Messages Of Artists, 99 Cents Apiece
DETROIT — Like the aisles of a discount shop, the gallery space is overstocked. The goods on view appear similar, too: kitchen gadgets, balloons, toys, office supplies, small electronics, and packaging marked by logos, some belonging to familiar brands. Taking on the subject of the 99- cent shop, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, known as MOCAD, has begun to resemble one.
The summer exhibition, “99 Cents or Less,” asked more than 100 artists based in the United States to make works from materials bought only at dollar stores, with a total budget of $99 each. The museum’s senior curator at large, Jens Hoffmann, invited participants to consider the dollar store — and its proliferation since the Great Recession — as an emblem of widening economic inequality, globalization, complex supply chains and rampant consumerism.
The project gained extra gravity with its setting, Detroit: The birthplace of mass production and former goodsfilled ubiquity of dollar- store products. Acknowledging “it’s where most of America shops,” the Los Angeles-based artist Sean Raspet mixed together surface cleaners available in Detroit stores, turning over the resulting solution to the maintenance staff to use in their work, emphasizing the sort of labor and goods that are often made invisible.
Osman Khan built a four- meter donkey piñata he called “The Allegory of the Horse” after a Mongol story in which a high priest instructs famine survivors to sacrifice their horses in order to be showered with gifts from the gods. For Mr. Khan, his donkey-horse represents labor.
In August, the piñata will be smashed, and out will tumble “all of the most useless things I could find,” he said. He will sacrifice the horse — now, for the riches of the dollar store.