A Natural History of Consumption: The Shopping Carts of Julian Montague

Seizing the amateur naturalist’s field guide as a form, the artist Julian Montague has produced a provocative and haunting work that takes the shopping cart as its subject. While the project might well be read as an amusing and insightful parody of the taxonomic and stylistic ticks and obsessions of a series like the Peterson Field Guides for everything from freshwater fish to the night sky, Montague goes far beyond this, providing rather a startling meditation on the interstices of consumer culture and urban spaces in both his book and a companion website.
 
While critics of consumer culture regularly offer detailed, entertaining histories and analyses of what and where consumers buy, they more often than not focus on well-worn icons, from plastic packaging to big-box architecture. Cultural critics can turn to dozens of books on shopping malls, for instance, each with vivid illustrations, meticulous analyses, and dour pronouncements. This work is often valuable but it is rarely surprising, even when it takes such playful forms as Montague assumes; for instance, Delores Hayden’s recent A Field Guide to Sprawl offers a blunt, thorough critique of contemporary suburban planning from the naturalist’s perspective.¹ In contrast, Montague provides no critical apparatus at all in The Stray Shopping Carts of North America, yet his considering consumer culture through the shopping cart is itself a profoundly surprising and pointedly critical gesture. What emerges is a naturalist’s investigation of contemporary urban consumerism and spatial practices dissected through the liminal form of the shopping cart. A visceral sense of play and shock animates this particularly canted perspective, calling to mind the effects pioneered by Walter Benjamin.
 
The book begins with an utterly earnest explanation of its classificatory system, in which carts are either “Class A: False Strays” (carts that will return to the store) or “Class B: True Strays” (carts that will not return). Montague proposes for each class a fascinating series of types that describe various situations and states. There are 11 types of false stray, from the “A1 Close False” (a cart on the edge of a store’s parking lot) to the “A 11: False Group” (carts at a dwelling adjacent to a source store). The real fascination of the book, however, is with the true strays, of which there are 22 types, beginning with the B1, “Open True.” Much of the taxonomic ingenuity of the book is dedicated to describing as completely as possible “shopping carts in different situations and considering the conditions and human motives that have placed carts in specific situations” (6). In the first two sections, the book provides definitions and photographs of all 33 subtypes. The bulk of the text then presents scores of “Selected Specimens,” photographs of carts taken primarily in Buffalo, New York, as well as an entire section entitled “The Niagara River Gorge: Analyzing a Complex Vandalism Super Site.” Montague assures readers that “none of the photographs in this book were staged; all shopping carts were found in situ” (7).
 
The illustrations in the “Selected Specimens” have little or no comment beyond designations of the relevant types and the occasional caption clarifying the context, but there is a profound critical force. Many of the types describe carts found in what Montague names “Gap Marginalization” and “Edge Marginalization” to describe “a cart situated in a vacant lot or ditch, between buildings, behind a building, in a doorway, under a bridge or overpass, or in any manner of vacant public gap between properties” (44). The eye is thus drawn into these strange seemingly dead or uninhabited spaces at the edges of parking lots, behind strip malls or apartment buildings. Such spaces are usually unnoticed, or certainly not the visual focus of either urbanites themselves or even most artists or critics taking cities as their subject. Even authors who have celebrated such odd urban green spaces, notably William Upski Wimsatt’s Bomb the Suburbs,² don’t provide the wealth of images Montague has amassed. The images of carts abandoned, decaying, or used for various purposes invoke with quiet insistence the decidedly absent and ghostly people who use them. The carts are thus Peirceian indexes, a fossil record of an army of poor urban consumers and homeless gleaners who, without access to cars, must steal shopping carts to move their purchases and gleanings, often from strip malls and big-box stores to their distant homes in the city centers or the overgrown gap spaces in which they live. The photographs that illustrate these types thus become what Benjamin names dialectical images, “a way of seeing that crystalizes antithetical elements by providing an axes for their alignment” (Buck-Morss 210). The axis here is the form of the naturalist’s guide, which presents image after image of the shopping cart—the very icon of consumer desire—embroiled in the improvisations of those most disenfranchised by this culture of consumption.
 
The sheer number of photographs is overwhelming, and the book makes clear that at least in Buffalo and surrounding areas, the shopping cart is a ubiquitous feature of the landscape. A dialectical critique is encoded into many of the subtypes. For instance, type “A3 Bus Stop Discard” is illustrated with a photograph of carts overturned at a stop without seats or shelter where poor consumers use them as makeshift benches before boarding mass transit. Such an image underscores the sheer time and labor that consumerism demands of those with the least economic power who must negotiate an urban environment built on the premise of automobility. This kind of critique appears again and again as we are presented with images of carts singly or in groups behind modest houses and apartment buildings. The relationship of the shopping cart to these consumers is fascinating. Consumers or gleaners never “buy” the carts themselves, and thus these examples of stolen, repurposed, modified and vandalized carts reveal strange gaps in the processes of consumption and of urban traffic. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes that consumers “trace ‘indeterminante trajectories’ that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move” (35). Montague’s photographs vividly capture a record of such movement, in which it seems that shopping carts, rather than people, “circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order” (35). Left abandoned in ditches next to highways, decaying in creeks, the carts force us to look beyond the proper spaces of the city.
 
Beyond the most clearly dialectical images and types in the book, there is a wealth of urban surrealism. The “B13 Complex Vandalism,” defined by “the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart” (42), are surely the strangest and most intriguing images in the book. The definition of this type is accompanied by a photograph of an empty swimming pool behind a seven-foot fence. In the pool stand two stray carts. The book offers no theories about how they came to rest there. One is left to imagine the motives of whoever took the trouble to hoist the carts over the fence and set them upright in the deep end. Beyond such surreal images, one is simply struck by the form of the cart, which is thoroughly defamiliarized by the book. Because so many carts are damaged in some way, or obscured by mud, snow, foliage, or decay, what leaps out is the ubiquitous lattice of their basket, and turning from one page to the next one is reminded of the grid, arguably the ur-form of twentieth-century art. The empty shopping cart becomes a transient and evolving meditation on what Rosalind Krauss describes as the key form of modernism. She writes that within the grid’s “austere bars,” we hear “no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water—for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object” (158). As Krauss puts it, “the absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but more importantly its hostility to narrative” (158). One is tempted to see the grids of these carts as a parable of emptiness and commodity fetishism, for their form is meant to mutely transfer only the fullness and utopian promise of the commodities they contain, briefly supporting them in their transit through the store; the cart is understood as a purely negative space we long to fill, a negative emblem that supports the fundamental emptiness of the commodity form into which we consumers project our desires. Thus the most unnatural of forms, the cart’s latticed basket, is revealed as a force of history in its decay, an allegory of the contradictions of consumer culture.
 
The field guide frame forces us to see these carts as living creatures, and in the photographs it does seem as if they are drifting across plazas or hurling themselves in front of trains, as though they moved through the world singly or in herds as natural and living creatures. This produces a powerful estranging effect, and it dramatizes our own status as the objects of the vast and inhuman machinations of commodity culture, in which consumers are the objects of the ghostly forces of capital. Moreover, in recent years, the shopping cart has become the icon of consumerism, even where the physical form no longer exists. Websites almost universally use the term and visual icon of the shopping cart to mark the point-of-purchase. The shopping cart has become pervasive in our experience both of mass-market retail and of virtual incarnations of every class, to the point where consumerism itself is ideologically naturalized through this form. As a profoundly dialectical image of this process, the most fascinating photographs in the book are the examples of “B21, Naturalization,” which present carts that are decaying in urban wilds, literally becoming integral elements of the landscape. The photographic illustration of this category presents a “specimen [that] has been buried by silt and is encrusted with zebra mussels” (50). Rusting carts, covered in mud or leaves, buried in the ground so only the latticed side appears, or caught in stands of trees, shot through by leaves and branches, abound in the book. These images enact what Benjamin names fossil and allegory. In his essay “The Idea of Natural History,” Theodor Adorno writes: “For radical natural-historical thought, however, everything existing transforms itself into ruins and fragments, into just such a charnel-house where signification is discovered, in which nature and history interweave and the philosophy of history is assigned the task of their intentional interpretation” (121). Ranked in rows and rolling through aisles under sanitary florescent lights, these carts and all they represent are opaque. Their significance and imbrication in the commodity system is far more tellingly disclosed in just these images of naturalization, and in this form of the field guide, where nature and history produce the friction for a profane illumination.