HOT SAUSAGE AND MUSTARD (2023)

Group show. Govan Project Space, Glasgow, UK

Accompanying text by Dr Richard Stein

Durty Beanz (DB) seem to be increasingly examining the ever-shifting set of relationships between identity and consumption, both digital and nutritional. For Govan Project Space, they’re serving up two new works examining such fodder, albeit from very different angles. Their first offering doesn’t appear on any gallery floor plan, or even have a title. Instead it operates as a silent but pervasive act of intervention into the fabric of the exhibition’s preview, and takes shape through hundreds of cans of complementary Alpine water, supplied by uber trendy American drinks company LIQUID DEATH (LD). A wall of the seductively designed cans (yes cans) are lined up on the refreshments table and bob about in ice buckets. At first glance, the cans appear (no doubt deliberately) somewhat like a hipster craft beer or energy drink, a trait especially jarring when witnessing young children gleefully necking them. DB’s choice of a corporate partner known on the one hand for their savvy and subversive ‘anti-corporate’ marketing strategies, and on the other for their genuine environmental mandate seems emblematic of DB’s broader investigations into the tangled terrain of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), influencer marketing and culture washing. What I like really here is that DB are taking the long road on this one. Their inclusion of a corporate collaborator is subtle and self-implicating, and resists taking any cheap shots at the company itself (if anything, quite the opposite actually). Instead, what is being scrutinised here is the relationship and system that DB & LD exist within more broadly - a global economic infrastructure which DB have recognised that they too are highly privileged beneficiaries within.

In complete contrast, FARM SHOP (2023) operates as a conspicuously non-digital artistic gesture. It’s a bloody great painting. But the use of a tradition-infected medium is left unmatched in subject matter. On the contrary, the painting dismisses still life in favour of depicting a grotesquely enlarged advertising flyer from the British frozen food supermarket: FARMFOODS. The painting’s wobbly act of enlargement operates as a humanising process of capture, slowing down this most familiar and frenetic of objects to a virtual standstill, allowing us to see it (and all its chattering words, shapes and smells) afresh. And now here it stands, ridiculous and naked. Massive and absurd. It seems to speak to ideas around generational isolation, budget-conscious marketing and (in this context) cultural snobbery. Its brazen flatness and primary tones offer a sharp reminder of just how subtle its contemporary digital counterparts have become in permeating every corner of our lives and identities.

On the face of it, DB’s two contributions to this exhibition couldn’t be more different: one a deft (and almost invisible) conceptual act of intervention, and the other a massive dumb (and very visible) painting. But in actual fact both these works seem to point towards a similar set of concerns, namely the endlessly plastic and conflicted agendas of late capitalism in The Global North, a cultural swamp so intrinsically shaped by consumption, that it is by definition (and despite the best attempts of more conscientious corporate actors such as LD) incompatible to any meaningful notion of sustainability, environmental or otherwise.

Like so much of what DB do, their work in this exhibition has left me thinking about a quote that is sometimes attributed to Zizek, and sometimes to Jameson, but I think is most effectively caught by Mark Fisher in his Zinger Tower Burger of a book Capitalist Realism (2009): I sometimes find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Dr Richard Stein is a Senior Research Fellow in Digital Food Marketing at The University of Cornwall, UK.