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 14, 2012

Labeling a Klein Bottle

ACME brand Klein bottles (via)

Felix Klein’s non-orientable, one-sided surface was not originally imagined as a container, but was labeled as such because of a German pun:

The Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein. It may have been originally named the Kleinsche Fläche (“Klein surface”) and that this was incorrectly interpreted as Kleinsche Flasche (“Klein bottle”), which ultimately led to the adoption of this term in the German language as well.

–Wikipedia

At lease one source asserts that Klein’s surface was, for a time, called the Klein jar, but I could not confirm this.

When did they change its name from “Klein Jar” to “Klein Bottle”? Look in any projective geometry book published before, say, 1960 and you will see the above “bottle” referred to as a “Klein Jar.”

Whatever you call it, a Klein surface can serve as a container, albeit a fairly impractical one. If we accept that it’s a container, then what sort of label does it get?

If you draw the letter “R” on a clear label, then slide that label around the outside of a sphere, when you return it to the same place, the letter looks exactly the same. So a sphere is orientable. On a Klein Bottle, you can slide that label around so that the letter reads backwards. To do this, you’ll have to slide the label all the way inside the Klein Bottle (you’ll need a long pipecleaner). When it’s on the other side of the glass from where it started, the label will read as the mirror image. That’s nonorientable.

ACME Kline Bottle FAQ

This idea of the label sliding on its one-sided surface all the way into the inside of the Klein bottle and then being backwards, is a recurring theme.

Labeled Klein bottle (via Matematita); Poster by IDeAS

The image on the left demonstrates the backwards inner label. The Klein bottle on the right is decorated with an abstract symmetrical design which would look the same whether it was on the inside or the outside. (A good idea for Klein bottle branding: ambigrams.)

While ACME does not, for the most part, label their bottles, they do sell a flask with their logo…

… and that logo employs backwards & forwards type on a Mobius strip to highlight the product’s non-orientability.

(The “Klein stein” and filling a Method/Klein bottle, after the fold…) (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.)

May 4, 2012

On the Shelf

“On the Shelf”: Michael Craig Martin’s 1970 sculpture (via: Russell Hill)

Three Four sculptures by three four different artists: each featuring bottles with varying levels of liquid.

Top: “Just So” Tony Feher’s 2002 sculpture; bottom: “Landforms” Russell Hill’s 2011 floor sculpture

(I almost forgot about this one…)

Cildo Meireles’s “Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos” [Insertions in Ideological Circuits] (1970)

May 1, 2012

Handful of Miniature Soda Cans

Via: Western Paperback Novels

April 25, 2012

Mouth-as-window: Package Eats Product

Top: Tequechongos!; 2nd row: Dusan Čežek’s Booster Engery 4-pack box; 3rd row: Design Herynek’s Adriana Mini-Pasta; bottom: Kanikko crab-shaped candy crab packaging

The 1971 ad for two discontinued Tootsie Roll products (Tootsie Tots & Tootsie Jesters ad from Gregg Koenig’s Flickr Photostream) reminded me that I’d been seeing more mouth-shaped windows on packages lately. Maybe now’s a good time for another round up.

Most of it’s food packaging, of course, but not all. As previously observed, when gaping mouths appear on packaging, they are not human mouths.

But seeing them all together, what’s really notable is that they are all illustrations. No photography.

I always liked the simplicity of seeing the product through a mouth-shaped window. As a consumer you’re invited to identify with the character (animal, monster, etc.) and imagine that product in your mouth.

There are also packages that open in mouth-like ways to dispense the product, but however clever these solutions, unless you’re a baby bird, there’s something off-putting about the idea of taking food from another mouth.

Colgate’s 2011 cross marketing effort to sell toothpaste from within a pizza box

Preston Grubbs (whose Spherical-Wedge Juice Packs we looked at last month) connects a chain of three boxes to form a puppet-like “S’mores” kit, in which the upper and lower boxes form a monster character’s mouth and the middle box serves as a sort of “serving suggestion.”

(A non-food monster pack example, 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 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

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