The Gruen transfer was once a uniquely American phenomenon. Named for Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born architect who designed the first indoor climate-controlled shopping mall, the Gruen transfer occurs when people, entering a space designed to be visually disorientating, are confused into a state of unplanned consumption. Their desire to purchase one thing, say, a birthday card, has been transferred, against their will, and in a deliberate, even predictable way onto a slew of entirely different items. An iced caramel mochaccino. A pair of trainers. A rubber Totoro smartphone cover. While shopping malls aren鈥檛 necessarily thriving now in the US, the mall concept has spread around the world, and the Gruen transfer with it. It鈥檚 not stretching the definition too far to see it at work on the landing pages of shopping websites like Amazon.
It鈥檚 as a direct response to the malling of the Arab Gulf states that the Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria has created her video installation Black Friday (pictured above), on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Al-Maria filmed Black Friday in the as-yet unopened . This massive structure (patterned after the , a sumptuous 19th-century proto-mall in Milan) is presented in soaring, swooping shots, empty of kiosks, stores or branding. There are, however, mannequins, often bathed in dayglow, observing Al-Maria鈥檚 characters as they traverse its corridors, wait passively on its escalators, or lie prone under its dome. Sweeping, aerial sections shot from drones achieve a disturbing sort of weightlessness: the vulnerable smallness of her figures, splayed on gilt floors or huddled on luxurious stairs, is painfully apparent. The drones鈥� inhuman camera movements are more than disorientating: they鈥檙e surreal. In one shot, the camera trails a father-son couple as if nipping at their ankles, then jerks upward at an awkward, neck-breaking angle.
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Watching Black Friday is like playing a video game in Explore mode. The sense of one鈥檚 own impotence develops slowly but relentlessly. Al-Maria鈥檚 subjects are so passive they might be extras in some other film; the only way they could be active is if stores were open. As such, Black Friday presents a perversion of the Gruen transfer, a confusion which cannot lead to purchase. As the authoritative voiceover (by the actor Sam Neill) informs us, 鈥淗ere, there is nothing to ingest, but to be ingested by.鈥� The cumulative effect 鈥� accentuated by the SF doom music blaring so loud that the bass shakes the screen 鈥� is apocalyptic.
鈥淚nner space is no longer a neat literary metaphor for alienation. Thanks to mobile technology, it has become virtual real estate鈥�
Gruen鈥檚 trailblazing mall opened in 1956 in Minnesota 鈥� known for its frigid winters, partially to address the locals鈥� desire for 鈥渋deal shopping weather鈥�. As temperatures rise the world over, it makes sense that we retreat further and further into the self-contained world of malls.
Step outdoors in the Gulf in summer, and you will quickly understand why air-conditioned malls have been a presence here at least since the 1990s. In her 2012 memoir , Al-Maria remembers their centrality to courtship: 鈥淭here was an intense energy of longing and desire that hung over the long strips of mall corridors, and it had nothing to do with what was displayed in the windows of the shops.鈥� If this sentence has a J. G. Ballard ring about it, well, the resemblance is deliberate. Exploring a region 鈥渋nformed in equal parts by Islam and postmodernity鈥�, Al-Maria unabashedly reaches for the tools of science fiction. In her essay she writes about the 鈥渋nner space鈥� first colonised by Ballard and Philip K. Dick: that charged, mythic territory we project on to an outwardly anonymous urban landscape. Inner space is no longer a neat literary metaphor for alienation. Thanks to mobile technology, it has become virtual real estate. Al-Maria recounts the 鈥渇lourishing of private worlds鈥� enabled by 鈥渞igid public rules鈥�, and in particular the way mobile devices 鈥� jawal in the Gulf 鈥� 鈥渕ake clandestine communication possible鈥�. Arranged in front of Black Friday is Litany, a collection of scattered jawal flickering on a mound of sand. Their screens, often shattered, give off a faint, disquieting buzz or screech meaningless background noise as they loop snippets of commercials or junk entertainment (pictured below).
Al-Maria writes in her memoir that her first visual memories of her father are of a video cassette he sent from Qatar, which opens with 鈥渁 speeding shot from a car in the desert鈥�. This video was 鈥渁 portal into another dimension 鈥� one I felt immediate ownership over鈥� seeing the video permanently cracked the world into two halves for me.鈥� These two halves, so apparently dissimilar, are united by the technologies of mall and jawal. Al-Maria has offered us an invitation to step into another dimension: one which none of us has any ownership over.
[exhibition_info title=鈥滲lack Friday鈥� title_link=鈥漢ttp://whitney.org/Exhibitions/SophiaAlMaria鈥� gallery=鈥漌hitney Museum of American Art鈥� location=鈥漀ew York City鈥� fromdate=鈥漬ow鈥� todate=鈥�31 October 2016鈥砞
