packaging as content

May 4, 2011

Product Placement at Bin Laden’s Compound

The television set that I mostly watched in 2001, was one with an antenna (rather than a cable) that we had in our kitchen. After September 11, the only network our kitchen TV could pick up was ABC. (Apparently the competing stations relied on transmitters atop one of the twin towers.)

It was during that time that I got into the habit of watching ABC news.

This week, when I first saw the helmet-cam video of Bin Laden’s bedroom, it struck me that there were shots of packaging and clutter that constituted a problematic sort of product placement for manufacturers. Would Vaseline really want its customers to know they were using the same brand of petroleum jelly as Osama Bin Laden?

Unfortunately, I seem to have been scooped by Diane Sawyer and Nick Schifrin. Last night ABC took us on a frame-by-frame packaging reconnaissance through the video, in a piece entitled, “Osama Bin Laden Dead: Osama’s Medicine Cabinet.”

This report even included 3D packages (identified by product type, rather than brand name) against a hi-tech grid with cross-hair sights. Similar to the graphics that Sarah Palin was criticized for, only here the targets are packages, rather than political opponents. In Bin Laden’s compound, of course, the shooting had already occurred and packages were not the target. (Although shooting at packaging is a traditional form of target practice.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

March 16, 2011

UPC as Package Proxy

While I’m not that into all of Bernard Solco’s creative output (His “pop” portraits of celebrities seem to skew Republican.) I do like these UPC prints from his “Symbology” series.

Does the barcode on the wall, serve as a proxy for a decoratively-problematic corn flakes package? Pop Art for people with Minimalist sensibilities?

Although Solco does go to considerable effort to put his work in a Pop Art context:

All editions are printed by the artist and Alexander Heinrici in his studio in NYC. Heinrici is a “Master Printer” whose expertise was also utilized by Andy Warhol for the Campbell’s soup can series…

Top left: Welch’s Grape Jelly Print; on right: Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup Print; lower left: Fedex Code Print; on right: Kodak Film Print

It’s easy to imagine how Solco’s blending of abstraction and brand-specificity might appeal to corporate art collections…

“Bernard Solco has painted more than 60 UPC Barcode Paintings for private and corporate collectors such as Kodak, America Online, and Tim Smucker.”

…but the general public has also embraced this sort of thing—barcodes, and other opaque symbols, as fashion and decor. (See: Consumed Column, Style Decoder)

Why is this? These codes may contain all sorts of data, but the information is not readily accessible to the naked eye. Yes, barcodes & QR codes can be scanned and decoded with the right smart phone app, but that doesn’t explain their popularity as decorative patterns.

I think it’s precisely because we can’t just read their information that they are popular. Unlike a television commercial whose commercial message you involuntarily absorb, encoded information you don’t have to receive unless (for some reason) you want to.

Until decoded, these are just abstract patterns and you get to remain blissfully ignorant of any content they might contain. (Unless its meaning is explicitly spelled out, as it is in Solco’s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes UPC)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

February 14, 2011

Frack Pack

Saw Gasland on TV a while back, so I knew about “fracking” and how it had seriously contaminated drinking water here in the United States, but I didn’t know that Canada was thinking of competing with us in the area of flammable drinking water!

Goût de schiste (“Good Taste of Quebec Shale”) is Valérie L’italien’s concept for the commercialization of this particular type of firewater. (d’eau flambé?)

Turning the perceived flaw of flammability into a product feature, she brings us: packaged (flammable) water.

Done as a project for Sylvain Allard’s packaging class at UQAM, Professor Allard has this to say about the new beverage:

… after having promised the moon to oil and gas companies, our good government finds itself in trouble because of the negative reaction of Quebecers who fear the environmental consequences of shale gas. In fact, dramatic stories have been reported in some American states where groundwater got contaminated with the shale gas. Pictures of taps that ignite were shown in the media…

Never mind, we must move forward announced Minister Nathalie Normandeau hammering that shale gas must create wealth. She never explains how this wealth will eventually come back to us though. In fact, like all our natural resources, profits seem more a vision of the mind than a reality. But Nathalie seems convinced that people just don’t get it and that against all odds, her government has the mandate to go forward.

In my packaging class, we believe we have the real solution to increase the collective wealth. Because shale gas is likely to contaminate our groundwater, why resist the temptation to exploit the bonanza? Indeed, what may seem like a catastrophe could become a true treasure. I named the shale gas carbonated water developed by my student Valerie Italian. After Perrier and Sanpellegrino, we would have the Good Taste of Quebec Shale. This particular carbonated water would be available in several flavors and come with a match to burn the excess gas…

via: Packaging UQAM (Read the full story: here)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

November 24, 2010

Campbell’s Thankgiving

Two things relating to the Package as Pixel thing:

1. An embossed tin Campbell’s Soup sign (circa: 1900–1910)

“A gorgeous and rare embossed tin sign for Campbell’s Soup, predating Warhol’s Pop Art by half a century is an attention getter. Most of these signs were destroyed when public opinion of the day deemed it to be a desecration of the American Flag. It comes to the Julia block with an estimate of $10,000/15,000.” [Sold for $18,400]

2007 Julia Auctions

2. From Canstruction New York 2010: a large Campbell’s Soup can made out of canned food — including other, possibly competing brands (e.g. Hunt’s Sauce).

Similar to Mary Campbell’s Food Can Mandala, Canstruction’s sculptures are later dissembled and donated to community food banks. (See also: Bean Can)

(One more thing, after the fold…)

(more…)

October 20, 2010

Shelf Reliance

Following up on yesterday’s train of thought about 1960s fallout shelters and their stockpiles of canned goods—(it’s “end-of-the-world week”, here on boxvox)—we find that President Kennedy’s impulse to privatize civil defense has apparently evolved over the years into what we now call the “survivalist” (or “preparedness”) movement. There are a number of businesses catering to this constituency. Shelf Reliance is one of them:

SHELF RELIANCE is a company that specializes in food storage, storage rotation, and emergency preparedness products. Our goal is to help families prepare for whatever tomorrow may bring, allowing them to feel confident if disaster strikes.

(from the About Us section of their web site)

Where some survivalist food packaging emulates a generic, civil defense look, Shelf Reliance’s “Thrive” brand is light and airy and uses a pastel color-code to differentiate between food groups. Their products are even carried by Costco.

Food rotation, the concept introduced by Better Homes & Garden in the late 1950s, seems to now be an established practice for many Americans. (I hadn‘t realized that.) What is it that Shelf Reliance’s customers should be preparing for? According to their web site:

• Natural Disaster
• Terrorism
• Labor Strike
• Economic Depression
• Drought
• Crop Failure
• Personal Tragedy
• Civil Unrest
• Unemployment

One big change from the 1960s—nuclear fallout is not mentioned.

(Some food rotation products and survivalist videos, after the fold

(more…)

October 19, 2010

Fallout Shelter Packaging

Today we look at packaged food in family fallout shelters.

In the 1960s, rather than promising “a chicken in every pot” president Kennedy called for “A fallout shelter for everybody, as rapidly as possible.”

In his book, Populuxe—(in the chapter entitled “Just Push The Button”)—Thomas Hine makes an interesting point about Kennedy’s proposal for building home fallout shelters: that it would privatize civil defense.

Kennedy’s program… would have transformed civil defense from a community-based responsibility to one that was carried out by individual suburban families. Air-raid shelters were hardly a new thing, but previously they had been group facilities which mobilized the solidarity people feel when faced by common adversity. Kennedy’s program, which was welcomed by the building materials and construction industries, foresaw the fallout shelter as yet another feature of the suburban home… And the family, not the community, became the key unit of survival. This was so clear a reflection of the way in which American society perceived itself at the time that the novelty of the approach was scarcely noticed.

But the part of the fallout shelter that I wish to focus on here, is the well-stocked 1960s pantry. (Click on the photo above for post-apocalyptical product placement of a number of surviving brandname foods: Campbell’s, Lipton, Del Monte, Coca Cola, Spam, etc.)

Better Homes and Gardens… identified a new problem in those trying times. Canned goods left in a fallout shelter for more than a year tend to develop a metallic taste, the magazine said, and there was really nothing that could be done about that. The magazine suggested a system of rotation in which newly bought food would be put in the shelter to replace earlier purchases, which would in turn be rotated up to the kitchen for immediate consumption. Tinny-tasting tomato soup seems among the lesser risks of the nuclear age, but the magazine’s concern with the topic indicates the limited extent to which it thought women would be interested in a public issue and the widespread desire to assume that the world would not be greatly changed by atomic warfare. Movies and television programs which dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war tended to promise a post-conflagration scene that was clean and pretty, though much less crowded than what went before.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe

The idea that, with sufficient quantities of packaged foods, we might survive in a less populated world reminded me of something that I had read in another of Hine’s books:

…in a modern retail setting nearly all the selling is done without people. … The supermarket purges sociability, which slows down sales. It allows manufacturers to control the way they present their products to the world. It replaces people with packages.

Thomas Hine, The Total Package

(One more well-stocked fallout shelter, after the fold…)

(more…)

July 19, 2010

Presidential Packaging as Op Art

(Not optical-illusion “op art,” but opinion/editorial op-ed art.)

Yesterday’s batch of editorials in the NY Times, about President Obama’s prospects for a future term, were illustrated with satirical cleaning products.

By no means is this the first time we’ve compared our President to packaged goods. These black & white packages above (by Abbott Miller and Kristin Spilman from Pentagram) hark back to an earlier book cover for The Selling of the President 1968 (on right).

One thing I’m puzzling over—the illustrations are definitely black & white in my edition of the the paper and online, but in Richard Shear’s copy, the illustrations were apparently in full color, or so he claims.

Either Connecticut is getting a much fancier edition of the NY Times than they deliver here on Staten Island, or there is some powerful, packaging/color synesthesia at work here! (Such that: we’re so accustomed to seeing brightly colored packages that, even when they are reproduced in black & white, our minds supply the color.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 14, 2010

Nathan Gibb’s Crayola Monologues

On left: Nathan Gibb’s crayon collection, illustrating Crayola’s 1962 name change from “Flesh” to “Peach”; on right: an 8-pack box of Crayola’s “Multicultural Crayons” (both photos are from Nathan Gibb’s Flickr Photostream)

When I was a kid growing up in Florida—(where orange juice & Caucasian-suntans were the dominant norm)—I somehow settled on the orange crayon as the one that most embodied the ideal skin color.

Last Friday’s post about patented crayon packaging included one box,
in which the crayons represented people—(clowns in a circus text). The video below, however, takes the crayons-as-people analogy to its logical conclusion: as a
metaphor for skin color.

Nathan Gibb’s 2003 Crayola Monologues “uses the crayon as a human metaphor for exploring color and identity in the United States” as well as pointing out Crayola’s (and our culture’s) recent history of race-based color names for crayons.

Regarding my own childhood choice of orange as a skin color, I’m thinking that it must have been partly due to a limited pallet of the 8 original colors. If I’d had the color choices contained in the “Multicultural Crayons” box, above, perhaps I would have identified with a different color.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

June 2, 2010

Molotov Explosive Energy Drink

Back in 2008, in a post about Susan Meiselas’s famous photo [of a Nicaraguan rebel throwing a molotov cocktail made from a Pepsi bottle] I had tempted fate by writing the following:

Given the existence of the hand-grenade-shaped Bomba bottle, I’m sort of surprised no one’s made an energy drink based on the idea of a molotov cocktail… Perhaps it’s too loaded a metaphor. Any bottle can be used to make a firebomb. Perhaps, beverage makers wisely do not want to go there.

(See: Meiselas's Molotov Man and the Pepsi bottle)

I guess with “Molotov Explosive Energy Drink” I can stop being surprised, because a beverage maker, willing to go there, has come forward, after all. Maybe the work-around lies in the fact that, although the logo features a flaming bottle, the product comes packaged in a counter-intuitive aluminum can.

(One more thing, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 26, 2010

Ration Type K Packaging: Morale Series

Following the thread of military packaging, we come to the packaging makeover of “K-Rations” from the latter part of World War II. (Photo on right: from US Army Models)

“Rations Type K” were developed by inventor and public health scientist, Ancel Keys, which may (or may not) explain the “K” in K-Ration. (There is debate about that.) The boxes were manufactured by the Cracker Jack company and were similar in size and material to Cracker Jack boxes.

Originally the packages were generically labeled: “Breakfast,” “Dinner” and “Supper.” Towards the end of the war they were redesigned (as part of a “morale” initiative) to make the three meals more easily distinguishable with 3 new color-coded / pattern-coded designs.

Who handled the graphic design? Some anonymous, government-employed graphic designer? An advertising agency of the time? K-Ration boxes were featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s 2001 exhibit, Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960, as one of many examples illustrating the impact of organic form on graphic design.

(Photos of the “new” boxes and their contents, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 25, 2010

Miniature MRE boxes

Similar to dollhouse packaging, but with more of a GI Joe aspect: miniature MRE and WWII rations boxes.

What’s the story behind these these tiny (1/35 scale) boxes?

Whether a full-scale mock-up of an objective or a small
sand table, the terrain model is an invaluable tool for the combat
leader to visualize fully the battlefield. All combat S2s should be
proficient in the process of creating functional models in a variety of
circumstances and conditions…

The “nuts”
and “bolts” of the terrain project is the terrain model kit. The kit is
a simple box containing the basic tools that you will need to construct
any terrain model… It might contain laminated cardboard cut-outs of
meal, ready-to-eat (MRE) box pieces.

The Terrain Model: A Miniature Battlefield
by Captain John T. Chenery
Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin

Some DIY, some from kits—photos via: USArmyModels.com

(An MRE kit sheet, after the fold…)

(more…)

May 24, 2010

Sand Bags & MRE Boxes

“This is where we pour the words into a jar, as if they were water. As if a jar of water was the same as a river. This is where we try to make a coherent narrative out of chaos.”

Nick Flynn
The Ticking Is the Bomb

Just finished reading Nick Flynn’s “The Ticking Is the Bomb”—a memoir in which he traces the connective tissue between his life as an expectant American father and the political and cultural implications of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs.

I’ve been a fan of Flynn’s writing since I picked up his first book of poetry, Some Ether at the library a few years back. The Ticking Is the Bomb may be his best work yet. While it might seem a risky gambit to interleave ones own stories in between stories of Iraqi torture victims, the effect is bracing. Rather than just compartmentalizing these disturbing news stories, as we often do, Flynn succeeds in showing how post-9/11 torture policy might just implicate us on a more personal level.

What does it have to do with packaging? Two ubiquitous examples of military packaging played major roles as props in many of the Abu Ghraib photos: the sandbag (re-purposed as a blindfold/hood), and the “meal, ready-to-eat” (MRE) box that detainees were forced to stand on while being subjected to torture. There was also a Huffington Post article about the use of these boxes and their appearance in the background of many of the other photos. (See also: Product Placement at Gitmo)

(More after the fold…)

(more…)

May 19, 2010

The Concept of Coke & Pepsi

Conceptual art: two takes on the idea of Coke and Pepsi. Jonathan Horowitz, above with “And/Or” and Ciprian Muresan, below with “Choose”—(photo via Risknfun’s Flickr Photostream)

1. Jonathan Horowitz

In 2008 Horowitz had an exhibition entitled Obama ‘08’ that documented the red state/blue state cultural divide. The gallery was carpeted half in red, half in blue—(a piece entitled,“Your Land/My Land.”) On election day the gallery functioned as a place to watch the election results and—this being the blue city-state of New York—those in attendance were certainly pleased with those results.

… But beneath the jubilation at this ground-breaking victory was a critique that ran throughout the exhibition, of the bipartisanship that divides the USA, concisely summed up in one piece: a vending machine selling Coke and Pepsi (Coke and/or Pepsi Machine, 2007–8). Whether it comes in a red or a blue can, the contents are basically the same. Freedom of choice is just an illusion.¹

Kirsty Bell
Frieze Magazine, Issue 127, Nov–Dec 2009

ArtForum had a similar interpretation of the dual-party soda-machine:

Nearby, a soda
vending machine (Coke and/or Pepsi Machine, 2007) offered us the
archetypal consumer-culture menu of non-choice as choice, difference as
sameness: Pepsi as the blue candidate, Coke as the red candidate, a
reference to the corporatization of politics and the politicization of
consumption.

Jonathan Horowitz: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
ArtForum, Jan, 2009 by Joshua Decter

In a smaller scale version of “And/Or”—the competing soda brands are simply handcuffed together like unfortunate rivals on a chain gang —(also calling to mind: Martin Kippenberger’s beer-can handcuffs). About the political content in his work and the soda can 2-pack, Horowitz says:

JONATHAN HOROWITZ: Everything is political, and everything’s a lot of other things, too, but human interaction is more interesting to me than shapes and colors. I don’t really try to make work that’s political, though, and I don’t really try to make work that’s funny—I try to make work that’s intelligible and about things.

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: Do you get a rise out of your own work?

JONATHAN HOROWITZ: Sometimes. But more the idea of the work than the work itself. I don’t like to have any of it around me. The materiality of it gives me anxiety. Maybe I'm afraid that it will all fall apart, or maybe I’m reminded of how I can never really get anything exactly right. Oh, but on my desk I have a can of Coke and a can of Pepsi that I attached together with a section of plastic six-pack rings. That, I think, I got just right.

Jonathan Horowitz Interviewed by Christopher Bollen
Interview Magazine

On left: Horowitz’s 2007 “Coke and/or Pepsi Machine”; on right cover of “And/Or” Klaus Biesenbach’s book about Horowitz’s work. (Note: really it’s a paperback book—my photo is faked)

2. Ciprian Muresan

Coke and Pepsi are also brought together in Ciprian Muresan’s “Choose” video—but in a different way.

“…a Romanian boy mixes Coke and Pepsi into the same glass. In defiance of the old taste test marketing campaign, he gleefully drinks the brown concoction. In a country like Romania, where consumer goods are relatively new (since the fall of communism) drinking cola is a political act. …Putting both colas into the same glass is in contradiction to the title of the piece, there is no choice to be made.”²

Luke Siemens in his blog post,
Younger Than Jesus:
Ciprian Muresan

It turns out, the Romanian boy is the artist’s son, Vlad.

Ciprian Muresan’s video Choose… part of a significant body of work dealing with the father-son relationship, sees Vlad Muresan mixing Pepsi and Coca-Cola in a glass. The child’s prank rings, in the context of Muresan’s practice, pre-apocalyptic: a glimpse of the moment when carefully marketed differences merge in the same viscous paste, a rehearsal for the collapse of identities. –Art Tattler

The artist stipulates that the work with his young son is, in fact, collaborative…

We “collaborate” before on different projects like the video called “Choose” …when he have this idea of mixing the same quantity of Coke and Pepsi in the same glass, because for him the taste was not such different, but the image of the brand, yes.

from an interview with Ciprian Muresan
in Art Review, October 7, 2009

(See a portion of this video, after the fold…)

(more…)

April 21, 2010

Politechnika Packaging

Photo of the original “Büvös Kocka” packaging via: Baxterweb Puzzle Auctions

When Erno Rubick’s famous puzzle first came out in 1977—before Ideal Toy Corporation got involved—it was called “Büvös Kocka” (Magic Cube) and was manufactured only in Communist-Bloc Hungary by Politechnika Ipari Szövetkezet. (aka: Politoys)

The puzzle was first packaged in this interesting folding carton—(with integral hang hole flap).

(More folding cartons, after the fold)

(more…)

April 6, 2010

Cildo Meireles’s Coca-Cola Project

Cildo Meireles, Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos [Insertions in Ideological Circuits] (1970)

In the 1970s, soda bottles in Brazil were still being returned, refilled & resold. Asserting that “the container always carries with it an ideology,” artist, Cildo Meireles began “inserting” his own subversive messages into the cycle.

For the Coca-Cola Project Meireles removed Coca-Cola bottles from normal circulation and modified them by adding critical political statements, or instructions for turning the bottle into a Molotov cocktail*, before returning them to the circuit of exchange. On the bottles, such messages as ‘Yankees Go Home’ are followed by the work’s title and the artist’s statement of purpose: ‘To register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation’. The Coca-Cola bottle is an everyday object of mass circulation; in 1970 in Brazil it was a symbol of US imperialism and it has become, globally, a symbol of capitalist consumerism. As the bottle progressively empties of dark brown liquid, the statement printed in white letters on a transparent label adhering to its side becomes increasingly invisible, only to reappear when the bottle is refilled for recirculation.

–Tate Online

(Some money shots & more, after the fold…)

(more…)

February 4, 2010

Buckfast Blowback

Photo by Kieran Dodds via: The New York Times

Some packaging-related content in an article in today’s New York Times…

Paralleling Russia’s battles with alcoholism—(see: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Campaign)—Scotland’s drinking problems are prompting legislation to try and curb alcohol consumption and its attendant bad behavior.

Unfortunately for Buckfast, the popularity of its caffeine-fortified “tonic wine” (with consumers in this market) also makes it a prominent symbol of a social problem.

…the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them)…

Legislation to curb drinking is of particular interest here in Scotland’s old industrial heartland, or the “Buckfast Belt,” where Buckfast is considered a regional favorite. The drink is so ubiquitous in this working-class town, not far from Glasgow, that some people call it Coatbridge Table Wine (others call it “loopy juice,” or, adding their own twist as they channel Travis Bickle, “Who’re you lookin’ at?” wine.) Buckfast is no newcomer to the market, having become popular in the first half of the 20th century, when it was prescribed by doctors for down-in-the-dumps miners and sold in drugstores.

One person’s helpful mood improver, though, is another’s worryingly effective stimulant. The drink is 15 percent alcohol by volume, a bit stronger than most wines. Also, each 750 milliliter bottle contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke.

For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle
By Sarah Lyall, NY Times, February 3, 2010

Interesting that—(like Vimto)—Buckfast began life as a health tonic. Sometime (when there’s time) boxvox must do a round-up of other contemporary products that began as Victorian patent medicines. (Like Coke, for instance.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

February 2, 2010

Two Golden Packages

Two golden packages: Helena Rubinstein “Gold Future” eye reviver cream jar (top) and Hennessy’s “Paradis Horus” Cognac bottle (below).

Freedom of Creations’ design for the “Gold Future” eye jar includes a flexible nylon helix that encases a smaller gold jar with a cap.

Ferruccio Laviani’s design for the “Paradis Horus” Cognac bottle includes an over-sized stopper that frames the bottle in a stylized overflow of golden liquid. (More images at Design Boom.)

Although gold packaging is pretty typical for luxury goods like cosmetics and liquor, the timing of these two recent packages may seem counterintuitive, considering the current economic climate. Why flaunt the golden excess of luxury packaging at a time when Wall Street is getting so much criticism over excessive bonus pay?

It may be, however, that this is the perfect time for golden packaging. The name “Gold Future,” while sounding luxuriously optimistic, is also a pretty unambiguous reference to the “safe haven” investment strategy of buying gold during times of economic instability.

Running against the trend to lighten packaging—(and its carbon footprint)—both of these designs use extra materials to create an illusion of solid gold plasticity. For the eye cream: a flexible golden skin that can be peeled off in a coil. For the cognac: a simulated geyser of golden liquid that can be popped off like a cork.

(via Lovely Package and PopSop)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

packaging as content

Contact Box Vox

Packaging Songs

join our pack

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Archives

May 4, 2011

March 16, 2011

February 14, 2011

November 24, 2010

October 20, 2010

October 19, 2010

July 19, 2010

June 14, 2010

June 2, 2010

May 26, 2010

May 25, 2010

May 24, 2010

May 19, 2010

April 21, 2010

April 6, 2010

February 4, 2010

February 2, 2010

Kudos

Consumer/Culture

other pack-blogs

links

More Links

Categories