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…)

May 7, 2012

Pakoh’s Porous Coke Bottle

Don’t know a lot about the glass artist, Pakoh. Grew up on Long Island. Went to RISD. Made this vintage glass Coke bottle porous. pour us? (Rot in Coke, 2007)

He also did this to a light bulb.

(He makes water pipes, as well, which reminded me of  a certain “English object” we featured in 2009.)

See also: Pipe Shaped Bottle | Bottle Shaped Pipe, Coke Bottle filled with a Coke Bottle and Light Bulb Bottles

April 27, 2012

Remarkable New Food Packaging Invention

Led to this topic by Dan Goodsell’s rusty can of Oscar Mayer Wieners (on left) it turned out to be a different story than the one I thought I might tell.

At first I was thinking that it would be about orthographic graphic design in canned food labels.

Or maybe I’d compare its label design to the once popular: “Crown Roast of Frankfurters,” and give it an alliterative, Spiro Agnew style title like “Fifties Phalanx of Phallic Franks.” (As Jon Stewart has pointed out about the former Vice President’s name, “Spiro Agnew” is also an anagram for “grow a penis.”)

That was more or less the plan until I read about the later development, pictured on the right…

Sack-in-Can Package

A new food package, developed by GO Mayer, vice-president of Oscar Mayer & Co., of Madison, Wis., permits two foods of separate and distinct flavors to be packed in the same can without interchange of flavors. This has been utilized in canned wieners by putting a barbecue sauce-filled Pliofilm sack into a can of wieners. Blending of two separate food flavors during the canning process is prevented. Other ready-to-eat food combinations will soon be put up this way. The Pliofilm sack is heat sealed, after which it is air- and watertight and break-proof under normal handling conditions. Housewives can open the sack with scissors or a knife. Sauce and wieners can be heated together, or they can be heated separately and the sauce poured over the wieners.

Food Engineering (Volume 19) 1947

I knew that Pliofilm had been used in margarine color-packs, but this was news to me.

As wonderful an artifact as it is, Goodsell’s can must have seemed like a plain spinster aunt in comparison to this new and potent marketing mix of canned wieners with a patented sauce packet. Still mentioned in Oscar Mayer magazine ads, the plain brine version was relegated to a footnoted “also ran” status.

The glamorous young “Composite Food Package” was patented by none other than Oscar’s own brother, Gottfried O. Mayer…

Side bar: I’m very happy to see that the patent drawings above include additional orthographic views.

(Advertising, promotion, and modern art, after the fold…) (more…)

April 19, 2012

The Optics of Rainbow Striped Package Design

We’ve already focused on multicolored product lines and their effectiveness in product differentiation when displayed all together, but just recently it occurred to me that there was another kind of rainbow packaging in which all the refracted colors come together in a singular package design.

Rainbow stripes as a packaging motif, probably reached their peak in the 1970s, although they really got started in 1968 with Paul Giambarba’s spectral branding for Polaroid:

“The original color stripes were to differentiate between the new Type 108 Colorpack Film and the gray color stripes that identified Type 107 black and white film.”

Apple used a similar sequence of colored stripes in spectral order for the second incarnation of their logo in 1977. Asked whether the rainbow colors were a reference to “hippy” culture, logo designer, Rob Janoff said,

“Partially it was a really big influence. Both Steve and I came from that place, but the real solid reason for the stripes was that the Apple II was the first home or personal computer that could reproduce images on the monitor in color.”

So in each case (Polaroid’s color film and Apple’s color monitor) the rainbow stripes are meant to convey the color capabilities of the product. Their founders —Polaroid’s Edwin Land and Apple’s Steve Jobs— have also been compared and found to be similar in some ways. (See Forbes article: What Steve Jobs Learned From Edwin Land of Polaroid)

Giambarba’s package design for Polaroid explored the geometric possibilities of the company’s rainbow stripe motif in some depth for nearly two decades.

Most of Giambarba’s designs displayed well, and some used the trick of wrapping shapes around corners to achieve completion when displayed. (See: The Incomplete Package: Part of a Larger Whole)

While Giambarba’s rainbow striped branding may have preceded Apple’s, there were also other rainbow-striped cultural influences which may have played a role.

Frank Stella’s 1966 painting, Concentric Squares apparently preceded Polaroid’s rainbow striped packaging by two years. Like Polaroid and Apple, Stella’s fluorescent paintings introduced a new color capability whereas his previous paintings had been black (and white).

(More rainbow striped ruminations, after the fold…) (more…)

April 17, 2012

Art & Kitty Litter

On left is one of Robert Gober’s 1989 “Fine Fare Cat Litter” sculptures. (From an edition of seven)…

With Cat Litter, Gober invokes a “hand-made-ready-made”, stemming from the Duchampian tradition. While Marcel Duchamp chose everyday, industrially produced objects as his ready-made works and elevated them to the status as an art object in the act of re-producing and declaring them to be so, Gober scrupulously recreates an already existing product; Gober uses plaster-casting and then paints by hand the imagery to imitate the real object.

In speaking about the Cat Litter sculptures, Gober explains, “The kitty litter I never saw as being that far a step from the wedding dress…for me the kitty litter was to a large degree a metaphor for a couple’s intimacy – that when you make a commitment to an intimate relationship, that involved taking care of that other person’s body in sickness and in health. If I had chosen to do a box of diapers, which is an equivalent of a bag of cat litter, it would have been obvious. But because I was juxtaposing a low symbol which a high symbol and a deflated symbol with an inflated one, people had a very hard time reconciling the two, and they had a hard time, I think, seeing that I could be connecting the two with some respect”

Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, 1999 (via: Phillips de Pury & Company)

Fine Fare is a New York “Metro Area” supermarket chain. (There was also a UK “Fine Fare” but I don’t believe they are connected.) I like their multi-colored pinwheel logo on the Gober sculpture, which I think has inherent fine art associations having to do with color wheels and additive color mixing. The animated gif on the right is not from Fine Fare’s logo, but from the website of package printer, J.M. Fry Printing Inks.

(See also: Untitled Packaging Sculptures)

–Randy Ludacer

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 13, 2012

Package Hacking: Evan Roth’s Propulsion Paintings

Not the kind of package hacking we sometimes think of — where empty containers are given an entirely different function. In Evan Roth’s sculptures and videos, the spray paint cans are not empty and still work as intended. The “hack” is usually more along the lines of an “off-label” use for spray paint.

The sculpture above, for example, is actually a tool for painting. The spray paint cans are arranged, sputnik-style in an array around a basketball, and are still fully functional, but their nozzles are now depressed by rolling the whole thing across a surface. 

In his “Propulsion Painting” videos, the cans also work as they were designed to—(to spray paint)—but have been modified to be more or less self-actuating. So that they can spray continuously without needing a person to hold down the nozzle. Like bug bombs, only with artistic intentions.

As with yesterdays tin can engine videos, the soundtracks are half the fun.

(More, after the fold…)

(more…)

April 10, 2012

Coca-Cola Urns

Although the Han Dynasty urn on the left was originally fired sometime between 206 BC and 220 AD and the decorative “syrup urn” on the right was fired nearly 2000 years later, in the late 1800s or early 1900s, the two objects seem related, none-the-less.

1. The urn on the left is one of Ai Weiwei’s contemporary sculptures using appropriated ancient artifacts.

… Ai’s unprecedented use of Neolithic and Han dynasty vessels as “readymades” that the artist subjects to a variety of procedures. These include marking 2000-year-old clay urns with hand-painted inscriptions of the “Coca-Cola” logo, dipping them into vats of industrial paint, smashing them on the ground in performances for the camera, and grinding the vessels into powder. Writing in the exhibition’s catalog essay about Ai’s “gestural practice” of defacing and destroying of these ancient objects to transform them into works of contemporary art, Beijing-based critic Philip Tinari remarks that these works provide “the illusion of clarity alongside the persistent specter of ambiguity.” What appears at first “like the sublimation of an ancient object’s financial value and cultural worth into a different yet parallel carrier of updated value and worth” also serves as a “satire of the ruling regime’s approach to its patrimony, and of contemporary China’s curious relation to its past, a situation where destruction of historical artifacts happens almost daily.”

Arcadia University art Gallery

2. The second urn is one of the ceramic “syrup urns” made by the Wheeler Pottery Company for turn-of-the-century soda fountains.


Upper left photo: from the Smithsonian; lower left photo of syrup urn on exhibit at Atlanta’s “Pemberton Place”: from jared422_80’s Flickr Photostream; on right: broken syrup urn from Dan Morphy Auctions; lower right ornament from: eBay

In 1896, The Coca-Cola Company embarked on a program of offering award premiums to the fountain operators selling our beverage.  Among the items offered as premiums were these porcelain dispensers, which, in essence, were not entirely dispensers as they are known today, but rather were promotional units designed for the point of sale.

The dispensers were made by the Wheeling Pottery Company, Wheeling, West Virginia.   These units dispensed the syrup by gravity flow through a faucet placed beneath the bowl.  They were an ornament for the soda fountain and were shaped and elaborately designed reflecting late Victorian motifs.

Phil Mooney, Coca-Cola Conversations:  Syrup Urn

As with ancient Chinese pottery, some syrup urns are “authentic” and some are reproductions. In the 1950s Coca-Cola produced a commemorative “hard rubber” version. There are also smaller reproductions like the one holding pencils above and the 3 inch tall ornament on the lower right.

–Randy Ludacer

April 9, 2012

Shari Mendelson


“Pom Vessel and Vinegar Urn” plastic from discarded bottles, hot glue, acrylic polymer, paint, 11″x3″x3″ each, 2009-10

While hunting for other examples of postmodern structural packaging, I happened upon Shari Mendelson’s “vessels.”

Sort of the other side of the postmodern/ancient coin: taking plastic bottles that may not seem obviously ornamental to us, Medelson deftly reconstitutes them into decorative antiquities.

Dasani water bottles are particularly prized for their color and shape, but she’ll take an Evian or Volvic bottle in a pinch. Recently, she was hankering after Poland Spring bottles…

“I’ll be walking behind someone in Midtown and they’ll be drinking a bottle of water, and I’ll just want it.”

Talking With Shari Mendelson
Penelope Green, NY Times, June 23, 2010


“My Metropolitan” (installation proposal)


“5 Vessels” plastic from discarded bottles, hot glue, acrylic polymer, paint, 7″x5″x5″ -12″x5″x5″, 2009-10

(More vessels, after the fold…) (more…)

April 3, 2012

Appropriated Ready Mades & Customized Containers


Landforms, 2011 (“Customised fabric conditioner containers”)

Some subtle sculptures with groupings of detergent and fabric softener bottles by Russell Hill. I like the the way he organizes these consumer products according to his own formal concerns. Lining them up by size, level of contents and color. (via: MKTG)

The thing with the rising and falling levels of fabric conditioner also reminds me of artwork by Tony Feher and Cildo Meireles.

By stacking 4 varieties of Fairy detergent, Hill creates a ready made color gradient. I like that he describes it as “appropriated,” acknowledging the package design to some degree. When artists use consumer packaged goods in this context, it’s sort of “have your cake and eat it too” situation. Clearly a critique on consumer culture, and yet exploiting whatever subliminal forces of attraction these (designed) objects may inherently possess. This was equally true for Warhol and other artists who have appropriated consumer packaging in this way.


Fairys, 2010 (“Appropriated ready made washing liquid”)


Horizon, 2011 (“Customised fabric conditioner containers”)

Below, an excerpt from a video about the Catlin Prize which Hill received in 2011…

(And a bit more, after the fold…)

(more…)

March 30, 2012

Nickolas Muray’s Plastic Containers


Nickolas Muray: Plastics, Plastic Containers, 1960

1960 Carbro color still lifes of plastic packaging by Nickolas Muray.

Lately we’ve been endlessly photographing, silhouetting and retouching plastic bottles, both as props for other products and as subjects in their own right.

I ought to be sick of the sight of them, but the plastic bottles in these photographs by Nickolas Muray are lit like objects in a Vermeer painting and I like the way they’re arranged.

In the photo above, the bottles are cropped, left and right, so that the viewer imagines an extended (endless?) parade of brands.

In contrast, the same bottles (more or less) in the photograph below, are all contained within the image.


Nickolas Muray: Plastics, Plastic Containers, 1960

After the market crash, Murray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and become a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for his creation of many of the conventions of color advertising. He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Nickolas Muray

These later works were done five years before his death in 1965. (Photographs via: George Eastman House)

(Another, of his more fantastical, plastic bottle still lifes, after the fold…)

(more…)

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