The Paul Piers Collection was born from piles of clothing left behind in a warehouse terminal market abandoned in the mid 1980s. In 1999, a squatter named RA discovered the endless piles of clothing and began refurbishing and selling wholesale to vintage clothing stores around Williamsburg and the East Village under the auspices of Paul Pierce Vintage. It is this reality that Riley spins into a poignant and humorous multi-layered commentary on the art and fashion worlds, gentrification and the changing topography of New York City. Inspired by the true story of RA’s entrepreneurial efforts, the installation becomes an embellished realization of unwrought potential. By 2004 Paul Pierce had grown into an operation that employed and housed 16 other non-domicile people. They eventually occupied a retail store in Williamsburg and began expanding and merchandizing their inventory.

The warehouse (located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn) was recently destroyed by massive fires of undetermined causes, displacing a group of squatters that occupied the space. Playing on the questionable investigation into the fires, absurdity of motives such as designer Paul Piers intentionally setting fire to clothes to launch a new, trendy burnt look abound. This burnt look will be modeled at WHITE BOX during the opening reception. [VIDEO BOX], a division of WHITE BOX, will include a mock video mimicking the style of celebrity newsreels. All of the actors are former squatters from the warehouse building that burnt down.Duke Riley presents Paul Piers for Chanel, curated by Juan Puntes and Judith Souriau, is the last and final chapter ending a six-year long WHITE BOX Summer Series under the umbrella title Six Feet Under. more

Peter Paul Chocolates, Edibles By Paul McCarthy: chocolate factory

Conceived by artist Paul McCarthy, and done in collaboration with his gallery Hauser & Wirth, the gallery has been divided into four sections: retail store, chocolate manufacturing, packaging and storage. The factory will then produce 1,000 ‘Santa With Tree And Bell’ chocolate figurines – complete with signature Paul McCarthy phallic innuendo – on a daily basis to be on sale to the public until 24th December, when the show closes.

NANCY SHAVER: Retail, sculpture and objects from Henry

Nancy Shaver is a sculptor and runs a store in Hudson, NY named Henry.
The following excerpts from a text by Ann Lauterbach for an upcoming catalog on the artist and shopkeeper, refers to both.

We, Nancy and I, share a love of necessary objects; objects that were made of necessity, in need.

With a purpose in mind.
With, sometimes, limited material means.

We believe, also, that art is necessary.

The necessity of art is somehow implicated in the relationship between materials and purpose.

There is a fine line between purpose and use.
Nancy and I share a pleasure in these fine lines.
…
Worn objects are the material equivalent of wise. This thought has been with me since the first flea market.

It has nothing to do with the frippery of antiques, nothing to do with the advancement of investment, nothing to do with Roadshow inheritance.
…
Well if nothing else, art has given me a way to live, she said one day as I was leaving Henry’s inventory of foundlings.
…
A Minimalist instruction: material and process revelatory of each other. Making as content.

“Stealing Beauty” was shot without permission at numerous IKEA stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. In the movie the Ben-Ners quite naturally inhabit idealized showroom interiors with price tags dangling from furniture, and shoppers occasionally interrupting the family’s daily routines. Because of the hit-and-run filming, the traditional cinematic continuity is abandoned and the changing sets are stand-ins for their home. The narrative, however, remains linear as the father offers life lessons on the subjects of economic exchange, meaning of private property, ethics, and family love eventually leading to the children’s rebellious manifesto.

Art in General
Tribeca / Downtown
Invited to reconsider Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961), a shop in
downtown New York furnished with an array of consumer goods the artist
fashioned out of everyday materials to reference food, clothing and
other consumable goods, Fawn Krieger proposed COMPANY (2007).
Conceptually structured as a social and economic project, COMPANY is
an installation and unfolding sculpture in Art in General’s
storefront, street-level exhibition space that will operate as a store
showcasing homemade renditions of recognizable items, with prices
marked from two to two thousand dollars. Gallery visitors will have
the opportunity to buy sculptural objects including ceramic Xanax; a
foam mother tree sloth; a papier-mâché TV; a wooden computer; plaster
enriched uranium; a concrete Baked Alaska; faux dinosaur eggs, ersatz
glacier chunks, cardboard passports, knitted nervous systems, leather
band-aids, and tin foil eye glasses. see more products here

Oldenburg’s environment called The Store—a storefront display on New York’s Lower East Side, shown from December 1961 to January 1962—epitomized the artist’s mingling of art, commodity, and commerce. At The Store, he sold painted plaster-and-wire constructions of familiar foodstuffs, clothing, and merchandise, elevating the status of these objects to art. To advertise his endeavor, Oldenburg created numerous printed works, such as business cards, stationery, and posters, including this hand-colored lithograph. Characterized by both a spontaneity of artistic gesture and the desire to self-promote, this print combines the tendencies of 1950s Abstract Expressionists with art’s new embrace of consumer culture. The title of the enterprise, The Store, appears at the top, its address of 107 East 2nd Street at the bottom, and the artist’s signature in reverse below the title. Oldenburg’s array of objects, including a shirt and tie and a piece of cake, capture the humor and irony of this seminal event in contemporary American art. from MoMA

Patriotic or not — and whether done on impulse, for recreation or for basic survival needs — shopping is usually a social activity, a point duly emphasized in Mr. Hollein’s show, which he organized with Christoph Grunenberg, the director of Tate Liverpool.

With this in mind, the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl’s installation ”New Supermarket” (2002) makes the point in ”Shopping” that perhaps no place is as inclusive or as democratic as a supermarket. It can make everything from salami to fruit cocktail more desirable. But Mr. Bijl’s work also calls attention to the psychological and emotional distance that the slick presentation of goods can put between longing and gratification. In Frankfurt, Mr. Bijl’s full-scale, walk-through replica of a Tengelmann store (a German chain) was complete with stacked shelves, a dairy case, check-out counters and printed posters that help make food buying cheerful (as well as lucrative for a store’s owners). In Liverpool, Mr. Bijl will recreate a British supermarket.

His life-as-art exercise is Duchampian in the extreme. Still, it has historical antecedents, and ”Shopping” features some of them. One is a re-creation of ”The American Supermarket,” a 1964 Pop Art show-as-event to which Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Robert Watts and others contributed. Drawing from photographs of its original installation at the now-defunct Bianchini Gallery in Manhattan, this version of the supermarket reassembles its foods that were made of wax or chrome. Porterhouse steaks, cheeses, eggs, apples and bananas are displayed in fruit crates and on white shelves. Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s picture of a turkey and ”real” supermarket signs make the setup feel theatrical. Viewed in a museum today, though, the exhibit’s piped-in Muzak of the 60′s tempers its humor with a strange chill. (This art ”environment” feels as airless as Jeff Koons’s pristine Hoover vacuum cleaners from the 1980′s, which are on view elsewhere in the show in dust-free, clear-acrylic boxes.) from nyt

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