Whoa, let’s have a conversation!

Okay. So to start with, I wanted to ask what was the impulse behind starting SupaStore?

Yes, the SupaStore. Well multiples had caught my attention, the 1990’s Buchholz + Schipper Multiples Shop in Cologne blew my mind! Iza Genzken Radios, Trockel Balaclavas! Repetition as a concept. I’d read that Susan Sontag only collected cultural artefacts that came in editions - books, CDs, prints and so on. SupaStore was a way of looking at doing things a bit differently, making accessibility and creating context for the small works, multiples and merch pieces that I and other artists were making then in 1993. SupaStore was created as a network before we were networked as a way to keep together when the centre was disappearing. SupaStore93, the first interaction was named in ironic/iconic reference to the late 80s mall culture that was changing patterns of retail and thereby distorting the social aspect of shopping.

In the UK?

Yes, mall culture crept into the UK from the late 80’s, Metrocentre, Gateshead I think is the first in the UK. SupaStore comes out of a job I had working as a sales rep for Faber & Faber, my territory was central London and the towns out to the South. 1993, I'd drive out to these towns where a repeat pattern of chain stores in small malls were creating super empty town centres, semi-abandoned with some charity shops, and struggling independent shops. And then all of the action was happening in the malls, in non-space spaces, designed to confuse you. I was working this job, but lots of the other YBA artists at that time appeared not to be working jobs, and were already selling work and sustaining themselves through art sales. There was lots of drinking in Soho, which I'd used to join in with a bit. I felt like I'd come back from these suburban situations to the kind of core of London Bohemia, I felt like the suburban work trips had shown me a bland future that was coming up the road and that consequently bohemia was under threat, I was worried that no one else was aware! In a way you can see that's really come true now - the access that Elizabeth Lines brings and the way turbo developers do whatever they want in central London. It's a bit like a revenge of the suburbs and kind of consuming up bohemian space. Like capitalism’s last revenge taking it over the centre and devouring it and owning it in a way that the poets and dreamers used to.

That's really funny.

All my anxieties at the beginning of the project arrived.

Has everything in the SupaStore always been for sale?

Most things have been for sale, yes. Occasionally I also borrow from collections in which case not for sale. In SupaStore boutique I had a Rosemarie Trockel balaclava, which I sold to an Australian museum.

Honestly, really you are a gallerist.

No! But selling is a buzz! The ‘not for sale’ work adds quality! One time I borrowed a Warhol from the Arts Council collection as he is all about the repeat. So, you know, at times I've managed to bring in pieces of work that I find very exciting or have a personal history with. Like the Trockel balaklava, for example.

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Yeah. Interesting, because SupaStore seems somewhere on the intersection of curatorial and performative, but also counts as research. It sits in between all of these different ideas so I was thinking how, as an artist, has that informed your practice or become part of your studio practice?

If I'm thinking about the work that was just shown at Galerina, the denim pieces, also from the 1990’s, then back then I didn't really understand how studio work and SupaStore sat together, but now it feels really quite clear. The denim work is also a way to process the ever present impactful American cultural hegemony that impacts us all, this is also at the heart of the SupaStore. The subject of the denims, loosely, is Americana, a big cultural influence in my childhood, an incredibly powerful cultural force. Looking at power and finding free space within its restraints is perhaps the desire, and so I find different ways to manifest my ideas around that.

Commerce is another continuous line throughout your work at different times, which is actually something me and Mischa were discussing. Where did your interest in commerce as such develop?

I don't really know how to answer that, for sure I am really interested in exchange systems, and also in how material conditions impact lives.

Yes, I feel that it's inherent to London and so informative of London, and actually, the resistance to it has built the most fun things which have happened and do happen here. That brings me back to the Soho conundrum. I am also thinking about the denim paintings and the show that we worked on. You were working on them whilst living in a squat in the 90s, using bleach and whatever was about. And when we discussed the work first, you said the denim factories you sourced the denim from have now closed and you can't even access cheap, local quality materials to start with. Thinking about London at that time and the difference to artistic practice and production, it could be quite interesting to talk a bit about how you developed the denim paintings.

I started them in the very early 90s. At Galerina we made ‘The Masses,’ for which you selected 3 denim Anti-Paintings, and two sculptures. These Anti-Paintings celebrate the ubiquity of denim which before ath-leisure was worn by almost everyone, denim was and still is a global culture. Within arts culture the work presents as a gesture from the early 1990’s against the domination of man painting - possibly a way to process the blatant sexism of the time. And then quite literally, colour is removed with bleach or the works are made with stitching - feminized labours of the 20th century. The Anti-Painting series has the title ‘How the West has Won and Lost’. Gertrude Stein called the 20th century the American century and clearly, through insanely aggressive business models, America is trying its best to be the 21st century too, but the Americana glamour and excitement that was projected world wide during the 1950’s and early 60’s has died and died and died again. Which brings me to the sculptures that you showed, and which take the form of enlarged representations of American fast food killer food - the hamburger, cast in bronze and then chromed, and a patinated bronze hamburger tower, where patties are interspersed with other fast foods, kebab and pizza and fried chicken and the whole is topped with what's left of the core of apple from the Garden of Eden! It’s been a pleasure to bring this work out of storage and share it with the Galerina audience. I enjoyed it so much when Galerina came to my studio and we unrolled the denims! Let me ask how you and Mischa came to select these works for the ones we looked at?

Well sometimes choosing just three is way more difficult than doing a show with ten or fifteen works. I think why we were drawn to these exact Denims was all our conversations around social development and 'The Masses,' which I guess both me and Mischa have a personal connection to coming from a Post-Soviet country. That also applies to denim and blue jeans - which basically dissolved the USSR. Were the denims the start of working with textile for you?

Actually not, one of my degree show pieces was a huge stitched sewing artifact. Art school had amazing dye vats in the theatre department so I could dye cloth to any color, it was so beautiful and exciting. I made a giant needle so I could sew this huge thing.

Do you still have the needle?

I do. CSM Central building had a really good industrial design workshop in the basement with metal lathes and nobody ever went in there. It was a sculptor's dream space!

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I also wanted to touch upon how you work across so many different mediums and often use repetitive motifs across different materials, whereas the material always stays conceptually informative. I really like the glass works you made, like the one that was in Serpentine. Could you tell me a bit more about those?

Oh, the floor based work. The first one of those was at Milch from around 1987, at this time we had the occupancy of two houses right behind where the Horse Hospital opened later. It was a very big building and we had two joined huge houses to play with to make these exhibitions. The only space that was never really activated was the back garden and there were two sections to the back garden. Then one day we made a hole through the wall so that we could go from space to space. Lauren, who I started the gallery with, was hyperactive and he whitewashed two Georgian houses in about a week on his own. And it was great, you know, the amount of energy that he had. This garden space was just a kind of dead zone, so I wanted to activate that. So I decided to make a kind of loose mosaic, using stone that I borrowed from a stone yard and I could return it afterwards. Stone and glass from the monumental mason’s yard, which was needed because in the end it was sadness, and dedicated to a friend of mine who took his own life shortly before the show had opened. I’d had quite long discussions with him about this exhibition and about everything to do with what was emerging, he was much more associated with the Goldsmiths scene and what was happening in terms of nascent careers. That garden work I dedicated to his memory. The following year I went on to make another piece that was similar on the lawn of the Serpentine, and that was using reclaimed glass from the bottle bank.

Yeah.

Yes, recycled glass from Kent. A lorry came piled with three skips of crushed glass, sorted by colour brown and green and white. I had imagined a flag that was somewhere, like, far away in what had previously been some corner of the British Empire that was no longer Britain and hadn't been Britain for decades, but was. Or even hundred years. And that was so faded that the color had gone from the Union Jack. So I made a Union Jack out of these sort of faded colors from the bottle bank. And so I like, you know, thinking about power and how Britain had so much power and then how there's so much nostalgia for that and how detrimental that is for contemporary Britain in some senses. So. And this was at the point where Cool Britannia was being really pushed and Tony Blair was, like, bringing this whole nationalism conversation back into play.

And then fast forward, we have Brexit.

Yeah. Then fast forward, we have Brexit. That's the trajectory of that line of thinking.

And how does the material conceptualise the figurative in the work or what's the relationship between the two?

That's an interesting question. Abstraction split from figuration as an innovation in early 20th Western Art history and this has kind of stuck as truth - you have to pick a side, however we are all reading abstraction and figuration all of the time so the reality is more complex. For me I am in a murky space where abstraction and figuration can coexist and I use material as a kind of communicative carrier. Material choices, the kind of tactile quality is a big thing for me and it's a lot about the relationship between seeing and feeling. So even when you don't touch textile or other different materials, you still have the bodily knowledge of what they feel like. It's a lot about touch, but through eyes.

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That makes sense, because even when you do paper based works, the paper is often quite textured or in the way the work is framed, you can see the physicality of the paper.

I think one of the reasons I like watercolour so much is because it works quite a lot like dye does in fabric.

Finally, I wanted to ask about Minerva.

My new friend.

Your new friend. How did she come about?

Well, she's become the adopted goddess at the SupaStore. And she's there because she is over 2000 years old and it's good to have older friends, I think. Her remit involves commerce and art. She’s busy, art and trade and wisdom and war and healing and knitting and poetry; a huge number of areas come under her remit, which I can relate to from my own experience of working through my life in lots of different roles. And then she's been really adopted heavily by Western capitalism. I've just written a short story about her and about how she really wants to get back to art, and she is angry that nobody asked her permission to be the figurehead or logo of So and So PLC Inc. etc. etc. There's many many businesses that she's associated with and she wants to be back with art. She also is observing the world over the 2000+  years of her lifetime, she sees what's going on and she's quite appalled with what's happened with, among other things, global inequity, with the way wealth has gone up the system through in the last 25 years, shop space moving online and so much attention grasped by the emergent edgelords who lack the wisdom to hold power for good. She’s got a lot of concerns.

The world is quite concerning.

Yes it is, I am sorry.

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Sarah Staton is a visual artist and currently Head of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. Over 3 decades, Sarah has devised ways to play with the social potentials of art, and she explores this interest through exhibitions and public commissions. She is represented in a number of collections including Arts Council UK, British Museum Prints and Drawings, Henry Moore Institute, South London Gallery and Tate as well as in private collections across the world.

Her durational shop-as-artwork SupaStore est 1993 curates contributions by other artists in pop-up displays at institutions worldwide. Most recently the SupaStore has popped up at A+A Gallery, Venice (2022); Cylinder Gallery, Seoul (2021); South London Gallery, (2021), Nida Art Colony, LT (2020).

Galerina is a non-commercial art gallery founded in 2022 by curators Mischa Lustin and Niina Ulfsak.

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