ARTISTS’ VIEWS ON CLICK & BUY
Black Cube’s “The Fulfillment Center” takes a deep, interactive dive into the world of e-commerce
Set inside a massive warehouse in Englewood, Black Cube’s “The Fulfillment Center” looks at the impacts and influences of the click-and-ship world of easy shopping fueled by Amazon, Apple, Walmart and other businesses through the work of 17 artists.
Curator Cortney Lane Stell describes “The Fulfillment Center” as a cabinet of curiosities. But that underplays both the bigness and the wonder of the art exhibit she has created in a massive warehouse, located on the edge of an industrial park in Englewood.
It’s an unlikely invention, this offbeat and irresistible show, installed in an unusual place, and probably the most rousing exhibit I’ve encountered on the Front Range in 2019. (Though, if you want to see it, you have to be strategic; this show is only open through Feb. 14, and then only one day a week. But do go.)
As its title implies, “The Fulfillment Center,” takes a second look at the click-and-ship world in which we live in today, the online shopping revolution defined by the mega-corporation Amazon, but that also includes the e-commerce enterprises of Walmart, Apple and other retailers. These operations have, of course, changed the way we shop, and live, in a very short time.
The show borrows its name directly from Amazon, which calls its own warehouses “fulfillment centers,” and proudly touts their high-tech magic in its online marketing materials:
“Picture this,” the Amazon customer blog reads. “Orange robots balancing towers of goods twirling in what looks like a choreographed dance across shiny concrete floors, miles of conveyor belts and ramps carrying inventory across the building, and shipping labels practically flying onto boxes, blown by puffs of air.”
Still, I would venture to say, the mock fulfillment center in Englewood has even more enchantment than that. Mostly because it’s powered by the
brains of 17 artists rather than the desire to add to the $232 billion in revenue Amazon now takes in every year.
Curator Stell has given the artists significant freedom, commissioning from nearly all of them new pieces that examine the impacts and influences of the current easy-buy environment. The exhibit is sponsored by Black Cube, the nonprofit that actually has its offices in the same warehouse and that, as a rule, compensates artists for the materials and time they need to make serious work.
And so, fully engaged, the artists interrupt the e-commerce stream to ask questions about that mysterious time between the second you click “place your order” and the moment you open your front door to find that little brown box. What about the people, products and practices that make that happen?
The tall shelves of this fantasy warehouse are stocked with things like Laura Shill’s “Companion Adoption” featuring 20 robotic cats, all waiting for some willing exhibition visitor to take them home. The soft-and-furry (and fully pettable) cats are stacked on boxes and when you touch them, they growl, purr and paw at you. Shill’s piece examines the extreme commodification of things, in this case the services people need for physical and emotional care. What once required human-to-human contact is often now possible via mobile apps and robots.
The piece doesn’t really judge the evolution of personal care — the cats are super-cute; you’ll want one — but it does question whether where we are going is better than the place from which we came. That sets the tone for the exhibition.
For sure, there are darker pieces, even if they appear light on the surface. Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s “Live to Die,” for example, is a tall stack of thousands of bright red welcome mats, the kind you see at the entrances to Chinese restaurants and businesses. But stuck within the layers are multiple, tiny porcelain figurines of an Asian girl wearing a “rice pickers hat” and carrying a sack full of heavy goods. What is buried in the piece, intellectually, is a concern for the underpaid, overworked labor that it takes to produce cheap things.
Jonathan Fletcher Moore looks at the demands on labor in fulfillment warehouses themselves. His piece contains six white, generic worker uniforms, encrusted in heavy bits of concrete that spin around endlessly. Moore designed the work using software that tracks employee movements as they go about work, supplying businesses with the surveillance they need to get the maximum efficiency from the human cogs in their operation.
Overall though, “The Fulfillment Center” isn’t a condemnation of our Amazon world. Like a lot of the work Black Cube produces, it doesn’t glamorize contemporary life or decry it, though it does want you to know what you’ve gotten into.
In that open-minded way, Joseph Coniff’s “Pallet Driver” presents the aura of a person working in a warehouse but not the person itself. There’s a pallet dolly, a safety vest and a sports drink, though no living being using the objects. Coniff is reminding us that there’s a people element to all this automation that’s often undervalued. On the one hand, the e-commerce revolution has provided jobs --Amazon claims to have 250,000 fulltime warehouse workers. But do those jobs come with the compensation and employment security workers deserve?
Other artists dig deep into the essence of the products themselves.
Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s “If you see something, say something” is basically an over-sized abstract rendering of an item inside a shipping box — not the exact object in the box, but an imaginary skeletal version of it made of ropes and straps. His work is about “the relationship between content and container,” and this piece conjures ideas concerning everything from new technologies to waste, while manifesting the excitement and expectations — the positives and negatives, if you will — that we have around the goods we buy.
A few objects take this idea even further, instilling mystical attributes into inanimate contheir sumer goods.
Kate Casanova fills three wooden shipping containers with videos showing abstract human movements and actions. Her boxes integrate some sort of human spirit into the electronic and household items we acquire without much thought about their inner lives — if they have them.
Mauricio Alejo bestows actual personalities on inanimate products. His “A Suitable Song for a Final Defeat” is an oscillating fan set up before the mouthpieces of five plastic flutes, each tuned to a different note. As the fan spins back and forth, it pushes air into the flutes, playing an actual song that repeats over and over.
The piece imagines a thrilling fantasy world where our objects have a life of their own, apart from those of us who use them. Think of it as a version of the film “Toy Story,” where things come alive after we go to sleep, but apply that to the hundreds of thousands of goods you might find in any warehouse.
In a similar way, the many objects in “The Fulfillment Center” each have a distinct personality. There’s no common element to them, except that for one moment in time, they occupy the same building. The same could be said for any Amazon warehouse, full of things that have no relationship other than the fact that someone consumer wants them — and fast.
Stell uses this to her advantage, building an exhibit that has a broad theme but doesn’t get stuck on repeat. The joys and sorrows of the show come at you from different angles. Though they do keep coming; it’s a thrilla-minute, while managing to be quite serious and illuminating.
It is certainly fulfilling, and in that way lives up to its title. But it’s also draining in that way you want art exhibitions to be. This is the first exhibition I know of, anywhere, to take on this intriguing topic.
The challenge, beyond the actual content, is getting there when it is open. Here’s that info: 12 p.m.- 4 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 21. Closed on Dec. 28 and Jan. 4. Then, in the new year, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. on Fridays.