Shilpa Gupta: M.O.L.: My Own Label
Title:
- M.O.L.: My Own Label
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
(Re)design your very own label for one of your favourite products! Simple, quick, reliable and easy just make a selection from the menus and click on ‘Print’.
Shilpa Gupta’s My Own Label project develops a new approach to the subversive activity known as ‘shopputting’ — where home-made artefacts [CD’s, sandwiches etc.) are taken to supermarkets and left amongst the retail produce for customers to discover and purchase (or steal!). Instead of creating a new product. however, My Own Label allows you to create a new label which can replace the label for an existing product.
It a project based on excessive branding in a world where consumerism reaches ever higher levels in the capitalist economy, and where globalization is still pretty much a one-way street without sign posts or rules (read: WTO guidelines). It is also a subtle critique of art, which Gupta believes has become too comfortable in its elitist circles to employ a language that is accessible to a wider audience. It also intents to address authorship [via its erasure] and the extension of the electronic medium into outside ‘lived’ space.
