VITAL MUMMIES

My rad housemate gave me a copy of Vital Mummies/Performance Design for the Show-Window Mannequin. Examines issues of hyperreality, consumerism, performative elements of consumption...  

"Malls too, as tightly and centrally controlled interior public spaces, may satisfy the desire for multisensory experience knitted tightly with acquisition, a mode of experience expressly connected with theatricality by the mall-management term 'The Retail Drama.' William Kowinski enumerates the staggering range of experiences that malls may offer:

'You can get anything from diamonds to yogurt in the mall; you can attend college classes, register to vote, go to the library, see topless dancers and male strippers, give blood, bet, score, and meditate, and get a room or a condo and live there. Someday it may be possible--if it isn't already--to be born--go from preschool through college, get a job, date, marry, have children, fool around, get a divorce, advance through a career or two, receive your medical care, even get arrested, tried, and jailed; live a relatively full life of culture and entertainment, and eventually die and be given funeral rites without ever leaving a particular mall complex--because every one of those possibilities exists now in some shopping center somewhere.'"

"The department store may have been, as Benjamin put it, the flâneur's last coup, but it was the flâneuse's first."

 

"For the first window on Fifth Avenue I blew up a copy of the 1963 Instructions for Preparing Your Federal Income Tax Form 1040 to serve as background art and arranged in front of it a timely still life: a bottle of aspirin, ice bag, pile of pencils, erasers, tax forms, and lots of extra red tape. The next window introduced New Yorkers to the hapless Yves Mal Chance, filing a joint return with his wife. Shown in the window was his Schedule-A Exemptions form, on which he claimed medical expenses of $20,159.67, some of it from hospital insurance premiums and payments to doctors Jones, Smith, and Brown, but most of it ($20,000) a 'diamond bracelet prescribed to calm his wife's nerves.'"