I recently experienced Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Cart Project at a gallery in Chelsea (the name of said gallery escapes me). Montague’s project is both beautiful and hilarious. Montague has developed a sophisticated classification system for identifying shopping carts in the environments in which they are found. There are eleven types of Class A: False Strays, including the A/2 Plaza Drift and the A/3 Bus Stop Discard. There are twenty-two Class B: True Strays including the B/7 Transient Imposter, the B/21 Naturalization (a cart resituated by natural forces), and the B/10 Plow Crush.

My personal favorite is the B/13 Complex Vandalism, which can be differentiated from Simple Vandalism by the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart (in his example you can see a shopping cart inside an empty pool that is enclosed within a fence).

In addition to the entire classification system, Montague includes photographs of 160 specimens on the project website. Each is, of course, properly classified.

I am not sure which part of Montague’s project was more enjoyable - the informational graphics and photographs or the accompanying text. Something tells me it is the perfect balance of the two that made this work so memorable.

Update: Montague has a special Site Study: Cleveland and Environs Winter 2005 section. Yeah, I know. That is only of interest to me.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Art, Design, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.