Box Vox

packaging as content

May 21, 2012

Another Budweiser Triptych


Alan & Michael Fleming: Balancing, Levitating, Opening (two cans of beer), 2010, 3-channel video [excerpt]

Part of a 2010 group show at SIAC’s Sullivan Galleries entitled The Joke is Irresistible, this “video triptych” by Fleming twins, Alan and Michael is interesting to compare with the Budweiser Triptych by Banks Violette that we looked at last Wednesday.

Whereas Violette’s redacted, black and white Budweiser label spelled out “die” and contained a certain gravitas, the three Fleming videos are more about gravity…

“In this video triptych two ordinary cans of beer are transformed into ephemeral sculptures through the act of drinking. The result is a series of poignant and playful studies of everyday objects imbued with a new life and form of their own. This piece reflects on the studio as a site for games, trials and tricks.” -via

In their show at threewalls last month they expanded on the balancing beer can trick, demonstrated in the first video.


100 Tilted Cans of Beer, 2012, cans of Budweiser, 6″ x 8′ x 8′

I never knew about this particular bar trick, but I like how it relies on the beveled edge of the beverage can, and I love the idea of 100 half-full cans of beer remaining precariously balanced on the floor of the gallery for two months.

I guess it also adds to the whole “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” thing.

 

May 18, 2012

Peter Cuba’s New Art

These were new to me: Peter Cuba’s 2010 photographs of Budweiser labels applied to an assortment of products other than beer.

Regarding his unauthorized brand extensions, the Chicago-based illustrator/designer says simply:

“My new art is putting Budweiser labels onto other things. Goodbye painting, hello drinking.”

(Diluting the brand, but never the beer.)


Beer Family

I hadn’t realized at first that last Wednesday was the start of “Budweiser Fine Arts Week,” but I see now that’s where we’ve been heading. Please stay tuned.

(See also: Marlboro Beer and The Brand Dilution of Duff Beer)

May 17, 2012

Nigel Sense’s Annotated Label Paintings


Budweiser, Stella Artois, Toohey’s Blue

Another annotated Budweiser label (on left) led me to the paintings of Nigel Sense.

As with Wacky Packs, the beer labels here provide a loose framework for satirical commentary, but in Sense’s paintings the content is nearly always about artists. (And sometimes about the economics of his art career choices—fine arts versus commercial art, graphic design, etc.)

Hence a Budweiser label becomes Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Stella Artois label is about Marcel Duchamp, and an Australian Toohey’s Beer label is revised as a comment on Australian artist Brett Whiteley. (I had to look that one up.)

Interesting to compare this video with the video in the previous post: two tattooed artists who created artworks changing the Budweiser beer label, each of whom emphasizes the role that personal experience has played in their work.

(A few more package-related Nigel Sense paintings, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 16, 2012

Redacted Budweiser Label

Banks Violette’s 2011 “Budweiser Triptych” features a redacted Budweiser beer label design spelling out the word “die.”

Origins of the concept are explained in the video below…

May 15, 2012

Calvin Klein, Yves Klein & Klein Bottled Beer

If Felix Klein’s paradoxical one-sided surface is represented as a bottle only because of a German homophonic pun, it’s fitting that artists and other creative types should further confuse things by associating this bottle with other people named Klein.

1. Calvin Klein Bottle

Uffe Holm’s 2008 sculpture entitled, “A Unisex Fragrance On A One-Sided Surface” is a Klein bottle with ck one perfume from Calvin Klein:

The Klein bottle is a spatial impossibility, if we lived in a non-Euclidean space, but this version is a model, a piece of scientific glassblowing, which purpose is to illustrate a three-dimensional Möbius band. In an unreal world this plane isn’t supposed to contain anything, but in reality it works fine as a flacon for the perfume ck one, the unisex fragrance from the 90s.

The two elements are tied together by the surname of their originator, Felix and Calvin respectively, but they both imply the possibility of illustrating something that does not unite in practical reality. Outer is inner and the sexes are merged.

–Uffe Holm

2. Yves Klein Bottle

Mariana Castillo Deball’s 2011 “Klein Bottle Piñata” deliberately conflates German mathematician, Felix Klein with Yves Klein by painting her interactive sculpture with the French artist’s patented color: International Klein Blue.

 (After the manifold: Klein Beer…) (more…)

May 9, 2012

Life-as-Bottles Meme


Esperanza Gómez Carrera’s 2008 “The Life in a Bottle” installation

The idea of representing a lifetime with a row of 4 or 5 bottles. Usually starting out with a baby bottle & a Coke, and ending up with an intravenous feeding bottle. (With an alcoholic beverage bottle in between.)

Typical internet post includes a rueful comment about already being at the “third”(alcoholic beverage) stage.

Some 4-bottle examples:


Upper left: the most prevalent example found online (can’t tell you who made it originally); on right a display at a restaurant in Oaxaca City (see: Pattie & Richard); 2nd row, left: via; on left: tee shirt design A; 3rd row, left: tee shirt design B; on right: via

(Some additional 5-bottle examples, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 8, 2012

Bottles & Bar Charts


Mark Swanson’s bar graph comparing alcohol content of beers

Last Friday’s look at 4 sculptures (with bottles containing varying levels of various liquids) brings us to another idea: bottles-as-bar-chart.


Courtney Gibbons 2009 bar graph showing monthly alcohol consumption


Ugleah’s 2010 “Booze Bar Chart” as inverse measure of job satisfaction and happiness

“…heard this great idea from David Gartner: celebrate project milestones with a bottle of Scotch. I’d occurred to me that you could flip this on its head and celebrate the failures instead. A cool byproduct: the bottles turn into life-sized bar charts of project successes and happiness.”

–Ugleah


Graphic comparing Champagne bottle sizes via Gastronomista


Stacy Levy’s Calendar of Rain installation

“Each day of the show is represented by a bottle sandblasted with that day’s date. The current day’s bottle is placed under a flask. If it rained or snowed that day, the precipitation is funneled into the gallery. After 24 hours, the bottle is capped and placed back into the calendar, a series of five glass shelves representing each month. By the end of the show, the piece had created a bar graph of rainfall for each week.”

The infographic for the “2012 Cone Green Trend Tracker” uses sideways bottles and gravity defying liquid levels in bar chart representing American’s expectations of corporate responsibility & environmental impact.

(Also works with cans, after the fold…) (more…)

April 20, 2012

Rainbow Striped Bottles

More spectral color branding. This time: bottles.

Absolut Vodka’s 2008 limited edition bottle (marking the 30 anniversary of the LGBT gay pride flag) and a 2010 Antico Frantoio Muraglia ceramic olive oil bottle (“…made by the expert hands of skilled master ceramists and covered with rainbow stripes.”)

Earlier rainbow branded liquids include Rainbow Beverages soda bottles (an ACL label with a monochrome rainbow!) and, below: Rainbow Beer and Rainbow Whiskey, separate brands whose labels both included full-color rainbows and metallic gold borders.


Bottle photo from AntiqueBottles.net; label from Newfoundland Beer History


Label photo from Etsy; bottle photo from RubyLane

And because I like miniature stuff and I never know when to quit…

(one more, after the fold…) (more…)

April 16, 2012

The Trickle-Up Effect


On left: one of Linden Gledhill’s photographs of paint reacting to sound vibrations; center: Patrick Hill’s “Gravity Wine” package design concept; on right: a painted jar from an Etsy listing (now down, but the same object appears on majama29’s Flickr Photostream)

I’m no economist, but I always suspected that being wealthy didn’t automatically make someone a “job creator” and I wondered whether the whole “trickle-down” theory of economics might not make a lot more sense the other way round.

As it turns out, there is a “trickle-up” theory:

The trickle up effect argues itself as more effective than the trickle down effect because people who have less tend to buy more. In other words, the poor are more inclined than the wealthy to spend their money. This being so, proponents of the trickle up effect believe that if the lower and lower-middle classes are given benefits, such as tax breaks or subsidies, the increased funds would be spent at a much higher rate than would the upper class, given similar fund increases. Furthermore, the trickle up effect argues, many upper-class individuals do not spend their entire yearly salary to begin with, which is an indication that they will not spend any additional funds. Instead, they will save additional funds, thereby withholding those funds from the economy and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

Wikipedia’s Entry on The Trickle Up Effect


Gravity-defying, paint-dripped ceramic planters project from The Lovely Cupboard

(More trickle-up imagery, after the fold…) (more…)

April 12, 2012

10 Tin Can Engines

Ten YouTube videos of “tin can” engines. These are homemade Stirling engines made by different people from recycled cans and other readily available hardware & household materials. (via: Boyd’s Tin Can Stirlings)

This is a fairly haphazard selection. I like the various engine noise soundtracks and the glimpse that they offer into the lives of tin can engine enthusiasts.

(5 more, after the fold…) (more…)

April 11, 2012

Packaging and Peripatetic Desire


On left: Untitled, 1993 — clay sculpture dating from the Song dynasty (960 – 1279) in glass Johnnie Walker Red Label bottle; on right: Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, 1994 — clay sculpture dating from Tang dynasty (618-907) in glass Absolut Kurant bottle

Two more artworks by Ai Weiwei, predating and prefiguring the modified ancient urns cited in the previous post.

In 1993, Ai Weiwei returned to a China that was fast becoming a culture based in consumerism. Not only was China eagerly embracing commodities from the West, the West was equally keen to purchase Chinese cultural material. Antique markets around Beijing were selling ancient Chinese artifacts. Ai Weiwei began visiting these markets and collecting examples of antiques created throughout China’s imperial history, learning how pieces from different dynasties were characterised by distinct forms, styles and markings.

The objects Ai Weiwei found in these markets soon became the starting point for a new direction in his artmaking. Ai Weiwei used the objects in a development of his experimentation with readymades, shifting his focus from everyday objects to objects that had already had significant cultural value…

In each of these artworks, Ai Weiwei combines two very different readymade objects in the one work. The antique sculptures represent the skill, time and artistry involved in the production of handcrafted cultural artifacts that have survived for centuries through China’s turbulent history. In contrast, the bottles represent the new China, symbols of consumer goods, mass production and the influence of Western culture.

Georgia Close, Ai Weiwei: Under Construction

About the Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle, the artist has this to say :

“Within this traditional repository of peripatetic desire and fantasy materializes an elegantly poised stone courtesan over one thousand years old. This work humorously combines symbols of two of man’s chief intoxications while playing off the opposites of unique artifact and disposable object, painstaking craftwork and mass production, antiquity and modernity.”

–Ai Weiwei

While I’m not sure what’s peripatetic about a bottle of liquor, the implications of a figure trapped inside a bottle (the ancient drinker trading places with the contents of a modern bottle) is traditionally a metaphor for alcoholism. The puzzle of how the artifacts were made to fit into these “impossible bottles” here suggests the insolubility of the antiquity/modernity problem. (The past, consumed by the present.)

–Randy Ludacer

 

April 4, 2012

Package Design for Losers


Top left: Poynter Products’ “The Loser” liquor dispenser package (from the-empress’s Flickr Photostream; on right: “Tol’able David” video cover; lower left: “Drunkard’s Cloak” wine label; on right: “Barrel Apparel” costume packaging (from eBay)

Package design for losers? A barrel.

I went ahead and titled this one as a companion piece to last month’s Package Design for Dummies. Although it has even less to do with “package design” than that earlier post about ventriloquist dummies.

“Loser” is not a term I much like. It’s one thing when it’s used to describe a non-winner in a fair competition, but as an epithet for your less successful acquaintances, it’s like social Darwinism, up close and personal.

Since the Poynter Products liquor dispenser (above left) is named “The Loser,” however, and since “loss” does seem to describe most of the different reasons that a person might be reduced to wearing a barrel, I thought it was apt in this case.

Barrel as garment: 4 kinds of loser…

1. Punishment

The “drunkard’s cloak” was a humiliating pillory for alcoholics in the 1600s. Forcing the drunkard to wear a barrel was deemed a fitting punishment. (Loss of dignity)

The photos below, however, show a more recent barrel/pillory used in 1932 to punish prisoners at Florida’s Sunbeam Prison Camp. (Loss of life)

A demonstration of barrel restraint worn by Arthur Maillefert in prison days before his death. The 19 year old inmate, a resident of New Jersey, died in the Sunbeam Prison Camp in Florida. He was strangled by the chain that held him in place while he was unable to help himself to stand again because his feet were in stocks. The Maillefert case of abuse received much attention and was steadily reported on by the New York Times.

FloridaMemory.com


Photo on left from University of Washington digital archives; comic book cover via: The Creepshow

2. Modesty

A far less troubling reason for wearing a barrel is personal modesty. (Loss of clothes) Usually seen in outdoors scenarios where clothes have gone missing and the barrel serves as improvised clothing. Usually played for laughs, as in this clip from the 1921 silent film, “Tol’able David”…

3. Poverty

It’s not entirely clear when wearing a “bankruptcy barrel” became a metaphor for poverty. Similar to using a barrel as improvised replacement clothing for modesty’s sake, but here the implication is that you just cannot afford clothing to begin with. (Loss of money)

Although wooden barrels are now a fairly archaic form of packaging, the meaning of wearing one in this context is still well understood.

The second photo (in color) is of Jim “Poorman” Trenton wearing a barrel inscribed with the words “POORMANS NATION” last October in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

The photo, 2nd from the right is of Alan Moore wearing a barrel while “singing about poverty” during a 1984 exhibition at ABC No Rio, entitled, “Island of Negative Utopia.”

(The 4th and final “loser,” after the fold…) (more…)

April 2, 2012

Brands Make Ü Happy

Bliss Buter-Thompson’s observations about package design that seeks to evoke positive feelings with smiley faces (see: Kraft Macaroni and Cheese) reminded me of another persistent graphic design trend. The umlauted, sans-serif “U” as a happy face.

Gü, Frü—(now merged with Gü), pür, güd (designed by Baldwin&),  yogen früz, Fünf, jüni, men-ü… (the second dot of men-ü’s logo is an encircled ™, giving its happy face an unfortunate dead eye.)

This kind of anthropomorphic typography in package design also reads as an emoticon: (“The letters Ö and Ü can be seen as an emoticon, as the upright version of :O (meaning that one is surprised) and :D (meaning that one is very happy).”) If consumers can respond to this method of expressing emotion on their cell phones, then why wouldn’t they respond to it on packaging?

There are plenty of other brands, not pictured above, whose logo designers have also sought to get happy in this way. (Füd, Güd Füd,  Nü Car Rentals, Trüf Creative…)

Writer, Douglas Coupland has commented on this attraction to the umlauted Ü:

The idea that this particular character in this particular typeface is the most attractive seems to intentionally conflate typeface with happy face. In his 2003 novel, Hey, Nostradamus!, Coupland also wrote this sentence:

“But the Quails spoke only their own language, which had only one word, glü, with a jaunty, Ikea-like umlaut on the ü.”

For a completely different type of happy umlaut pack, also inspired by Coupland, see the Knotoryus Eastpak Artist Studio Bag, below. The logo is also featured on their Ü website.

(See Also: Douglas Coupland’s Plastic Bottle Sculptures)

–Randy Ludacer

March 23, 2012

Water Designs its own Package

Xiaoli Wen’s 2009 “Water Shaped Bottles”

Rubber molds, made from discarded Gin, beer, water, Coke & whisky bottles, were filled with plaster and allowed to cure while hanging under flowing water. Porcelain bottles were then made from the “water formed” plaster casts. (See pictures of the process on Dezeen.)

“Water does not have its own shape. It is shaped by its container. Now water wants to change the container’s shape therefore to decide its shape by itself.”

–Xiaoli Wen

A nice personification of water wanting to design its own packaging. But what about the other beverages that were originally contained in these bottles? Maybe gin, beer, Coke and whisky also want to change their containers’ shapes. I know: these other beverages all mostly contain water. (…and where on earth does one find a whisky waterfall?)

Prototypes of the porcelain bottles appear to be for sale (or have once been for sale) on Wen’s website, although the prices seem to be missing.

(One more picture, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 21, 2012

2 Anthropomorphic Heineken Bottles

Two takes on kicking back with Heineken:

1. An anthropomorphic Heineken bottle —with arms, but no legs— “kicks back” and relaxes in the retouched photo at top. I assume this image originated from some specific Heineken campaign, but I can’t find the original source. (If you see what I mean.)

2. An anthropomorphic Heineken bottle —with arms and legs— appears in a disheveled, “morning after” state in a 2007 Michael Williams painting entitled, “Cancuned.” (Detail shown above.)

(Another Williams painting with an anthro-pack, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 20, 2012

The Vicious Circle

This 1964 self-parody by Kansas City industrial filmmaker, The Calvin Company, illustrates the pitfalls of making a trade film for a nested corporate hierarchy.

Package design can be a similarly disheartening business, if a new client’s true decision maker is revealed only gradually through layers of middle management.

See also: Nested Packaging

–Randy Ludacer

March 12, 2012

Paul Lee’s Untitled (Can Sculptures)

While lighting fixtures made from beer cans in Friday’s post strongly appeal to a certain male, hetero decorative impulse, a similar mash up of beverage cans and lighting also occurs in the untitled “can sculptures” of Paul Lee, but with a differing agenda.

Using everyday objects such as soda cans, light bulbs, and socks, Lee’s Untitled (Can Sculpture) series explores the relationships between materials and their coded cultural and sexual meanings.

…Each of the pieces in Untitled (Can Sculpture) begins with a soda can with a photocopy of a young man’s face pasted over the label. The image is taken from a 70s naturist magazine and was chosen because the boy’s strong classical features exemplify archetypical ideals of beauty and youth.

… Through this sensual fetishisation of everyday consumer objects Lee’s sculptures explore the nature of personal identity, their disposable nature highlighting the ephemeral transience and guilty pleasures of desire.

 Artist’s Profile: Paul Lee, Saatchi Gallery

Note how, in the lower sculpture below, with the two cans connected through the eyes, Lee uses the same kind of “cylindrical completion” that we’ve noted as a package design trend: using a row of separate cans to form a larger whole. (See: Turner Duckworth Coke packaging) While the string joining two cans might, on the one hand, suggest “eye contact” between the two individuals, the matching cans are arranged in such a way that same young man’s face —a single individual— spans the two connected beverage cans.

Lee also did a more minimal series of polychome beverage can bottoms…

(More untitled (can sculptures) and a video, after the fold…) (more…)

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