Art lurks among the aisles

Financial Times (March 4 2008)

The critic Percy Fitzgerald once compared the theatre with a “gigantic peep show [in which] we pay the showman and put our eyes to the glass and stare”. The same might now be said of department stores, whose increasingly frequent collaborations with the arts are adding a new dimension to the shopping experience; but the admission here is free.

In 1909 Gordon Selfridge founded his eight-storey Oxford Street department store. It stocked everything from tea and top hats to diamonds, and Selfridge announced that the store would also display the most extraordinary items it could, beginning with Louis Blériot’s aeroplane – which had just made the first crossing by air of the English Channel – and continuing with in-store theatre productions, merging store and stage.

Selfridges has continued to host events to this day. The interest surrounding these has led the store’s creative team to dedicate an in-store space as a permanent platform for contemporary art, with a year-round programme. Called the Ultralounge, the versatile space showcases international talent in diverse fields, with installations, film and theatre.

Bettina von Hase, the founderdirector of arts consultancy Nine AM, was called in three years ago as the store’s independent art adviser and acts as its creative scout, sourcing artists and helping to curate shows.

“Selfridges doesn’t want to do what an art gallery can do better,” says von Hase. “We want to do what a department store can do really well. We are not producing shows for an artliterate audience, but for a general audience and we want to give them an epiphany.”

The first Ultralounge event, Future Punk, was held in 2006 and combined live music performances with a fully licensed recreation of one of London’s members’ bars, The Colony Rooms Club. The space also functioned as a separate venue after shopping hours; with cans of beer and cigarette ends everywhere, it was a far cry from the usual sleek ambience of a department store.

“To let the club happen when only moments earlier someone upstairs has been selecting their designer wedding gown is amazing,” smiles Linda Hewson, creative manager of Selfridges. “It symbolised that anything can happen in that space.”

Installations by artists Brian Eno and Conrad Shawcross followed. Soon it was not only artists that the store was collaborating with but museums too. The current exhibition, Exactitudes , is the first photographic show to be commissioned for the Ultralounge and is a collaboration with London’s Photographers’ Gallery and the Dutch artistic duo Ellie Uyttenbroek and Ari Versluis, who document common styles and fashion trends within social groups, which they call “exactitudes”.

Uyttenbroek and Versluis have been commissioned by Selfridges to create their first London series. Based in a studio in the store, the pair select candidates from the city’s streets and invite them back to Selfridges to be photographed. “Working in Selfridges is fantastic,” they say. “The in-store studio speeds up the tempo and we have this nervous energy for the work.” The collaboration will allow shoppers to watch them work and, with an estimated 123,000 people per day on Oxford Street, the show’s reach is potentially huge.

Selfridges is by no means the only department store to support creativity. Nor are visual artists the only beneficiaries. A particularly durable project is Tokyo’s Parco Theatre, which opened in 1973 and is located inside the Shibuya district’s Parco department store. Theatre also flourished among the teacups and toasters of Edinburgh’s Debenhams in 2005, when the Grid Iron Theatre Company performed the UK premiere of The Devil’s Larder , using the empty shop floor and secret stairways in an after-hours show.

Harrods, too, is championing the arts. The London store’s creative team has recently transformed six of its heritage-listed lifts (the building dates from 1834) into exhibition spaces, five of which celebrate each of the five senses, with the sixth themed around cosmic ordering, the new-age wishfulfilment philosophy.
The lift devoted to smell wafts customers with 12 fragrances, from coconut to freshly mown grass and even engine oil. These scents also drift throughout the store. “It’s all about new experiences and a different frame of mind, making people utilise the store in a different way,” explains Mark Briggs, Harrods’ image director. “By presenting the art in a confined space, shoppers have to stop and take focus, even if you are only in the lift for a matter of seconds.”

The store commissioned a crosssection of creative people for its installation. These include the visual artist Chris Levine, who has installed a meditative light sequence, and the composer Michael Nyman, whose piece Lift Music 1 was inspired by the feeling of claustrophobia.

“The time most people spend in a lift is short,” Nyman says, “so the music had to be memorable. It is constantly revolving and folding back on itself so it sounds as though you have heard bits before, but unless you choose to stay in the lift for the entire five minutes of the piece then you will never hear the whole thing. It’s like a conundrum, a musical maze.”

Of course, there is a strong business logic behind stores’ collaboration with artists, one that Gordon Selfridge recognised nearly 100 years ago. It creates a talking point, lures people in and keeps customers entertained. Some may grumble about the commercialisation of art. But such schemes are at least as much about art enriching commerce: at their best, they have the potential to transform a shopping expedition into an encounter with something extraordinary.