I think I'm going to commission a gallery showing the theme of which will be "shopping carts: a los angeles institution" (and by commission I mean post a blog about it since I have no connections in the LA art gallery scene). Before moving to LA I never really gave a lot of thought to the shopping cart - their impact on my life was minimal at best. However three years in LA has changed all that. Angelenos are an industrious people who are not content to see the shopping cart as merely an aid to get items to a checkout stand to them it has a myriad of uses that would put the average shopping cart user to shame. The most obvious of uses of course is to the homeless person who uses it as a portable storage system (this is not limited to LA clearly as homeless all over the country make use of this function). However, Los Angeles is not content to allow the shopping card to be so underutilized. My favorite use for the shopping cart is very simple but also brilliant - the personal take-home shopping cart. Think about it, why would you leave the cart in the store, and then be forced to CARRY your items to you home when you can simply take the cart with you. With minimal effort you can just roll your items right up to the entrance to you apartment. This does however create the issue of what to do with the shopping cart now that you are at your apartment. And leave it to the cleaver people of LA to figure that out. You just leave it outside your apartment, maybe push it to the side of building so it is less likely to be stolen by an envious neighbor. Done. Other uses for the shopping cart include (but I'm sure are not limited to) stroller, dolly, table and though this might be inadvertent, it is no less striking, the lawn ornament.
This is where the art show comes into play. With all these people making use of the shopping cart in so many different ways the shopping cart has become part of the LA landscape and has become an integral part of society. I realized this as I was walking to my car this morning and saw a man stopping to collect shopping carts on the street and loading them into his shopping cart truck (yes, they have trucks designed for this purpose). Now I had seen these trucks driving around before but I had always assumed they were just delivering shopping carts from the shopping cart factory to the stores. I had no idea that it was actually someones job to drive around the city and collect stray shopping carts. Clearly there are a lot of detail that I'm not aware of, like, does he work for a certain store and just collect stolen carts from that one store? Maybe he works for himself and then he sells the carts back to the stores, for a price. Or maybe he works for the city and it is some attempt to beautify the neighborhood (some people are of the mind that shopping carts left on the front lawn of apartment building is not aesthetically pleasing). So I think an art gallery showing where artists are encouraged to reflect on the shopping cart as a muse would yield some amazing results. It's time the shopping cart is celebrated not just in our streets and in front of our apartment buildings but in our art.
