How Artists Through History Transformed the Shop Window

Well now, what can a poor artist do? This is the question for almost every art school graduate; how can they earn a living, just turn an honest penny, make a meagre buck, having been cast out into the cold and callous real world? One possibility has long proffered itself over the centuries, namely designing or ‘dressing’ shop windows, arranging sundry goods in a suitably glamorous manner to dazzle all punters as they stroll past the high street department stores. This tradition, and its many errant offspring and deviant tributaries, is now celebrated with an exhibition in Basel, Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art.

This is the second show which I suggested and co-curated at Museum Tinguely, and like the first one on the Impasse Ronsin it is intimately connected with the artist Jean Tinguely, Switzerland’s most popular post-war sculptor. For Tinguely began his adolescent career as an apprentice window dresser and continued to survive by doing such work even when he arrived at the Impasse Ronsin in Paris. Here he lived next door to Brançusi as well as such varied artists as Larry Rivers, Max Ernst, Duchamp and William Copley, not to mention his own wife Niki de Saint Phalle. His closest friends, fellow sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne also worked on displays for Christian Dior and his young successor Yves St Laurent, who subsequently became their lifelong friend and patron.

Thanks to my co-curator Andres Pardey (also vice director of the museum) we have some very strong early works by Tinguely, paintings shown in some of his first shop windows; for we made the decision to try and only include original objects which had actually been on display. Thus from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh we borrowed a large-scale Bonwit Teller billboard fashioned by the young Andy, as well as recreating two 1955 windows from the same store by feminist firebrand Sari Dienes. We even found some Fifth Avenue fruit by the youthful Jasper Johns and his partner Robert Rauschenberg, working as ‘Matson Jones’, the company they created specifically to conjure such commercial spectacles.

The title Fresh Window is, of course, a pun on Duchamp’s famous sculpture, itself a pun, Fresh Widow, which has been generously lent by Tate. This work presents a model ‘French Window’ whose panes of glass have been blackened out with dark leather, refusing all transparency.

Having made the obvious decision to open the exhibition with this near-eponymous objet we were then led, as if by language itself, into organising a first room around such challenging blankness. Rather than just mindlessly celebrating consumer culture we attempted to proffer some sort of resistance to such scopophilia, an almost political opposition to the very pleasure such windows are intended to encourage.

Examples here include a dramatic suite of photographs by Johnnie Shand Kydd of boarded up Bond Street luxury emporia, braced for riots on May Day 2001, along with Christo’s distinctive shrouded storefronts and a photo-painting by Bertrand Lavier of a whitewashed shop. Lavier also created a similarly obscured window, painted by the artist himself, at the entrance of the museum next to a boldly subversive text installation by Giorgio Sadotti promising the passerby that all their desires and fantasies could be answered within.

Thanks to my other, much younger co-curator from the museum, Tabea Panizzi, this subversive strain, the tang of critical distance is much to the fore amongst some notable artists of her own generation; these include a major diptych of paintings and accompanying bodega studies by Tschabalala Self, a 34 year old rising star from Harlem and a video by Martina Morger in which she takes the French term for window-shopping ‘lèche-vitrine’ comically literally by actually licking such Parisienne windows.

Similarly socio-political might be the fake shop front (coming straight from NY’s prestigious Sculpture Center) by R.I.P. Germain, which references the illegal enterprises to be found thus disguised in many large cities today. Meanwhile an earlier and more innocent era of shopping is suggested by the faintly nostalgic stand-alone vitrine sculptures of Atelier E.B, a rightly celebrated conceptual fashion brand based between Edinburgh and Bruxelles.

Our exhibition naturally attempts to be as broad geographically as chronologically and some notably strong works include Jiajia Zhang, whose giant pink lit display lists the feeding and sleeping schedule for her infant child, and María Teresa Hincapié whose documentation of her performance in a Bogota window is a poetic parable of the place of women within the South American patriarchy.

Equally striking is ‘Hole in Space’, a pioneering 1980 video installation by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in which you see crowds gathered outside a Beverly Hills store window communicate in real time with friends and curious strangers over in New York, a live-feed drama which now plays as an oddly poignant hole in time.

In almost the last room of the exhibition is to be found a classic modern intervention within the artistic tradition of window dressing. The site of this was again Bonwit Teller, which thanks to the genius creative director Gene Moore had long been in the forefront of such work, indeed where he had given Salvador Dalí one of the first opportunities for a high-profile artist to create a suitable high street scandal back in 1939.

On this occasion the windows were given over to Lynn Hershman Leeson who created an ambitious series of conceptual, political, even activist windows, including one advertising to those North Americans who had no credit rating and thus no buying power. In a prophetic video shot at the time she talks to an expert on the future of merchandising who remarks that “who knows, in 50 years time perhaps these stores will not even exist, you will be able to order whatever you want, pay for it and have it delivered by clicking on a couple of computer buttons.” The date is 1976, almost exactly 50 years ago.

Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art, is at the Museum Tinguely until 11th May 2025.



Feature image: Prada Marfa, Elmgreen & Dragset, 2012. © 2024/2025 ProLitteris, Zürich. Courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset