Window Shopping ‒ Marge Monko
-Marge Monko
Window Shopping
“...how will the retail store look tomorrow? In what direction will its decoration and sales policy develop? What will be modern tomorrow? What can we rely on?” In 1930, the Austrian-American architect and sculptor Friedrich Kiesler opened his groundbreaking treatise on “The Ideology of the Show Window” with fundamental questions.
In her current series “Window Shopping”, the Estonian artist Marge Monko, born in 1976, proves that these questions are still valid today, transcending the mere culture of product presentation.
In her work, Marge Monko combines photography, video, sculpture, sound, found footage and installation to formulate social observations based on theories from psychoanalysis, feminism and visual culture. Recently she has been strongly concerned with the mechanisms of advertising and consumption. For „Window Shopping“ she transfers the perception and evaluation of an initial architectural situation oriented towards the seemingly mundane - as in this case the shop window - into conceptual sequences of images.
„Window Shopping“ borrows the title from the book of the same name by the American media theorist Anne Friedberg, who, in turning away from the dominance of a central, static, all-overview perspective postulated by Michel Foucault for the 19th century, adopts an understanding of a „mobilized, virtual gaze that is more appropriate to the postmodern constitution ‚ as the individual‘s way of relating to the world. Monko‘s photographs play through this constitution using the example of window shopping. To this end, she creates a consistently subjective cataloging of various conventions of window dressing in cities such as Antwerp, Tallinn and Manhattan in an apparently documentary manner.
In her approach, however, the artist not only refers to the photographic process, but predominantly seeks to trace and make aware of the path of perception characterized by Friedberg.
The sequentially arranged rows of images are interrupted and flanked by historical black-and-white photographs, such as a view of destroyed shop windows in Narva in 1919, during the Estonian War of Independence. Another of the historical photographic documents shows a young woman in Belgrade standing proudly in front of a facade with shop windows draped in white cloth.
In her work, Monko formulates less an analysis and criticism of the commodity fetish of western industrialized nations; rather, she shows shop windows mainly in their ambivalence: shop windows mark visible but inaccessible spaces; they are public but also private. They reveal as much as they hide.
The neoliberal promise that everyone can have and become what they desire - all of this is condensed in the staging of the shop windows: only a thin slice separates those who offer something from those who desire it. The shop window as a contemporary treasury and warning sign: it is hardly surprising that shop windows are always the first targets of attacks when there is political upheaval in a society.
Magdalena Kroner
Marge Monko lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She is professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts and head of the photography department.
Her work has been shown in the following solo exhibitions, among others: ‚Great Pretender‘, Kai Art Center, Tallinn, 2021, ‚Diamonds Against Stones‘, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2019, ‚Gevaert as Image‘, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, 2017, ‚How to Wear Red‘, mumok, Vienna, 2013.
Her work is represented in the following public collections:
Museum Folkwang, Essen
Estonian Art Museum
Tartu Art Museum, Estonia
FRAC Lorraine, France
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Kiasma, Finnish National Gallery
mumok, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria
Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Poland
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Marge Monko 'Window Shopping'
Installation view COSAR, Düsseldorf -
Marge Monko 'Window Shopping' (2014-2021)
Houston, Texas (September 12, 1961), Shoe shop (Ghent), Schütz (New York City),
Calvin Klein (New York City), Dolce & Gabbana (Vienna), Narva (February, 1919)
92 cm x 309 cm, framed
(4 pieces 60 cm x 60 cm, C-Print / 2 pieces 30 cm x 38 cm, Photolitho) -
Marge Monko 'Window Shopping' (2014-2021)
New York (August 10,1958), Cavalli (New York City)
101 cm x 61,5 cm, framed
(1 piece 60 cm x 60 cm, C-Print / 1 piece 30 cm x 38 cm, Photolitho) -
Marge Monko
Window Shopping (2014-2021)
London (March, 1912), Westmanni äri (Tallinn), Handschuh Christl (Vienna)
Ruys (Antwerp), Boon (Antwerp), Berlin (April 7, 1965)
92 cm x 309 cm, framed -
Marge Monko
Window Shopping (2014-2021)
Paris (year unknown), Mauerer (Vienna), Gelaude (Ghent)
Juuksur (Tallinn), Belgrade (year unknown)
61,5 cm x 247,5 cm, framed -
Marge Monko
Window Shopping (2014-2021)
Vienna (1938), Jungmann & Neffe (Vienna), Ricci (Vienna), Knize (Vienna)
61,5 cm x 263,5 cm, framed