The Steal (11 page)

One of the shoplifters in Trimarco’s article was an activist trying to support his family. Another was a self-described kleptomaniac-anarchist who had shoplifted $10,000 worth of food from Key Foods over the years. A third amped up his shoplifting during the Republican National Convention in New York as if to achieve through stealing what he could not through voting. But however devoted they were to their crime, these shoplifters were too ashamed to use their real names. Trimarco concluded that shoplifting arises from “a missing place in the battery of activism. There’s a lust for direct action and even though this is futile, people do it.”

David Graeber, an American cultural anthropologist who has taught at the University of London since 2007, defended shoplifting in even stronger terms.

Although some ethical shoplifters use Abbie Hoffman’s word “liberating,” their fascination with the crime springs from seismic shifts in technology and culture in the last two decades. The phrase “ethical shoplifting” itself indicates an ironic stance toward an act that is descended from Hoffman’s idea of stealing to beat the Man, yet is also quite different. Ethical shoplifting is a practical joke—a postmodern, plugged-in, hipster crime. It is a powerful moral glue holding together groups of radicals who don’t believe in anything in a post-Internet age.

At the Point of Purchase exhibit at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn in 2006, organized by Gretchen Wagner, then a curatorial assistant in the prints department at the Museum of Modern Art, few artists were older than thirty, and like Adam Weissman, many of them regarded shoplifting as a necessary populist, intellectual, and creative protest against consumer culture.

Standing in the crowded gallery, I wondered if this was the first time in history artists had committed “fake” shoplifting. Some of the artists exhibiting here called themselves “shop-droppers”—or “reverse shoplifters.” They buy an item, alter it, and return it to the store to send up consumerism or lament the absence of individuality in mass culture. Ryan Watkins-Hughes did photo collages of abandoned buildings, which he then glued onto cans of peas. The idea, he said, was to assert “the individual’s rights over those of mass culture by making the peas unbuyable.” Zoë Sheehan Saldaña shoplifted some candy once, but as an artist, she, like Watkins-Hughes, was into shop-dropping. For her this meant buying an article of clothing at Walmart, remaking it by hand, and sneaking the one-of-a-kind garment, complete with tags, back onto the rack. “Gen Y all watched Winona Ryder movies and they’re all interested in shopping. . . . The store is my gallery,” she told me.

The shop-droppers reminded me of a Dada prank. As did urban sprinting, kids miming shoplifting so that security guards would chase them for nothing. The fake thieves’ most ambitious stunts borrowed from the theater.

Andrew Lynn is a slight man with an MFA in integrated electronic art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. At age twenty-four, he invented Whirl-Mart, a ritual in which “shoppers”—wearing shirts emblazoned with the words “Whirl-Mart” or aprons designed to resemble salespeople’s smocks—push empty shopping carts through a Walmart store in what Lynn calls “a silent protest of commercialism.”

At the Point of Purchase exhibit, Lynn was embarrassed to find his Whirl-Mart photos hanging in a traditional gallery. Still photos, he said, failed to capture Whirl-Mart’s dynamic radicalism, which came to life when in 2001, still a graduate student, he answered a call from
Adbusters
, asking him to create a “participatory and anticonsumerist happening” for April Fools’ Day. “In Troy, there were about three Walmarts in a radius of seven to ten miles, and they put a lot of small stores out of business,” Lynn said.

The first Whirl-Mart, on April Fools’ Day 2001, happened during daylight saving time. Lynn forgot to set his clock. When he arrived at the Walmart, almost in tears at the thought of having missed the event that he had worked so hard to set up, a line of fifteen people snaked into the parking lot outside. They whirled “of their own accord” for two hours.

For a few years, Whirl-Marts sprang up all over the world: in Stockholm, Sweden; Finland; England; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Germany; and Austin, Texas. According to an Internet rumor, a Whirl-Mart took place at the foot of the Mayan pyramids, where Walmart was improbably planning to build a store. Asked how shoplifting was connected with Whirl-Mart, Lynn said they were both on a continuum of “risky anticonsumer rituals,” repeating the point of view, common in his circle, that shoplifting doesn’t hurt stores financially since they are insured for less.

Store personnel missed the postmodern inflection. In 2001, Kmart chased some “Whirl-Marters” out of the Astor Place store, as did a Walmart in Latham, New York, the following year. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña approached Sam Walton’s daughter to see if she was willing to buy some of the shirts to exhibit in Crystal Fields, the company art gallery at store headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. She never heard back. “It’s not worth anything to them to touch it,” she said, explaining that her shoplifting artwork was too radical for a Walmart gallery in a Southern town.

If part of ethical shoplifting comes from Abbie Hoffman, part is imported. In 2004, a group of Barcelonese artists interested in social justice introduced Americans to their version of the crime: Shoplifting in Barcelona is a belated response to Franco’s regime, as well as a reflection of the city’s history of anarchism, an unemployment rate of 18 percent, the lack of a solid middle class, and Spain’s lack of interest in what the law considers in most cases an irrelevant crime. In Spain, if you shoplift an item worth less than 400 euros ($600), you are unlikely to go to jail.

Though not exactly the mecca of anarchism, Barcelona “is not far off,” explained a British expatriate and self-admitted “technical anarchist” I met while visiting the city in 2009. “During the Spanish civil war,” he said, launching into a history of the movement justifying shoplifting,

I visited Barcelona to interview members of the anarchist artist collective Yomango in person. Now I was standing at 15–17 Portal d’Angel Avenue, in front of Bershka, a popular clothing company with a branch near the Plaza de Cataluña, one of the most touristy spots in the world. Seven years earlier, Yomango staged its first shoplifting “action” at this “mall,” which looks like malls everywhere.

On June 5, 2002, at five-thirty in the afternoon, Yomango, whose name is slang for “I steal” and a pun on the Spanish ready-to-wear clothing line Mango, attracted a crowd. They cordoned off a runway with tape on which they had written
“gratis/dinero”
(free/money) and which stretched from the store entrance into the street.

As a uniformed security guard watched, Yomangoites clad in revolutionary rags set up an impromptu catwalk and began to vogue. An emcee in a blue jacket with a bullhorn announced the Yomango brand and its models. A fashionista in a ratty beard wore a glitter heart on his cheek. Several men in pink minidresses and belly shirts waved blue pompoms. A man in a Rasta cap stripped to blue-and-white-striped boxers and shimmied across the cobblestones. Some “models” wore red smocks with multicolored nylon tights and Uggs, others tulle skirts, leather miniskirts, or green polyester pants. One carried a Danish butter cookies tin as a purse; another grasped a person-size fork.

A crowd gathered. The Yomangoites raided Bershka, chatted with customers and guards, and handed out flyers. An extra phalanx of guards arrived. As if on cue, the model with the Danish butter cookies tin deposited a maxi sky-blue spandex dress worth 9.50 euros inside it and left the store. Outside, she popped the lid off the tin and twirled the dress around her head. Everyone cheered. The hairy guy in the blue striped shorts put on the dress.

A guard chased them, but according to one Yomangoite whom I’ll call “A,” “our security convinced their security to back down.” As A explained to me, “stores want to deal with this sort of business as discreetly as possible, as if resistance to shopping is something that does not exist.”

Yomango displayed the “liberated” dress and showed a video of their shoplifting at the Cultural Center of Barcelona, at INn Motion, an arts festival. The police denounced Yomango as crooks, but a columnist in
El País
applauded them, summarizing the message they propagated. “Yomango accuses the market of appropriating ideas, ways of life, fashion (desired by ‘cool hunters’), sexuality, already invented by society, in order to resell them as new luxury products. It believes that stealing is nothing more than reclaiming what belongs to us.”

On July 8, some members of Yomango returned the shoplifted dress to the men’s department of Zara, another store on Portal d’Angel Avenue. They attached to it a note explaining the dress’s adventures, part of which read “The liberated dress took a walk through Barcelona and now it’s back. Because Yomango does not recognize borders or security alarms.”

Yomango intended the shoplifting to critique multinational companies’ failure to give consumers “real” choices. And many American media sources treated them as countercultural heroes.
Wired
magazine traced Yomango’s roots to Argentina, where protesters angered by the economy’s collapse in 2001 looted stores. Another news article linked them to 1990s Barcelonese performance artists famous for constructing a
prêt à révolter
clothing line with pockets sized to fit guns.

But according to “Leo de Cerca,” a pseudonym for one of the group’s founding members, Yomango’s birth occurred in 2001, after an antiglobalization demonstration against the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa. “We realized that we needed to build a protest not just for the summits but for our daily life, a political tool it [
sic
] can be useful every day,” he said. “We wanted to show the false alternative that capitalism offers us.” He wrote of “circulating goods,” of “a million shoplifters rising,” of Yomango as a meta-brand, as a synonym for ethical shoplifting and as either a noun or a verb.

In response, I fired off a simple e-mail, “Who are you?”

De Cerca replied, “We are an international network, we are a transnational brand name, as all the brand names of today we don’t sell anything, we just offer a lifestile [
sic
].”

I e-mailed back: “I meant literally ‘Who are you?’ ”

De Cerca scolded, “I told you, Yomango is an open process, no authors, no stars, no personal names, Yomango is you!”

The Yomangoite A, a fashion designer who described himself as Israeli, Barcelonese, and American, was among those leading “magic bag” workshops—magic bags are Yomango’s version of booster bags—all over the world. Asked how many workshops took place, A said between dozens and hundreds of people had studied with him. A’s inspiration for the bags came from magic. He had learned from magicians’ card tricks and sleight of hand. “The gesture [to shoplift] has to be quick. It’s an ergonomic study,” he said.

To make their political points, Yomango stole not just from magic but from bourgeois rituals: The 2003 “Yomango Tango” began as Yomangoites, wearing berets and holding accordions made of tinfoil, crashed a supermarket on Las Ramblas. Seven couples in costumes tangoed through the aisles. A woman in a red dress slid a bottle of champagne into her boyfriend’s knapsack. One salesclerk shouted to another that the tangoers were shoplifting champagne, but a security guard just crossed his arms over his chest.

Through a bullhorn, the leader of the tangoers proclaimed Yomango’s support of “the populist rebellion” in Argentina a year earlier as the dancers, champagned-up, waltzed past the cashiers onto the street. They bowed to the onlookers. They uncorked more champagne the next day in the lobby of a bank that supposedly supported the crackdown on the “populist rebellion.”

Even more popular were dinner parties serving shoplifted gourmet food. One took place in Geneva during the World Summit on the Information Society conference, where, in Yomango’s view, communications companies met to carve up the Internet. The grainy YouTube footage of the Geneva dinner began as about two hundred guests ate, drank, danced, hugged, and laughed. A girl in a ponytail and a fisherman’s cap asked the camera in a German accent, “You want some free food?” And then she answered the interviewer’s question: “If you want happiness, steal it” before a lecture on capitalism and how Yomango had transformed the shoplifted food into a “gastro riot” was delivered in Spanish, with subtitles.

“This is the first time I’ve done it in an organized fashion with a big group of people,” declared a young American in an Andean cap over house music as the camera panned through the aisles of a supermarket where, in predinner madness, Yomangoites had stuck steak, wine, bottles of Moët, and Lindt chocolate bars in their socks, shoes, pants, and in shopping carts. One shopping cart after another was filled up with “liberated” products, which were then slapped with Yomango stickers. “I take the best wine, of course,” the American said as he unpacked one cart.