objects of painted plaster in The Store in 1961. (Six years later Elaine Sturtevant set up her own version of Oldenburg’s ‘Store’ in a rented space.)
Others opened stores when they achieved their first success, like Keith Haring with Pop Shops in New York (1986) and Tokyo (1987).
The Pop Shop was a boutique where Haring’s art could be accessible to everyone, selling inflatable babies, condom badges, T-shirts, baseball caps, puzzles, refrigerator magnets, pocket radios, SAFE SEX stickers, and more.
A less known is Yayoi Kusama’s business venture. In 1969 she opened a boutique in New York where she sold her own designs.
‘The Kusama Fashion Company produced and sold dresses and textiles decorated in polka dots, which were sold in hundreds of stores and boutiques across the US. The Nude Fashion Company was an offshoot of Kusama Fashions. The idea was that clothes should bring people together, not separate them, without the need to completely disrobe oneself. The goal of the Nude Fashion Company was to expend distribution of these dresses, being based on fresh ideas and (being) practical for enjoying sex, into the mainstream.’
(From an interview with Birgit Sonna, Sleek 42, Fun & Games, Berlin, 2014.)
The FluxShop in New York founded in 1964 and its subsidiary in Amsterdam, Willem de Ridder’s European Mail-Order House have both become legendary.
Fluxus was also well represented in Nice. In 1958 Ben Vautier bought a store in the Rue Tonduti de l’Escarène. He started out selling gramophone records, but in the sixties the shop became the operating base for many disorderly street actions.
In 1966 Vautier’s Fluxus friends George Brecht and Robert Filliou started a shop in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a small town near Nice. They named it: La Cedille qui Sourit. For two years they used this place to invite their friends, sell small artworks, postcards, jewellery, ‘and all kind of things which do or not do have a cedilla in their (French) name’.
Brecht and Filliou developed ‘games’ as well and the result of their ‘research’ was presented in the book Games at the Cedilla, or the Cedilla Takes Off, published by the Something Else Press in 1967.
PUNK, late 1970s! Gallerie Anus in Amsterdam, set up by graffiti artist Hugo Kaagman and punk poet Diana Ozon was designed as a magazine production site to store the many underground flyers and pamphlets from the punk wave. But it gradually converted into office management for New Wave groups and a graffiti shop for t-Shirts, magazines, posters and clothing. It was also a hairdresser’s shop and a bicycle repair workshop. And all this took place on only 20 square metres.
Sometimes coincidence offers a helping hand: while Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas were looking for a studio in London they found an empty store instead. They used this place to sell T-shirts (‘HAVE YOU WANKED OVER ME YET’), badges and small artworks for six months in 1993.
‘Fashion Moda’ was an artists’ space, founded by Stefan Eins, that opened in 1978 in an abandoned storefront on Third Avenue near 147th Street in the South Bronx. Many of its participants were part of Collaborative Projects, Inc., an artists-run collective whose members included Stefan Eins, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and others.
In 1982 Fashion Moda was invited to participate in ‘documenta 7’ in Kassel. Stefan Eins and Jenny Holzer organized three stores on the ‘documenta’ campus and filled them with multiples created by approximately forty artists. Everything in the stores was priced from 50 cents to $200.
(I bought a silkscreen print on cloth, 27 x 20 cm, by Kiki Smith.)
From 1975 until 2015, Hans-Peter Feldmann and his wife ran a store in Düsseldorf, where you could find ‘rare’ items, such as vintage toys, antiques, paintings, old cameras, et cetera. Feldmann Verlags Shop offered ‘every day’ objects in boxes.
Another ‘shop’, The Wrong Gallery, was conceived by Maurizio Cattelan and his ‘curators’ Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick in 2002. It was the smallest exhibition space in New York: an expensive-looking glass door with two and a half feet of floor space. It was located at 516A½ West 20th Street in Chelsea. Between 2002 and 2005 more than 30 exhibitions were organized with works by Lawrence Weiner, Andreas Slominski, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul McCarthy and many others.
In 2005 The Wrong Gallery was produced by Cereal Art as an edition in 1000 numbered copies: 1:6 scale. (‘Become the curator you’ve always imagined you could be by organizing your own personal gallery program.’)
The artist Servaas (Servaas Schone, 1950-2001) transformed galleries and museum rooms into shops where he sold fish related products. In his Int. Fi$h-handel SERVAAS & Zn. He offered canned Fish-Air, Fish-Beer and a perfume with fish aroma: Eau de Poisson.
Another artist who sold her own works is Lucy Sparrow. In August 2018 she presented her Sparrow Mart Supermarket in Downtown Los Angeles. The 260 square-meters space was filled with 31,000 felt groceries. All products could be purchased.
Three years earlier she opened a Sex Shop in Soho, London, with more than 5000 sex products made from felt. (No under 18s!)
Art Metropole is a gallery shop in Toronto founded by the Canadian collective General Idea in 1974. This nonprofit space in Toronto is specialized in editions such as artists’ books, multiples and video.
Another shop for artists’ publications was Other Books and So, founded in 1975 by Ulises Carrión. Carrión was a fascinating artist who made beautiful books – Wikipedia describes him as ‘perhaps Mexico’s most important conceptual artist’ – but in the 1970s Carrión was first of all known for his activities in Other Books and So.
In 1979 Karen Kvernenes took over the bookstore and reopened it under the name Art Something.
Still functioning: Boekie Woekie (1986) – a shop for books in Amsterdam run by the artists Henriëtte van Egten (Dutch), Rúna Thorkelsdóttir (Icelandic) and Jan Voss (German). Last year the bookstore moved from Berenstraat 16 to a new shop at Geldersekade 39.
In 1978 Other Books and So sold games and books by Fluxus artist Takako Saito. Thirty-Nine years later, Saito set up her own shop. It was part of her exhibition in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in the German city of Siegen. On the red and white striped awning it said: EXTRA DO IT YOURSELF SHOP “YOU AND ME”.
Once inside, you could fill a plate, bowl or cup with small works of art. A sign requested the client to sign the çontainer’. Saito had written: Ich werde as auch tun (I would do it too).
The “YOU AND ME” Shop will be part of a large Takako Saito retrospective in Japan, later this year, organized by the Fukase Memorial Visual Art Preservation Plan in Tokyo.
