box vox

Clown Cereal

Clown cereal boxes (Kellogg’s, General Mills & Post) were, I think, all from Dan Goodsell’s Flickr Photostream

My early childhood was spent in Sarasota, Florida, home of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

While clowns have been culturally waning for some time now, in those days, there was a show called “Circus Boy” on television (starring a young Micky Dolenz who grew up to become the Monkee‘s drummer) and there were lots of circus-themed packages at the grocery store. Not yet scary, clowns were still considered a good way to market children’s cereals.

Why the sudden interest in clowns, you ask?

(Asked and answered, after the fold...)

Baby Shoemaker

Yesterday we looked at four makers of (adult-sized) cardboard shoes. Today we consider another ephemeral shoemaker, Catherine McEver (a.k.a. Rubblearium), whose handmade baby shoes were made from a variety of improbable materials.

Pictured above are shoes made out of emory cloth, cigarette pack foil, a sewing pattern, metal screen, sand paper and carbon paper.

... creations I made for a little art book called “All My Little Shoes,” an experiment in materials from gold mesh to meat.

Stuff You Can’t Have

In addition to her cigarette foil shoe above, another package-related shoe was made from a Campbell’s soup label. (Also awfully nice: her Astroturf shoe)

McEver recommends viewing these photos whilst listening to the Everley Brothers singing “Put My Little Shoes Away” which I am enabling you to do here...

Pensioners and Packaged Foods: Best Before ...

“My wife’s 90-year-old grandmother — having lived through World War II — doesn’t believe in “best before” dates. It made eating at her house rather exciting. Sadly, she had to move to a home and clearing out her larder was as thrilling as being offered a snack. All the products here — going back decades — were, I believe, intended to be eaten.

James Kendall, “Best Before”

James Kendall’s photos of vintage (but still viable?) packaged foods, I can relate to on a personal level...

My late grandmother had a similar disinclination to discard foodstuffs. An elderly box of Nesselroad Pudding in her cupboard was an ongoing joke with my brothers and me.

Of course, in these days of reality television, all types of hoarding are undergoing a closer social scrutiny. Looking at my grandmother’s situation in retrospect, I now regret the smug superiority that we felt towards her housekeeping and her kitchen.

That certainty of ours — that my grandmother was crazy to think that anyone in their right mind would consider eating her box of Nesselroad pudding — was just a part of our being young and newly competent.

“Best before...” certainly does not constitute a drop dead expiration date. It’s more like a serving suggestion, really.

Best before or best by dates appear on a wide range of frozen, dried, tinned and other foods. These dates are only advisory and refer to the quality of the product, in contrast with use by dates, which indicate that the product is no longer safe to consume after the specified date. In spite of this, about a third of food bought is thrown away while still edible.

Wikipedia’s entry on Shelf Life

It’s easy to see why older people might want to push the envelope in this regard. It might even be an inescapable geriatric rule — that as we get older, the food from our kitchen will become increasingly less appetizing to our children. Whether this will be due to failing eyesight, financial hardship or simply our own declining standards of “freshness” is hard to say. Maybe all of the above.

Even if our children become freegans, their food will certainly be fresher than the food in these photos. But so what? Assuming the meal worms and pantry moths have not beaten you to that box of pudding mix: just dust off the top and you’re good to go.

If we can set aside our personal judgments about the “freshness” of packaged products, the importance of packaging in the lives of pensioners becomes more obvious...

(Why packaged food is preferable to home-cooked, after the fold...)

Packaging as Prom Theme

Left: conceptual Tide dress photo by Ryan Yoon, styling by Hissa Igarashi (via MKTG); middle: Katell Gelebart’s Little Friskies coat; right: Frank Sorbier’s 2010 recycled wrappers dress

It’s high-concept/high-fashion to dress models in recycled packaging, but the same idea has been a popular prom theme for some time now...

Top left: DuctTapeRockStar’s Doritos bag prom dress; top right: StrawberryOrange’s “recycled prom dress”; middle: Gondabo’s Coke can tuxedo (“Yeah, I made my prom tux out of coke cans... because I'm just that cool...”); bottom left: Molly Burt-Westvig’s Skittles wrapper prom dress; bottom right: AnnieMarie88’s Starburst wrapper prom dress

(See also: Packaging as Wardrobe)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Fresh Kill

Last weekend we went to the second “Sneak Peek” for Freshkills Park. Naturally, there was some package-related stuff there, which I’m planning to feature in a few days. In the meantime, I’ve been wanting to post this film by Gordon Matta-Clark for a while now...

Fresh Kill 1972, 12:56 min, color, sound, 16 mm film

This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.

(via Freshkills Park blog)

Besides being an interesting conceptual art film in its own right, Fresh Kill provides an indelible “before” picture of the Staten Island landfill in the 1970s, before its ambitious makeover into parkland.

For a contrasting “after” picture, consider the photos below from last weekend’s “Sneak Peek.”

Photo by Raj Kottamasu

(Another photo, after the fold...)

Yesterday And Today

Yesterday I read in the Times, that photographer, Robert Whitaker has died.

Today I’m learning more about the two photos he took that were each used as the cover photo for the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” LP.

I knew that both photos were sometimes there simultaneously, one on top of the other.

I first learned about the “butcher” cover in 1969 when was in 9th or 10th grade. Visiting Clarissa and her fraternal twin sister, Clara, I noticed that their copy of the Yesterday and Today album looked different from the one I had. The title font was the same (“Siegfried” by Dieter Steffmann) but the photo was different.

I was amazed to hear that, by peeling off the photo of the Beatles with the prop trunk, Clarissa had revealed the photo of the Beatles with the prop doll parts and raw meat, printed underneath.

She told me that it was some kind of censorship thing—that people had been offended by the raw meat in conjunction with the doll parts on the original cover.

I remember going straight home and peeling up a corner of the photo on my copy of the record and being pretty bummed out that I did not find any hidden raw meat.

Reaction was immediate, as Capitol received complaints from some dealers. The record was immediately recalled under orders from Capitol parent company EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood ...

Capitol initially ordered plant managers to destroy the covers, and the Jacksonville plant delivered most of its copies to a landfill. However, faced with so many jackets already printed, Capitol decided instead to paste a much more conventional cover over the old ones. The new cover, featuring a picture of a less-than-content band posed around an open steamer trunk, had to be trimmed on the open end by about 3 mm (1/8 inch) because the new sheet, known as a “slick”, was not placed exactly “square” on top of the original cover. Tens of thousands of these so-called “Trunk” covers were sent out. As word of this manoeuvre became known to the public, owners of the altered cover attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to peel off the pasted-over cover, hoping to reveal the original image hidden beneath. Eventually, the soaring value and desirability of unpasted-over Butcher covers spurred the development of intricate and complex techniques for peeling the Trunk cover off in such a way that only faint horizontal glue lines remained on the original cover...

from Wikipedia’s entry about “Yesterday and Today”

What surprises me now, is to learn the extent to which a whole cottage industry with special terminology has sprung up around this minor branding fiasco and the concealed album covers.

Copies that have never had the white cover pasted onto them, known as “first state” covers, are very rare and command the highest prices. Copies with the pasted-on cover intact above the butcher image are known as “second state” or “pasteovers”; today, pasteover covers that have remained unpeeled are also becoming increasingly rare and valuable. Covers that have had the Trunk cover removed to reveal the underlying butcher image are known as “third state” covers; these are now the most common (and least valuable, although their value varies depending on how well the cover is removed) as people continue to peel second state covers. The most valuable and highly prized First and Second State Butcher Covers are those that were never opened and remain still sealed in their original shrink wrap. Since the first documented collector’s sale of a mono Butcher cover LP in 1974, which fetched US $457.00, the value of first state mono versions has consistently appreciated by around 100% per year.

In 1987, former president of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston released for sale twenty-four “first state” butcher covers from his private collection. When the original cover was scrapped in June 1966, Livingston took a case of already-sealed “Butcher” albums from the warehouse before they were to be pasted over with the new covers, and kept them in a closet at his home. These albums were first offered for sale at a Beatles convention at the Marriott Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving weekend 1987 by Livingston’s son. These still-sealed pristine items, which included nineteen mono and five stereo versions, are the very rarest “pedigree” specimen “Butcher Covers” in existence. These so-called “Livingston Butchers” today command premium prices among collectors, the five stereo versions being the most rare and valuable of these. In April 2006, Heritage Auction Galleries sold one of the sealed mono “Livingston Butchers” at auction in Dallas for about $39,000.

There are also websites specifically devoted to devotees of this record cover — thebutchercover.com, for example.

(More photos from Robert Whitaker’s “butcher” session, after the fold...)

Hyperbolic Package Design(a potato sack and a couple of beer cans)

“I wore a certain red dress to a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a beautiful dress. It cost a fortune. I got it at I. Magnin’s. It was a copy of a French original. But one lady columnist wrote that I was cheap and vulgar in it and I would have looked better in a potato sack.”

Marilyn Monroe interviewed by Pete Martin
Pete Martin Calls on Forty of the Most Fascinating and Controversial Celebrities of Hollywood and Broadway

In answer to the highlighted hyperbole above, Monroe’s agent, Johnny Hyde, “promptly went down to L.A.’s warehouse district, got a couple of sacks, and had some photos taken of her wearing one.” (via)

This story is very similar to the story of how Jasper Johns came to create his cast bronze, “Ale Cans” sculpture, based on a crack that Willem DeKooning once made about art dealer, Leo Castelli ...

“Somebody told me that Bill de Kooning said that you could give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans and he could sell them. I thought, what a wonderful idea for a sculpture.”

Jasper Johns
As quoted in “Jasper Johns” by Richard Francis

It’s telling that, in both of these rather backhanded hyperbolic statements, the packaging represents the lowest imaginable thing. A potato sack. A couple of beer cans.

The idea of taking a hyberbolic statement and running with it (as Johnny Hyde and Jasper Johns did) accomplishes two things. It paradoxically proves the point and exposes the fallacy behind it. Burlap bags are not fashionable. Or are they? Beer cans are not fine art. Or are they?

I wonder if a similar rhetorical strategy could be used in package design?

For example, someone could say something like, “Acme Widgets could come packed in a pickle jar and they would still outsell their competitors!” A culturally-savy package designer might then design a category-disrupting “pickle jar pack” for widgets.

The package would still be the scapegoat of the story—(the lowly, loathsome pickle jar)—but the hero of the story would be Acme’s wonderful widgets whose virtues somehow win out despite everything.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Accordion Bottles

As with yesterday’s look at “accordion packs,” although there is one example here of a literally accordian shaped bottle from eBay, accordion bottles, for the most part, are those bottles with expanding/contracting, bellows-like features.

Prior to digital photography, photographers had the option of storing their darkroom chemicals in “air reduction” bottles which “expand and contract depending on amount of contained liquid to ensure it’s air tight and lasts longer.

There are also collapsible sports bottles, sometimes in the shape of a ball.

The bottle shown in the lower left of the photo above is Tnuva Milkshake’s 2003 “Accordion Milkshake Bottle.”

By using the new flexible ‘accordion’ bottle space saving technology the customer stretches to full capacity the flexible bottle only when he wants to consume the product, then the customer shakes the firm closed bottle to desired foamy structure and then only the customer opens the bottle.

via: Global Packaging Gallery

Sometimes accordion bottles are used as syringe-like dispensors, as with the Kuhn Rikon cake decorating bottles below.

We also featured a 2008 collapsible carbonated soda bottle concept by Swerve that was meant to prevent soda from going flat (similar to the darkroom “air reduction” darkroom chemicals bottles), but in recent years, the accordion bottle has been continually reinvented as a space-saving ecological solution.

Here are five examples:

1. Oto Musalek and Josef Zboril’s 2005 “NDC PET” bottle:

My idea was to make a bottle whose volume could be easily reduced. It was obvious that it should fold like an accordion. But the first prototypes did not work because of certain properties of the plastic, so I had to adjust the design of the bottle.

via: Radio Prague

 Their idea also includes an unusual non-adhearing label concept which is intended to make the bottle more efficiently recyclable.

Its design enables an easy separation of the raw materials — the bottle, the label, the cap — and a simple condensation of the empty bottle. Its label is not fixed with adhesives but it is just put on the bottle’s neck.

via: Czech Design

Their patent appears to be for sale.

2. Brengt Brummer’s  2009 “Pop Bottle” is actually a water purification device, and may be a bad example of the accordian-bottle-eco-space-saving idea. It’s ecological, but not by virtue of its recyclability. Like those sports bottles we mentioned above, its collapsibilty has more to do with convenience. Still, it’s a cool looking bottle...

The water filtering system introduced by Bengt Brummer is designed for active users in different environments where the water quality cannot be considered as safe. Dubbed Pop Bottle, the dynamite shaped water bottle has the ability to collapse and expand as required.

via: siahdiar.org

3. James Hart’s 2009 “Twist Bottle” is an accordion bottle, by way of origami:

“This bottle was influenced by collapsible origami cylinders and aims to change the way we interact with plastic packaging. Aesthetics have been improved, whilst re-use has been encouraged and made more enjoyable.”

(2 more examples, after the fold...)

X-Ray Vision and Cereal Boxes

Vita Crunch cereal boxes by Mark Oliver, Inc: brilliant use of product photography on packaging to clearly signify contents. (Can’t think of a more logical product differentiation scheme.)

Even the type treatment, with its strokes & drop shadows, though fairly common in the context of cereal box typography, here serves to heighten the illusion that each box is transparent. Giving consumers a trompe’l'oeil moment of X-ray vision. (See also: Packaging & What Lies Beneath)

Doesn’t seem as if these boxes were ever produced. Sadly.

(Via: PopSop)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Package Design Conveyor Belt

Now open for business: our new web site features this interactive, conveyor belt style shelf showing Beach Packaging Design’s portfoilio. (Mouse over at either end to see more)

On the actual web site the small packages serve as the menu for selecting larger images. (Here they just convey themselves back & forth for your amusement.)

If you‘re in the market for some package design, please stop by.

Feel free to browse, but be careful. (You break it—you buy it!)

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Cameras

...And while we’re on the subject of corn flakes & photography, here are two types of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes camera:

1. top left: a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Mini 110 Camera

This advertising camera is an actual working #110 — miniature Camera / Key Chain, left over from a 1989-90 promotion. It has the Kellogg’s rooster around the lens and is attached to a small key chain! It comes in a colorful small box ornamented with the distinctive Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Rooster. You could get one in 1990 for $4.95 and 2 box tops from a Kellogg’s product. It has the instruction sheet and it all comes packed in it's original shipping tube.

(for sale on Esnarf for $6.35)

Note: although this camera comes packaged in a small, snack-pak style box, the package, itself, is then packaged in a tube.

2. top right: A homemade Kellogg’s Corn Flakes pinhole camera from Joshua Hathaway’s Flickr Photostream. (Some photos he took with it may be seen: here.)

There is also evidence of other people making pinhole cameras from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes...

I built my own [pinhole camera] here to make sure I know what I am talking about — I used a box of Kellogg’s corn flakes which I cut to about half size (the longer the hole to screen distance, the bigger the image and it can actually get too big pretty quickly). Then I cut a hole (about 2 by 3 inches) in the bottom and I taped aluminum foil over it and made my pin hole in that — you want as thin material as you can get, foil is better than the original cardboard. I used the plastic bag from the corn flakes for screen (turns out that Kellogg’s is actually in pinhole camera business, except they don’t know about it) ...

Jan Tichy on Photo.net forum (I’m guessing this is Jan Tichy, the artist.)

(See also: Packaging Cameras)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Bobby Grossman’s Corn Flakes, Die Originalen

“I photographed a number of friends eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The idea originated at RISD when I took a Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed and put it on a box of German Kellogg’s Corn Flakes... You can find a photo of Andy holding the box in Victor Bockris’ Lou Reed biography.” [above left]

–Bobby Grossman

The photo on right is Grossman’s original photograph. (thank you, Bobby!) A color photo of the box was also published in an illustration annual sometime in the 1970s and a black & white photo of the box was featured in the NY Rocker. (shown below)

Yesterday’s post was about the famous (but not infamous) people who are allowed to appear on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes. But it was this subversive take on their package, by photographer, Bobby Grossman, that first set me thinking about cereal boxes as a new, heavily censored type of media.

Ostensibly all-American—(Kellogg’s featured an American flag on one recent version of their corn flakes box)—but they’re really a multi-national, hence: a German box from the 1970s. Onto this already somewhat foreign backdrop, Grossman superimposed as unlikely a mainstream cereal box hero as can be imagined: Lou reed in black leather & black nail polish.

On left: Bobby Grossman’s Corn Flakes box (with appropriated Mick Rock photo) as it appear in the NY Rocker (via: SFview’s Flickr Photostream); on right: photo by Grossman of Warhol eating corn flakes

As a photographer, Grossman then proceeded with a series of unauthorized endorsement shots. Celebrities, but not the sort of celebrities that Kellogg’s generally celebrated. Andy Warhol (of course) but aside from him, mostly musicians...

Photos by Bobby Grossman of David Byrne, Deborah Harry, and David Johansen eating corn flakes

Do musicians in particular have some special affinity for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes? I’ve read that John Lennon wrote a song based on a particular Kellogg’s television commercial jingle...

“Good Morning Good Morning” is a song composed by (credited to Lennon/McCartney) and performed by The Beatles on the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Inspiration for the song came to Lennon from a television commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The jingle went: “Good morning, good morning, The best to you each morning, Sunshine Breakfast, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Crisp and full of fun”.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Good Morning Good Morning

And there’s also the Robert Hilburn book entitled “Corn Flakes with John Lennon.”

But the irony of Lennon using corn flakes advertising as a critique of the middle class, pales in comparison to the irony of Lou Reed on a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box.

Certainly if Kellogg’s would pull Michael Phelps boxes from their shelves due to pot smoking, they’re not likely to feature the author of a song entitled “Heroin” on their cereal. But the irony runs deeper still...

According to Grossman, his idea for putting Reed’s picture on the box “originated in 1974 while listening to Sally Can’t Dance.”

 So considering that Lou Reed’s “Sally Can’t Dance” album includes, “Kill Your Sons” a song about Reed’s electroshock therapy as a teenager in the 1960s...

Reed received electroconvulsive therapy in his teen years to “cure” homosexual behavior; he wrote about the experience in his 1974 song, “Kill Your Sons”. In an interview, Reed said of the experience:

    They put the thing down your throat so you don’t swallow your tongue, and they put electrodes on your head. That’s what was recommended in Rockland County to discourage homosexual feelings. The effect is that you lose your memory and become a vegetable. You can’t read a book because you get to page 17 and have to go right back to page one again.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Lou Reed

And considering the history of Kellogg’s founder, John Harvey Kellogg...

One of the leading advocates of circumcision was John Harvey Kellogg, who is well known for his pseudoscientific views on human sexuality. He advocated the consumption of Kellogg’s corn flakes to prevent masturbation, and he believed that circumcision would be an effective way to eliminate masturbation in males.

from Wikipedia’s entry on Male Circumcision

But Kellogg’s antisexual advice did not end with corn flakes & circumcision. Electrical shocks also came highly recommended as a cure for unwanted sexual impulses.

Electricity.—Probably no single agent will accomplish more than this remedy when skillfully applied. It needs to be carefully used, and cannot be trusted in the hands of those not acquainted with the physical properties of the remedy and scientific methods of applying it.

John Harvey Kellogg
Plain Facts for Old and Young, 1881

(For more about John Harvey Kellogg, see: Porn Flakes)

Also chilling: Kellogg was among the early proponents of the American Eugenics movement and helped the found “Race Betterment Foundation” in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany (and in fact, U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter).

from Wikipedia’s entry on Eugenics in the United States

So for all these reasons, I say, Grossman’s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, die originalen box with the Mick Rock photo of Lou Reed (a Jewish boy from Long Island), strikes me as ultra-ironic.

(Another Die Originalen irony, after the fold...)

Kirsten Justesen’s Sculpture #2

Kirsten Justesen, Sculpture # 2, Ed.7, 1968

Kirsten Justesen’s 1968 Sculpture #2:

“It started with the cardboard box in 1968, Skulptur II. Basically, a sculpture is a plinth with a form on top — and it’s often a naked woman up there. My Skulptur II is a cardboard box with a black-and-white photograph of me inside. So it’s identical with the basic sculpture: the cardboard box is a plinth you can walk round, and there’s a woman in it without any clothes on. And what is more, it’s the artist who has entered into her own work. It can be folded up and it’s easy to transport. It is nothing less than the ideal sculpture...”

Kirsten Justesen interviewed by Malene Vest Hansen

On the one hand, the photo on the box-top of Sculpture #2 functions as a less-than-convincing form of trompe-l’œil, as if one might be fooled into thinking that there’s actually a woman curled up in this box.

On the other hand, Justesen was curled up in this box at one point (or a box like this) in order to take the photo. As with any orthographically-projecting package, the photo on the top of the box speaks to us about the box’s contents, but here there is misdirection. The box is presumably empty and the orthographic projection is of the box’s former contents.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Sticky Fingers Packaging: Zipper vs Tin Can

1. Zipper

Like The Velvet Underground’s “banana” album cover with its novel peeling banana sticker, the other well-known Andy Warhol produced album cover (the Rolling Stone’s “Sticky Fingers” on left) also had novel, conceal/reveal packaging gimmick: a functional zipper, beneath which was another photo of the same model wearing jockey briefs. (See also: Packaging Junk)

Warhol’s chief collaborator for this (as well as the Velvet’s banana cover) was actor & graphic designer Craig Braun. The success of the project was nearly derailed when the zipper packaging began damaging the product:

...a problem was to arise when the first pressings were shipped. Stacking the albums on top of each other caused the zip to press into the album above. This succeeded in damaging the vinyl, ruining side 2, track 3: Sister Morphine. The designer, Craig Braun, was threatened by the record’s distribution label Atlantic, with a substantial lawsuit—but he was to come up with an ingenious, yet simple, solution whilst “very depressed and very high” of pulling down the zipper before shipping so that any damage would only occur to the central label.

–Nick James

2. Tin Can

The album on the right was the alternate cover (designed by Hispavox Records) released in General Franco’s Spain, when authorities objected to the suggestive zipper package. Not the most appetizing of product placements for Fowler’s West Indian Treacle, but this was probably before anyone had ever thought of suing for product displacement. Note the vintage-style bull’s head can-opener. (via: Sleevage)

(After the fold: Jagger writes to Warhol, “Please write back saying how much money you would like.“)

Tattooed Consumer Packaged Goods

We’ve already touched on CPG tattoos yesterday and last week. Here now is a fuller accounting of the product range that some loyal consumers are wearing. Permanently.

Note: The upper right photo of the man with the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise tattoo is © by Robert “Ferd” Frank who played in a band called the Aerovons and recorded an album called Resurrection [album cover here] at Abbey Road in 1969 and who later played bass with John Cougar Mellencamp.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

 

5000 Cans of Cremains

Photo by Melanie Conner for The New York Times

Eva York died in a bathtub in 1896 at the Oregon Asylum for the Insane. After an inquest, which absolved the hospital staff of any blame, no one claimed her corpse, so she was buried in the asylum cemetery and forgotten.

Eighteen years later Eva’s remains were exhumed, cremated, placed in a copper urn and forgotten all over again. Today the corroding canister containing her ashes sits on a plain pine shelf in what’s called the “Cremains Room” at the 122-year-old Salem institution, now known as the Oregon State Hospital.

Eva York is one of about 5,000 patients whose cremains are neatly stacked in that stark, lonely room like cans of paint in a well-stocked hardware store. 

Rick Attig, All The Lonley People
The Oregonian, January 9, 2005

The collection of copper urns came into being in 1913–1914 when the state thought to make better use of the land occupied by the asylum cemetery. The bodies were exhumed, cremated and put into these canisters. All of the cannisters started out with paper labels identifying whose remains each contained, but most of those labels have fallen off or decayed over the years. (See also: Cans Without Labels)

Photo on left by Rob Finch for The Oregonian; photo on right by David Maisel

...at least one former patient said the cremains should stay where they are, in deference to how those patients had truly lived and died — in obscurity.

“To me those cans are a very honest representation of where we were,” said Grace Heckenberg, an advocate who was a patient at the hospital in 1969 and 1970 and said she believes the ashes of one of her ward mates are in an unclaimed urn. “And to take them out and put them out in some nice cemetery with a nice monument — it would just be a lie, a lie about my life, a lie about his life.”

Sarah Kershaw, Long-Forgotten Reminders of Oregon’s Mentally Ill
 NY Times, March 14, 2005

In 2005, photographer David Maisel made a series of photographs of the copper urns, now made into a book.

On my first visit to the hospital, I am escorted to a decaying outbuilding, where a dusty room lined with simple pine shelves is lined three-deep with thousands of copper canisters. Prisoners from the local penitentiary are brought in to clean the adjacent hallway, crematorium, and autopsy room. A young male prisoner in a blue uniform, with his feet planted firmly outside the doorway, leans his upper body into the room, scans the cremated remains, and whispers in a low tone, “The library of dust.” The title and thematic structure of the project result from this encounter.

David Maisel, Library of Dust

(Some additional photos, after the fold...)

Brownjohn vs Cooper

Following yesterday’s thread about Robert Brownjohn’s conceptual-art-style stationery for Michael Cooper, Painter, Bobby Gill has suggested that Michael Cooper was so unaccomplished, that having had Brownjohn design his stationery was, perhaps, his only accomplishment.

“It was very much the style then to have a witty letterhead. Brownjohn designed one for this guy Michael Cooper, who was somebody who hung around, but he didn’t have much personality. The only thing this guy had done was to ask Brownjohn to design his stationery.”

Bobby Gill
(via: Robert Brownjohn sex and typography: 1925-1970, Life and Work)

Smells like hyperbole, right? Well, I thought so, and a little research shows that, in fact, Cooper’s life and accomplishments, when compared to Brownjohn’s, match up in a lot of ways.

1. They both designed album covers for the Rolling Stones.

Cooper photographed and art directed the cover (the first 3D album cover ever) for “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” (above, left)

Michael Cooper was in charge of the whole thing, under his leadership. It was handicrafts day... you make Saturn, and I'll make the rings... People always ask, Are John and George in there? ... They are all in there. And Paul and Ringo... we had to put a stop to it. We were getting the whole of Sergeant Pepper in there, just for the hell of it. It was getting late and Michael finally got Saturn suspended... It was really funny... we should have done a gig that night.

Keith Richards, 1971 (via: Time Is On Our Side)

(Regarding “Satanic Majesties” see also: Tony Meeuwissen)

Brownjohn designed the album cover for “Let it Bleed.” (above, right)—(Photography by Don McAllester; Cake by Delia Smith)

2. They both had smoking habits (also heroin)

They both were smokers. In yesterday’s post we showed photos of Brownjohn and Cooper, as young men. Details from those photos, above, show them each with a cigarette in hand. See also: Brownjohn’s design for a Bachelor’s brand cigarette pack. (Note: we have an ongoing interest in photos of celebrity smokers. See: George Arents Jr. and Bridget Riley’s Rolling Papers)

Robert “Bj” Brownjohn had already made a name for himself as a designer in 1950s New York when he arrived in London in 1960. He claimed that he came over for the city’s creative energy. His girlfriend, the super-chic fashion designer Kiki Byrne, remembers it differently. “You could get heroin on the National Health back then,” says Byrne. “And Bj did have a problem.”

Via: Matt’s Morgue

Cooper has been described as “A heroin addict whose worsening condition confined him to a wheelchair.”

(More similarities, after the fold...)

Letterhead as Conceptual Art

Above is the business stationery that Robert Brownjohn designed in 1967 for photographer, Michael Cooper. Another example of conceptual art’s influence on graphic design.

Rather than designing stationery with a logo and the usual typographic arrangement of name & address, Brownjohn labels each part of Cooper’s stationery system—letterhead, business card & label—with a conceptual-art-style declarative statement, which happens to include Cooper’s name & address. Calling attention not so much to Cooper’s business activities, but rather to Brownjohn’s role in producing Cooper’s stationery.

On left: young Robert Brownjohn; on right: young Michael Cooper

What are we to make of this?

This simplicity of form is matched with clarity of expression. There can be few more straightforward statements than ”Robert Brownjohn designed this letterhead for Michael Cooper.” But, of course, the design’s appearance and tone of restraint prove misleading. They transpire to be a means of casting Brownjohn’s outrageous subversion of the function of the letterhead into even greater relief. It takes quite a nerve to convert a piece of typography intended as an advertisement for someone else into a promotion for yourself. Every communication Michael Cooper made on this paper could not help but be at least as much about Brownjohn as it was about its subject.

Bob Gill has suggested that the letterhead was designed in reaction to being cajoled into doing the job as a favour: “This is the greatest free job ever done by a designer. What does he want to say? I did this for nothing, that’s what.” Meanwhile, Gill’s then wife Bobby had a somewhat different interpretation: “Michael Cooper was somebody who used to hang around, but he didn’t have any personality. Bj thought and thought of something to do for his letterhead, but the only thing this guy had done that was in any way interesting was to ask him to design it.” The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The desire to wreak revenge on exploitative “friends” will resonate with most graphic designers, but accounts of Cooper do hint at a paper-thin personality...

...It could be the case that his letterhead for Cooper was intended as a subtle swipe at the whole King’s Road scene. Although Brownjohn obviously enjoyed his notoriety, his increasingly exaggerated manners and extravagant outfits imply that he had a perpetual sense of the absurd.

Dick Fontaine has suggested that Brownjohn had a 1950s sensibility very different from that of the “velvet-suited” brigade of Cooper and Fraser. It was a case of conceptual art and jazz versus hippy philosophy and psychedelia.

Robert Brownjohn sex and typography: 1925-1970, Life and Work
By Emily King and Eliza Brownjohn 

If, as Bob Gill and his wife suggest, Brownjohn resented the project or didn’t respect Cooper, then why even do it? Maybe the sheer audacity of the idea was, for Brownstreet, kind of irresistible.  

“In his short but intense working life, Brownjohn helped to redefine graphic design, to move it from a formal to a conceptual art.”

Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 1995

Or maybe this was just a combative, but friendly rivalry among creatives? (You know, like between the Beatles and the Stones?) Despite the Bobby Gill’s harsh appraisal of Cooper’s “paper thin” personality, his life and accomplishments actually match Brownjohn’s in number of surprising ways... (which we’ll take a look at tomorrow.)

See also: Logo as Conceptual Art and Robert Brownjohn’s Bachelor Pack

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

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...)

Things Inside Brock Davis’s Refrigerator

In designing packages, we usually think in terms of how a product will look “on the shelf” — but this is surely an unforeseen angle.

Part of Brock Davis’s 2009 “Make Something Cool Every Day” project: “One piece of creative work made every day for 365 consecutive days.”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design