Among the many culture jamming strategies there are some that are still underdeveloped and ready to be exploited in order to achieve more ambitious results. One of them is so-called »Shopdropping.« As an artistic practice it was described by the artist Ryan Watkins-Hughes during his participation in the psychogeographic Conflux Festival 2004 in New York. His definition was: »To covertly place merchandise on display in a store. A form of ›culture jamming,‹ see: reverse shoplift, droplift.« He placed canned goods on store shelves whose packaging he replaced with labels created using his photographs. Here he accomplished a visual disruption from the typical landscape of goods.
This practice had already been adopted in the past by various groups and single artists for different reasons, however: from inserting self-promoting material such as CDs on shelves or business cards and advertising bookmarks inside books, to artists trying to place unfamiliar objects under the customers’ eyes. For these radical experimenters the shelf has become the stage, the »public« space where the customers’ attention to goods is unavoidable. It has thus become a distinguished and attractive place for delivering a controversial message to a mass audience. The first »reported« shopdropping action was the 1989 (in)famous Barbie Liberation Front (later reclaimed by the RTMark group), which swapped the voices of Teen Talk Barbie and Talking Duke G.I. Joe, made possible by their hardware similarities, and then returned the altered dolls to the toy-store shelves for sale. In this case it was thanks to digital technologies that a fake yet plausible product was created.
Generally speaking, the virtualization of a product (or its abstraction) gives value to anything placed on a shelf. It’s a case of literally creating value by exhibiting an object in a specific place. Thus camouflaged, art can physically enter one of the temples of compulsive consumerism. And infiltrating the shelf of goods means also to infect them, to undermine commercial products’ credibility in the temple of consumerism. This infiltration is a political act because it enters, apparently legally, a protected space, one similar to that occupied by billboards and advertisements. The act constitutes a corruption of the integrity and reliability of commercial space and its aseptic sensorial experience. And there’s a fundamental difference between producing forged goods and copying the original product as closely as possible. Both do in fact need an unofficial space to be sold in, as does any unauthorized copy, but here the shopping space is the same as the »official one,« and the goods are simply »imagined ones,« a fake in themselves.
The Web with its countless varieties of fake culture, supported by an endless visual creation of virtuality, is responsible for this phenomenon. That’s also why different artists and activists use forms of shopdropping to produce subversive goods and place them »on the market« with their untouched symbolic value. Packard Jennings, for example, produced an anarchist action figure fitting the very style guidelines of the most classic and famous action figures, spreading them in Target and Wal-Mart stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, and documenting some disappointed reactions by cashiers and store managers.
The Canadian Institute for Infinitely Small Things instead used shopdropping to spread 40 copies of its »New American Dictionary: Security/Fear Edition« in public libraries and bookstores in Toronto. The book was a compendium of »war words,« or neologisms and new idioms coined by newspapers, government and mass-scale communication concerning the war that had entered the common use.
But probably the most famous shopdropping action was the one Banksy perpetrated during September 2006. He was able with a few flankers to circulate a parody copy of Paris Hilton’s »Paris« CD in 48 music shops all over the UK. Every track was modified, along with its title, and the images in the booklet made the famous starlet look quite ridiculous (in one, her face has been replaced by that of her dog). The music retail shelf space has already been encoded for specific predictable behaviors, and it is also the symbol of an old industry-consumer relationship (buying a record in a record shop), vastly outshined by the online / mobile / purely digital consumer model. But it’s definitively another (ancient) temple of consumerism. The Banksy CD is worth about US $500 on Ebay nowadays.
The shopdropping practice has become so widespread and attractive to many artists and cultural workers that the Anti-Advertising Agency organized a few free Shopdropping Workshops in 2007. The next question should be: When will we be able to »shopdrop« in online stores?
