obsessive consumption

specialization and labeling in order to narrow choices.

Obsessive Consumption

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.”

Since then the project — or brand — has taken two forms. She exhibits her work in shows with titles like “Love Your Money” and “Available Credit,” and she also sells things in an online shop: drawings; stuffed dollar signs sewn from “vintage and recycled materials”; and pillows with sewn-on designs inspired by credit-card logos. For $4, you can buy a zine of her pen-and-ink-drawings of purchases she made in May 2006: “Exciting stuff here kids. . . . Kate buys a lime on May 5, her second pair of sunglasses for the summer on May 1 and falls victim to purchasing trendy skinny jeans that do nothing for her figure on May 20.”

Although she no longer documents every product she buys, her own purchase patterns still occupy a prominent place in her work, through (for instance) an ongoing series of hand-drawn recreations of her credit-card bills — which are for sale through her Web site. Her first credit-card-statement drawing, as she recalls, was purchased by Jim Coudal, the founder of Coudal Partners, a design and advertising agency in Chicago. Coudal remembers seeing the drawings online and contacting Bingaman-Burt about acquiring the portrait (as it were) of her October 2004 Chase statement. At the time, she hadn’t figured out how to price them, and ended up charging him the minimum balance due, which happened to be $140.

“The credit-card statement is this thing that everyone in America understands, and it’s completely produced by machine,” Coudal observes. “No human touches it, except for the human at the other end, who has the card — and who affects the content of that statement by the purchases they make.” Coudal appreciated the idea of animating this soulless document through hand drawing (the Chase logo suddenly looked so attractive), but what he really liked was that it connected with the artist’s actual purchases. “It brought an anonymous part of everyone’s life and made you look at it in a completely different way,” he says.

Bingaman-Burt, who also teaches graphic design at Mississippi State University, does not see her work so much as a negative reaction to consumer culture as an attempt to cope with it on its own terms.

“Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture,” her site explains. “It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels an hour later. It doesn’t want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant.” Indeed, the June statements of her various cards showed a cumulative total balance of more than $23,000. She says that it has been reduced to something like $15,000, as she has recovered from grad-school-era debts — but she also acknowledges that there’s “a lot of guilt and emotion” involved in recreating evidence of money spent and interest racked up.

But of course that’s part of the point. And Bingaman-Burt knows perfectly well that nobody needs any of the Obsessive Consumption objects any more than the gifts and cards she designed and helped market in the early 2000s. Her hope, she says, is to engage an audience on a more conceptual level, inviting them to think about consumption and obsession and their after-effects (and to think of them more frequently than during the holiday retail frenzy that begins this coming “black Friday”). The objects she creates and sells are, in a way, simply “souvenirs” of that thought process. As a brand, Obsessive Consumption is about facing the stark realities of obsessive consumption. As Bingaman-Burt puts it: “The products are aware of their lack of necessity.”