M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

as a signifier of urban decay or the perils of consumerism.
While political and environmental concerns have their
place, those concerns tend to focus one’s view too
narrowly. I want to push past the assumptions to reveal
just how diverse and complex the stray shopping cart
phenomenon actually is. But despite my best efforts, I
think a lot of people respond to the work because they
are able to project their own concerns onto it. And on
some level I want the photographs to be open to that
kind of projection; each photograph contains its own
emotional content and has to exist in its own space.
In The Order of Things Foucault reflects upon
archaeologies of order - resemblances amongst
things and how differences between things can
be mastered. He also states that one should not
only take traditional values into account, but
accept all values as equally privileged. Would you
say you are investigating - through the stray
shopping cart, a post-consumer order of
commodities?
Yes, but I suppose it depends on what one means by
post-consumer. I think of the shopping cart as an object
that operates in two consumer systems. The first is the
closed circuit of the store where its primary function is to
aid in the transport and purchase of goods. The second
is the consumer system that is in operation outside of
the store. This is an open system that is comprised of
potential appropriations. A shopping cart is so useful in
so many different ways that it is almost analogous to a
kind of open source code. It can be re-purposed for
whatever the appropriationist wants. It can even be cut
up and its parts used for new structures (a not
uncommon occurrence). And a cart can also be taken
beyond utilitarian engagement and be used for more
metaphysical acts, like vandalism or the construction of
visual jokes.
It also seems to me that another Foucaultian
concept emerges here - that of emplacement. He
defines emplacement as: ‘the relations of
proximity between points or elements’ and that
‘we live in an ensemble of relations that define
emplacements that are irreducible to each other
and absolutely nonsuperposable’. Would you say
your system of classification identifies
emplacements of transit?
My approach to “identifying” stray shopping carts shares
Foucault’s concept of defining sites by describing the
ensemble of relations. My system tries to identify
shopping carts by looking for the cluster of relations that
define the situation they are in. By “situation” I mean the
physical position of the cart in the environment, but also
the consideration of the forces/acts that placed the cart
there and the potential of the cart to transition to
subsequent situations. The identification, therefore, is
only relevant to that particular set of relations; when the
cart is re-appropriated and transitions to a new situation,
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it has to be reevaluated. For example: if I find a cart with
a cracked basket in a vacant lot from a store that closed
down several years ago, that cart is identified as being
B/2 Damaged, B/14 Archaic, B/15 Gap Marginalization. If
somebody removes the cart from the lot and uses it to
move paint cans around their garage, the cart will retain
the Archaic and Damaged designations because they do
not change, but it will lose the Gap Marginalization
designation because it is a Type that is defined by the
relationship of the cart to the lot and to the act of
marginalization. Once appropriated and employed in the
garage, the cart gains the B/4 On/As Personal Property
designation.
The cow parade was a planned and organized
event throughout the world in which the cow as
signifier was attributed a non-threatening and
benign presence. What kind of presence is
denoted by the shopping cart in your opinion?
Strangely, I might be the wrong person to ask. After
spending such a long time seeking out stray shopping
carts, I have the mindset of a hunter. I’m thrilled to find a
mangled shopping cart in a snow bank, either because it
provides a good photograph or it confirms that my
system works in some way. When you document
thousands of shopping carts over a period of years, you
encounter the same situations over and over again. It
starts to seem natural. I have spent so much time in
vacant lots and other sorts of urban no man’s lands
(what I call “Gap Spaces” in the project), that to me they
have their own kind of natural state where the plants and
animals mix with the litter and the illicit human activities
to form an emergent ecology. My next project is going
to take this idea further, with an investigation of the
spaces around urban waterways.
Shopping carts seemingly belong to no-one and
everyone. I have never seen a crime reported on
the stealing of shopping carts although some
countries have introduced locking systems. Does
this attribute a kind of agency to the shopping
trolley?
The fact that a cart needs to be locked up does
acknowledge that, like an animal, if you set it free it might
not come back. One could call that a kind of agency, but
a peculiar one. Part of what interests me about stray
shopping carts is that they each have a “life” story of
their own that we can rarely ever know.
As far as stealing carts goes, there are many
different ways these “crimes” of appropriation take place.
I have observed that there can sometimes be a symbiotic
relationship between a store and the customers who
take the carts. In neighborhoods where most people
don’t own cars, the inhabitants will push their groceries
home in a cart and then leave it outside their apartment
building. The store will send a worker to collect the carts
every couple of days. Both parties benefit: the customers
have a way to get their purchases home, and they are