Box Vox

packaging as content

October 15, 2009

Soup Can Columns

WarholPillarsSoup can columns on the exterior of the Warhol Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy marking the 20th anniversary of Warhol's death (Photo by Tom Rolfe, 2007, Edinburgh, Scotland).

Credited with the idea of converting their columns into stacks of giant Campbell’s Soup cans, the National Gallery of Scotland’s “in-house marketing team” was awarded a Media Guardian Innovation Award last April.

(Another package related Warhol photo by Rolfe, after the fold…)

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October 14, 2009

Corn Baskets

ClaraKeezer-corn2
CornBasketSecord
EbayCorn
Top photo: Clara Keezer’s Corn Basket from The Abbe Museum; middle photo from the National Museum of the American Indian: Theresa Secord (Penobscot, b. 1958), Ear of corn basket, 2003. Natural and dyed wicker-plaited black ash splints with wart-weave overlay, diameter 10 cm., length 42 cm. (Photo by Ernest Amoroso); bottom photo: a corn basket for sale on eBay

As with the acorn baskets, these “corn basket” are of the woven, corn-shaped type. (But there are also baskets that are called “corn baskets” because they’re used to hold corn.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 13, 2009

Acorn Baskets

AcornBaskets
Top left: from The Abbe Museum, Gal Frey’s 4″ Acorn with cedar bark stem; top right: miniature acorn basket by Jeremy Frey from eBay; middle row left: splint acorn basket from Live Auctioneers; middle row right: from The Abbe Museum Eric “Otter” Bacon’s Acorn Basket with Moose Antler; bottom row: another miniature acorn basket from eBay

Going off on a tangent from the previous post: acorn baskets. These are all acorn shaped baskets, but there are also baskets that are called “acorn baskets” because they are used in the harvesting and preparation of acorns for human consumption. (More about that, after the fold…)

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October 11, 2009

Tempest in an Acorn-Shaped Teapot

AcornVending
Acorn brand vending machine photo and ascending price decals from Crow River Trading

Check out this oblique segue: In our previous post we discovered Cynthia Von Buhler’s reliquary prize capsules & vending machine. Her capsules were of the round type but there are also acorn-shaped capsules, as well as a brand of vending machine called “Acorn” made by Oak Manufacturing.

…and speaking of things, acorn: how about all that self-righteous, Republican indignation about that other, more newsworthy Acorn?

The recent Borat-style ‘sting’ by James O’Keefe has put Acorn —(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)— on the defensive in the media, but unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, who, as Borat or as Brüno, sought to expose the prejudices of individuals, O’Keefe and his backers have something more grandiose in mind. His YouTube prank videos of a few guileless Acorn workers, have been packaged presented as if they were an indictment of the entire organization as a whole. O’keefe has created a sufficiently prurient sound bite to scare off Acorn’s funding & support and putting its CEO and Chief Organizer, Bertha Lewis onto a mainstream media hot seat.

BerthaHeadShot I met Bertha Lewis when she was a fellow homesteader in the same building in the South Bronx. Living there (and then fighting to remain there) was, for me, just an instinctive response to the 1980s escalation of rents in Manhattan. For Bertha, however, it became more than that. Yes, she too needed an affordable place to live, but it was through her dedication to the various shared struggles of tenants in that building—(rebuilding a collapsed courtyard, unclogging the building’s sewer, securing legal representation in housing court, etc.)— that, I believe, she came to really embrace “housing rights” as a core principle.

Ms. Lewis and her friends moved into the building in 1983 and fixed it up, paying rent to a man who claimed to be the landlord. After two years, they found out they had “been snookered,” Ms. Lewis said. The city tried to oust the occupants as squatters but they resisted, forming a tenants’ association and winning in court. Ms. Lewis became their spokeswoman, reaching out to reporters and persuading William M. Kunstler to take on the case. “I was just trying to save my home,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about organizing. You just learn this stuff, and I learned the hard way.”

New York Times, March 14, 2001

Building Eventually my wife and I gave up and we left the space that we had worked so hard to fix up, while Bertha and others stayed on to fight the good fight. We were delighted when we learned that she had become head of Acorn and I remember hearing her on NPR warning about predatory lending practices years before all those sub-prime mortgages, bundled into “toxic assets” brought down the entire world’s financial system.

I cringed in 1989 when President Bush (senior) invoked his “thousand points of light” rhetoric, citing volunteerism as a better alternative to any humane or humanitarian government-run assistance. Knowing myself well enough to know that I am not and never have been a “point of light,” it strikes me as horribly ironic, that Bertha Lewis should be now scapegoated by the right wing. Here is the one person I know who actually does exhibit the “volunteer spirit” that the metaphor was supposedly meant to inspire. What if they were to succeed in crushing Acorn? Who would they like to have step up and help poor people? Big government?

See what Rachel Maddow has to say about the Acorn controversy:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(See Bertha Lewis on The Colbert Report and some acorn-related packaging, after the fold…)

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October 9, 2009

Von Buhler’s Prize Capsules

Capsules

Another packaging-related artwork from last weekend’s “Mapping Staten Island” show: Cynthia Von Buhler’s Cynth-O-Matic vending machine. This interactive sculpture caught me off guard and I was putting quarters into it before I had really sorted out my (art-consumer) choices carefully.

“This one has some color,” I thought to myself, “I’ll have one of those…” [turned the handle—made my first purchase] “Oh, it’s menstrual blood… hmmm, what were my other choices? Eyelashes, fingernail clippings, hair, pubic hair… OK, I’ll buy one more capsule, but I cannot be the guy who comes in here and buys only menstrual blood & pubic hair, so I guess I’ll have to go with the fingernails…”

Cynthomatic
The Cynth-O-Matic machine soon separated this doddering old fool and his money (Photos above by Debby Davis)

Although the capsules’ labels claim that their contents are “100% Genuine” I do have some doubts about their authenticity. As a collector, I don’t want to open these capsules (thereby diminishing their resale value) but, to my eyes, the fingernails look a little plastic and the red seems too bright. (Doesn’t blood dry out and turn brown?) Plus, hair and fingernails take a while to grow. We covered another reliquary type fingernail artwork (here) and, in that case, it took the artist a long time to accumulate a quantity of fingernail clippings. Of course if the contents of Von Behler’s capsules turn out not to be genuine then what I lose as fetish object, I gain in commentary on truth-in-advertising. Her website has this to say about the project:

Have you ever noticed that when you go to an art opening, many people are more focused on the artist than the artwork? Frequently, art viewers do not seriously look at the art. Usually they drink the wine, eat the cheese, and show more interest in the artist than in their art. The Cynth-O-Matic is the answer to this troubling problem. For 25 cents, you can actually have a piece of the artist.

(More photos and another of Von Behler’s package-related vending machines, after the fold…)

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October 8, 2009

Nicholas Fevelo’s Water Museum

Fevelo “Staten Island Water Museum” by Nicholas Fevelo: on left samples of water from various bodies of water on Staten Island (including at least one bottle of someone’s used bath water); on right: “found” bottles of urine (Photos by Debby Davis)

Around 1986, at the height of the 1980s real estate boom, my pregnant wife and I joined a group homesteading an abandoned building in the South Bronx. Plumbing was on a DIY basis and, in one of the bedroom closets of our newly assumed home, we found stacks and stacks of Ballantine Ale bottles, each filled with urine.

Nicholas Fevelo’s “Staten Island Water Museum” reminded me of that. Found objects have had a long cultural history in contemporary art—(Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal comes to mind)—but for someones private collection of urine-filled bottles to be found by someone else and then put on public display raises interesting questions. Whose urine is this? Is this the evidence of a homeless, plumbingless life? Or just the foul aftermath of someones illicit drinking party with no convenient bathroom?

Favelo was one of the ten artists participating in the aforementioned “Mapping Staten Island Show” where stacks of shipping pallets served as the gallery walls and pedestals.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 7, 2009

Shipping Pallet Exhibition Space

ContainerGala

Top photo by Mike Shane; second row: drawings by Archicorp; third row: photo by Debby Davis; bottom: photo of The Great Unwashed performing among the pallets by Mike Shane

Shipping pallets, formerly a
behind-the-scenes, invisible part of packaging are now enjoying a new
limelight. (Perhaps because of their current prominence in warehouse stores? Or a general ecological desire to recycle used lumber?)

Archicorp and COAHSI used the idea of “pallet forts” as the guiding
principle for creating smaller exhibition areas within the vast container terminal…

The Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI) turned Staten Island’s massive New York Container Terminal into a contemporary museum for a special arts weekend highlighting the work of ten borough artists. The exhibit, entitled “Mapping Staten Island,” explores these artists’ perceptions of their resident borough, through physical installations, video, light, and musical recordings. The exhibit space—created by the newly established firm Archicorp—will be a work of art in itself, as actual shipping pallets will be used to build walls, tables and other structures to display the artwork. After the exhibit, the pallets will be recycled and used for their original purpose of transporting consumer goods…

The selection of the New York Container Terminal as the venue for the exhibit also builds on Staten Island’s specific geography and history. Each exhibition room was constructed from shipping pallets and designed like a fort, 20 x 10 feet long. The pallets were literally “branded” by hot iron brands, bearing the logo or tag line of each sponsor. Deconstructed after the gala, these branded pallets will now rejoin the flow of global trade, sharing with the world a small part of Staten Island.

adapted from COAHSI’s Press Release (I changed from future tense to past tense since the event took place last week.)

(More shipping pallet projects and products after the fold…)

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October 5, 2009

Brendan Coyle’s Mortal Coil Pack

Coyle

It may be a symptom of my own obsessive marginalia, but after attending the “Verfall: Decadence and Decay” show this summer (curated by Ginger Shulick) the piece that really stuck with me was artist/performance artist, Brendan Coyle’s polybagged vampire teeth (upper left) with an “Eternal Life” religious tract as the header card. According to Coyle, “It was kind of like a visual caption or accompanying piece” to his larger “Candy Corpse”—(a candy-colored crime scene with high-fructose body parts, licorice string viscera and packaging evidence of candy & cigarette consumption).

What I like so much about the ‘eternal life’ polybag, is the logic and simplicity of the combination. Summing up in one gesture all that is hopeful, yet creepy about immortality. (Brendan Coyle’s mortal/immortal-coil pack.) It also set me to thinking about the hackneyed graphics of religious tracts, in general, and I even found a nice Flickr Set of them: here —(including a Spanish version of the one Coyle used.

The “sugar power” sugar cube is a bit of “found” packaging that Coyle had incorporated into an earlier performance piece and suggestive of yet another good area of arcane packaging exploration: the sugar cube.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

October 2, 2009

Polyhedral Soda & Chips

PolyhedralPacks

Two recent polyhedral concept packages that caught by eye:

1. Peter Pavlov re-envisions the flexible polyethylene snack bag as an ingenious flexible folding carton. He cites the triangular Doritos shape as the inspiration for the package’s triangular facets. The thing is, triangles are the only regular tessellation that would have worked in this way. Squares would only have made a tube. And hexagons would hardly have flexed at all. There are, however, irregular tessellations that could conceivably provide flexible capabilities (and an interesting texture) to packaging like this. (See: Flickr Origami Tessellations Pool)

2. Dzmitry Samal’s faceted soda cans show similar polyhedral tendencies, although, in their case, the geometry is strictly decorative. And the practicality of the design (requiring “impact extrusion”) appears to be debatable. (See: commentary on Dieline post about this subject)

(More photos/simulated illustrations, after the fold…)

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October 1, 2009

More Shmoo Packaging

ShmooCandyBox

ShmooCards

A 1950s Shmoos fruit flavored hard candies box with 5 unseparated “fortune” cards from Hakes.com

As long as we’re talking about licensed Shmoo merchandise and its packaging, here’s more of it. The merchandising of Shmoo products in the late 1940s to early 1950s was a wildly successful example of character licensing. Presumably, the designers of these packs didn’t have the rigid style guides that we follow for licensed packaging today. The branding of Shmoo products was a lot more diverse and all over the map, as compared to, say, Sponge Bob products. To the extent that these products do match, stylistically, I reckon it is mainly due to Al Capp, himself, having final approval over the artwork.

PencilWhistle

1950 Pencil-shaped pencil-box/whistle with Shmoo branded pencils from from Hakes.com

(More Shmoo packaging, after the fold…)

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