‘Supermarket’: making political artworks politically

Extrapolating from the interim findings of Fowler’s doctoral research, ‘Supermarket’ explores the interface between revolutionary socialist politics and artistic production. Applying Gramsci’s ‘inventory of traces’ and Brecht’s estrangement techniques as means to reject and reform the simplifications of liberal orthodoxy, ‘Supermarket’ seeks to shift the framework of discussion from merely formal analysis of artistic technique, to one which grounds cultural expressions in particular social formations. Animating the project is the question which Fowler poses and brings us significantly closer to answering: namely, what does it mean to develop a cultural analysis that goes beyond the conventional view of “things as they are" to discover “things as they really are” (Brecht)