Stray Shopping Carts
An Interview with Julian Montague
You probably see stray shopping carts everywhere. The backs of parking lots, bus stops, even the occasional one on the side of the road. But, have you ever been curious as to how the carts got from their original place of occupation to their new home? How does a shopping cart make it from Target to the intersection of James St. and Fort Ave. all the way on the other side of town?
Artist Julian Montague began noticing shopping carts all around and devised a clever way by which to categorize them. He created a field guide (very much like the ones used for birds or other wildlife) and started to group similar carts based on how they were found. His classifications have appeared in art exhibits and in his 2006 book The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.
TDS: Tell us a little bit about the Stray Shopping Cart Project and how it got started.
MONTAGUE: The project basically started sometime in 1999 when I was driving through an intersection in Buffalo (where I live). For some reason I noticed that there were shopping carts everywhere; crowded at bus stops, turned on their sides in front yards, etc. I thought there was something interesting to be done about this phenomenon. But I knew that if I simply took photographs of stray shopping carts, the images would only read as a sort of sad urban commentary that wouldn’t be much different than your average college kid’s social documentary photo project.
So, I decided that it would be more interesting to try and figure out how shopping carts moved by observing them in the way a naturalist might observe a wild animal. This approach led me to construct a taxonomy that could define the different situations in which a stray cart could be found. It started small (10 or so different categories), but as I went on and discovered more about stray carts, the “System of Identification” grew to include two classes and 33 sub-types with names like A/2 Plaza Drift, B/12 Simple Vandalism, B/13 Complex Vandalism, and B/19 In/As Refuse.
Early on in the project it became clear that what was interesting about it was the way that I could sensitize my viewers to the presence of stray carts. People would often tell me that after seeing my exhibits they started seeing shopping carts everywhere. By using an absurdly detailed vocabulary to describe a mundane phenomenon, I could, (on some level), make viewers see a part of the urban landscape that had previously been invisible to them. The project became less about shopping carts and more about the way in which scientific classification constructs meaning and imposes order through language.
At this point the project has been presented in a number of different ways including, numerous gallery shows, a web site, a book, and a set of outdoor sculptures.
TDS: Does the classification system actually work?
MONTAGUE: Yes, the “System” of stray shopping cart identification actually works. I conduct the “field work” in a very honest way. I never pose carts or set up situations, all of my photographs depict the scene as I found it. I write the text in the character of someone who takes this investigation very seriously. The project winds up being funny because of the humorless tone of the writing.
TDS: Have you noticed a relation to the economic standing of an area and the amount of stray carts?
MONTAGUE: Yes, but I should start by saying that stray cart activity happens everywhere, from very wealthy neighborhoods to very poor ones. I once found a cart in a canal, right next to the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The vandalism aspect of stray cart activity seems to be the same across the socio-economic spectrum. The impulse to throw a shopping cart into a body of water appears to be universal! But generally there is less cart activity in very well off neighborhoods because there is less of a need to use a cart to get your groceries home.
In the poorest neighborhoods you often have a situation where you are not allowed to leave the building with a cart, you can’t even take it into the parking lot. This, of course, lowers the number of stray carts in the area. The most activity occurs in the neighborhoods that are somewhere in between the two extremes. First ring suburbs have a tremendous amount of activity because they were built for car life, and now they have a growing population of lower income people who don’t have cars.
A lot of people associate shopping carts with the homeless, but I have found that the homeless only represent a tiny fraction of stray cart activity. Shopping carts are so useful for so many different things that they are constantly being appropriated and used by people from all levels of society.
TDS: What urban symbol is the antithesis to the stray cart?
MONTAGUE: I don’t know, part of the idea of this project is to take something that people use as a symbol of the perils of consumerism, urban decay, etc. and show them that it is far more complicated than they think. So on those grounds I have a hard time coming up with an opposing symbol.
TDS: Is there a shopping cart species you know exists but have not found? (Why or why not?)
MONTAGUE: At the moment I think the Stray Shopping Cart Identification System can basically account for most stray shopping cart situations, even ones I have not personally witnessed. The question is one of refinement, in the System there is Type B/2 Damaged which is fairly broad, but there are also B/10 Plow Crush, B/11 Train Damaged and B/20 Bulldozed, which are really just more specific categories of Damaged. It is entirely possible that I could find some new situation that deserves its own Type designation.
Right now if I found a cart in a tree and it got there because of a tornado, it would be classified under B/21 Naturalization (re-situated by natural forces). If, however, I found multiple examples, I might consider breaking that situation out into its own category.
TDS: If you had to "categorize" the project would it be art, satire, or statement? Or, a mix? (explain)
MONTAGUE: It is definitely an art project, but there is a bit of satire in it as well. I don’t think it is a statement, although I have no doubt that a lot of people like the project because they see it as speaking to a number of different social concerns. In my mind it’s an open ended exploration of peripheral urban space and an experiment in language, classification and perception. And it’s funny too.
TDS: What other projects do you have in the works?
MONTAGUE: My latest project is called To Know the Spiders; I showed it at Black & White Gallery in New York last Spring. The project uses some of the methodologies of the Stray Cart Project but in very different ways. I spent a year collecting spiders from the inside and outside of buildings. After collection I would look at the spider through a microscope and make a drawing of its face, the drawing would then become a template for a fabric banner. I would return to the point of collection, hang the banner where I found the spider and then photograph the whole scene.
Hanging the portrait of the spider was a way to mark the presence of the tiny occupants that live in peripheral architectural spaces. The banner also served as a kind of ironic memorial to the spider that had to be killed in order for me to see it well enough to draw it.
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