Galleries: Exhibition on changing face of shopping

Never mind if those same centres are run by global corporations who hold the city hostage over civic planning issues, and sell their tin-plated behemoths as “destinations” more important than the city itself, say.

The demise of the high street is a long-running thing, for there is shopping and shopping, and for all those who enjoy the glitz and convenience of big shopping centres, there are those – and sometimes the same people – who love the independent bookshops and useful old ironmongers, or the local shop where the owner knows your kids and asks them what they’re cooking when you send them round for emergency mango chutney or a half dozen eggs.

It is the individual that has often been lost over the last few decades, with large chain retailers repeating down the high streets of the UK, so that you would never know, at street level, if you were in Bath or Barry, Derry or, well, let’s say, for the purposes of this article, Dundee.

And so we come, via the iniquities of global capitalism and a chutney short of a curry, to the McManus’ new exhibition, which provides a glimpse in to the not so distant past, and the things which have been lost and gained in the city’s high street evolution.

“The Street” is an immersive, in-gallery recreation of an old shopping street in Dundee on a set designed and built by Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre, with whom the curatorial staff at the McManus have worked closely,

and filled with shop frontages and bar interiors saved from the modernising drive of the 1960s

that have long been in storage.

There is always this sort of treasure in local museums and galleries, tasked as they are with recording and valuing the heritage of their widely divergent demesne.

The Shop and Bar were once much-loved installations in the McManus, seen in the 1980 show Ale and ‘a Thing, and now recreated. Some may remember these days, others may wonder if there is anything we can learn from them to make our own shopping experiences more sustainable.

Here are shops, whose exhibits span the gamut of 150 years, with very little plastic, where goods are lined up on the shelves in cardboard boxes, where nothing used to arrive shrink-wrapped on a trolley, where deposit bottles were brought back to be recycled, where you had to ask the shopkeeper for everything you wanted, rather than just helping yourself – ideal in a time of Covid, you might say.

The Grocer’s Shop – which is itself a construction based on a traditional grocers shop, the like of which some will still remember – has its shelves stacked high with past products. Other shops along the street, from the toy shop to the pawn shop, the shoe shop to the furniture shop, are all filled with new acquisitions made in the past 40 years that chart the diverse course of Scottish, and wider, design history.

The good and the bad of high street history is here, as perhaps evidenced by the handsome bar, an amalgam of furniture from two Dundonian establishments taken down in the 1960s and ‘70s – John O’ Groats (from the Cowgate) and The Old Toll Bar (corner of Gray’s Lane and Lochee High Street) – whose dark Victorian wood is so hugely atmospheric and yet which housed a place where women (let alone children) were largely unwelcome or barred entry.

And then the pawn shop, with its odd assortment of objects, as is the nature of the place. You can imagine it, here, things pawned and never picked up again as the economic fortunes of Dundee, given its charter in 1191, partly to encourage trade, rose and fell, along with its inhabitants.

There are names on this faux-cobbled high street that will be known from old Dundee, just as there are names on our modern-day high streets that we knew only a year ago, now gone.

Here then, an enjoyable stroll through the history of Dundee’s high streets, the competing pressures, and by extension, a thought for the perilous situation in which our high streets now find themselves in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic that is still very much with us. Where we spend our money counts.

The Street, The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum, Albert Square, Meadowside, Dundee, 01382 307200 www.mcmanus.co.uk Until 23 Oct 2022, Mon to Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 12.30-4.40pm

Critic's Choice

Last chance this weekend to catch the Glasgow leg of Wunderkammer, an international curatorial peer-led project featuring the work of former students who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. Running simultaneously in London, the project will see exhibitions in Thailand and South Korea, before returning to Glasgow in January 2022.

The project is the brainchild of Aeji Seo, one such 2020 graduate, who developed this international programme from her bedroom in Korea in order to bring a sense of togetherness to her similarly dispersed peers, all of whom were unable to go through the process of a “normal” graduation due to Covid measures.

“Open Cut” is the Glasgow show, featuring 14 graduates, co-curated by Transmission Gallery's Robert McCormack, a gallery which was the first to sign up to the project and offer space to exhibit.

The Glasgow exhibition is centred around the idea of the body “as a site of cultural, aesthetic and ethical significance.” The gallery itself becomes the “body”, as it were, hosting the different approaches of each artist to the theme, suggesting the “painful threshold” between the internal and external body. Artists involved are Chao-Ying Rao (Betty), Sean Robertson, Antonina Kulmasova, Gaia Tretmanis, Ash MacDonal, Emma Clark, Greta Martyniuk, Hannah Kate Absalom, Isla West, Louise Reynolds, Ramona Lindsay, Rowan Ormiston, Sophie Booth and Tabitha Hall. All must relish this chance to exhibit their work in the “real world” after the trials of the last year of their degrees, so brutally interrupted by the pandemic.

Open Cut, Transmission Gallery, 28, King Street, Glasgow, 0141 552 4813 www.transmissiongallery.org Until 28 Nov, Daily 10am - 5pm

Don't Miss

Howardena Pindell is a hugely influential figure in American art whose six decade-long artistic career and activism has helped enable a subsequent generation of African American women – and indeed African Americans and women full stop - to make their mark in the art world. Pindell found her early artistic drive in the process which she painstakingly developed in the 1970s, an abstraction of dots and grids, before moving on to make ever more political work. This is the first solo exhibition of Pindell's art in a UK institution.

Howardena Pindell: A New Language, Fruimarket Gallery, Market Street, Edinburgh, 0131 225 2383,www.fruitmarket.co.uk Until 2 May 2022, Daily 11am - 6pm

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