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 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 10, 2012

1969 Polaroid Annual Report

This was an image I left out of an earlier post about rainbow-striped package design. (See: The Optics of Rainbow Striped Package Design)

It’s a nice annual report cover that I found on designer, Paul Giambarba’s site. It’s unclear where he designed the annual report, but he was surely the man behind Polaroid’s rainbow branding.

I had in mind I might save it for June (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month) but what with the President’s recent support of gay marriage, I thought I’d put my oblique observance out there a little sooner. (i.e.: graphic meanings of rainbow & 1969.)

Another company whose rainbow iconography would later acquire unintended gay connotations: Apple Computer.

This page from a 1983 Apple Computer gift catalog.

2 brands, coincidentally positioned on the right side of history.

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 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 2, 2012

Packaging of Miniature Dummy Heads

Speaking of miniature stuff, I’ve had this leftover image since “Dummy Week” last March. (See: Package Design for Dummies)

I got the image from Clinton Detweiler’s site, but I think it originally came from Tom Ladshaw’s “Gottle O’ Geer” site.

Like dime store packaging, the carded packs for these novelty keychains were structurally simple and graphically in-your-face:

“The keychains were sold two different ways. You could order them in “loose bulk” (for insertion in gum machine capsules, etc.) or carded.  The flocked head keychains were only available carded.”

Tom Ladshaw


Die-cut carded pack for Jerry Mahoney dummy head keychain. (via: Toy Tent)

 

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 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 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

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 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…)

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