Still life with eggplant.

Someone at the supermarket - whoever's in charge of visual merchandizing (or its grocery-store equivalent), I guess - has decided it would be a good idea to wedge a compartment full of individual containers of chocolate 'dipping sauce' between the strawberries and the pears. It took me a second to process this, as I'm used to a fairly immutable supermarket taxonomy. "That's not fruit!" I thought, before promptly realising that the idea was for the customer to suddenly realise that her delicious fresh produce would taste even more delicious if coated in sugar and fat.

I wrote this off as fairly standard marketing practice, but then I noticed that someone - presumably not the supermarket's middle management - had buried a couple of chocolate bars in with the loose potatoes. And I assumed that someone was taking the piss, and this filled me with glee. And then, as I was doing my single girl/sharehouse route of milk bread eggplant toiletpaper chocolate, I kept seeing Things That Didn't Belong. Some of them didn't belong in fairly subtle ways, such as those that questioned the supermarket's meaningless ghettoisation of vaguely ethnic food, like the Italian chocolates in a store display of Freddo Frogs. And some things didn't belong in strikingly explicit ways - magazines stashed in the bread aisle, toothbrushes next to the biscuits - and these things made note of the cognitive dissonance that arises from the deviation from what is ultimately an arbritrary and/or cynical product organisation system anyway.

And look, I do realise that people just pick things up, decide they don't want them, and stash them away randomly because they're too tired or lazy to go back and find where they belong. But I prefer to think that my local supermarket has been infiltrated by a performance artist whose pointed rearrangement of consumer goods illustrates the inherent futility of a search for meaning in a codified site driven both by capitalist imperatives and the arbitrariness of a single prioritised taxonomical logic. By showing us these things of our supermarkets, they are showing us these things of ourselves. Or something. Who knows? This is Brunswick. Fucker probably even has a grant.