box vox

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...)

Uncapped Landfill Bottle #2

Some vintage medial waste found on the beach at Dead Horse Bay:

1. An injectable medicine vial (shaped just like my insulin bottles, only a litle bigger) with a script “L” on the bottom, identifying its source as Eli Lilly—(again, the same company that manufactures my insulin today). But, who knows what injectable drug this bottle once contained?

2. Part of a huge 20cc glass syringe with Luer-Lok branding. Luer-Lok is Becton, Dickinson’s trademarked name for cofounder, Fairleigh S. Dickinson’s patented hypodermic syringe connection system. No sign of the needle or the plunger.

The contents now washing out of this eroding landfill preceeded the AIDS epidemic by about three decades. So no worries there. Although, as one person familiar with the area put it, “Don’t get too comfortable handling it. The 1950’s were the worst for chemical dumping in our country’s history. The garbage from the 1850’s [on the other hand] is deep in the middle under the airport.”

Not that you can’t find more recent medical waste on a New York City beach. Just last April, Debby (my partner at Beach Packaging Design) found a relatively fresh vial of blood on South Beach. (photo on right)

This more contempory bit of medical waste still had its label showing the source to have been Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.

As suggested by its name, “Franklin Lakes” has lakes and is not adjacent to an ocean. This blood vial, therefore, did not float all the way to Lower New York Bay from one of Franklin Lake’s lakes. Not without some illegal human intervention.

But I digress. Here’s what my 20cc Luer-Lok syringe probably looked like when it was still intact...

(See also: Diabetic Packaging, Early Insulin Packaging and Color-Coded Bloodstream)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Chalky White’s House

Staten Isand Savings Bank on Beach Street (via); Boardwalk Empire “No Parking” sign (via: the telephone pole outside of our house)

In our previous post about the Bechtel beer bottle collection, we promised there was more to say about a house in our neighborhood that brewery-owner, George Bechtel gave to his daughter, Anna on her wedding day in 1887. (NY Times wedding announcement, on right)

Available as a movie location via Cynthia von Buhler’s CVB Spaces—(see also: Von Buhler’s Prize Capsules)—this house has recently been the site of filming by HBO’s Boardwalk Empire—a show whose credits and theme song, we’ve already covered here. (See: Opening Bottle Credits)

Celebrity Sighting
Last week I was walking down to the bank, when who should I see on my street? Apparently heading to the wardrobe trailer, but already wearing a brown, turn-of-the-century gangster suit? The Atlantic City bootlegger, Chalky White! (played by Michael Kenneth Williams who also played Omar Little from The Wire)

I was delighted to later learn that, in the Boardwalk Empire story line, the big historic house built by George Bechtel is to be Chalky’s house!

“Chalky’s operation takes the whiskey that Nucky has smuggled across the Canadian border, distills it and repackages it, allowing Nucky to get 3000 bottles out of the initial 500.”

BoardwalkEmpire.wikia.com

We had initially guessed that the big house around the corner was being cast as a new residence for Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder (played by Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald). That would have been cool too, but for Chalky White to be our new neighbor, in residence at the Bechtel house is historically more interesting...

The HBO series is based on Nelson Johnson’s book, Boardwalk Empire. His follow up book, “The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City” focuses on the history of Atlantic City’s black community...

“The city’s very existence was dependent on money spent by out-of-towners (and) Atlantic City’s solution was unique for its time. The hotel industry reached out to the Upper South and recruited people… former slaves and their dependents, coaxed to the North during the three generations following the Civil War.” According to Johnson, “African Americans built Atlantic City. Remove them from its history and the town we know today never comes to be.” –LTS Wire

In Boardwalk Empire, Chalky White, himself a recent descendant of former slaves, is the head of Atlantic City’s black community— “the de facto mayor of Chickenbone Beach.”

Staten Island had slavery up until 1827 when it was abolished in NY State. Bechtel, Stapleton’s leading citizen (and largest taxpayer on Staten Island) during the NY City draft riots in 1863, appears to have played an Oskar Schindler type role in helping to hide and protect black people:

Mr. Bechtel has been foremost in all public and benevolent matters. During the negro riots in 1861 he sheltered large numbers of these homeless people in the woods and sent them nourishment daily till the trouble had subsided, a circumstance which the colored people on Staten Island have never forgotten and for which they have been ever grateful.

History of Richmond County
by Richard M. Bayles, 1889

He also appears to have had a hand in founding Staten Island Savings Bank...

During the Civil War, Staten Island was home to abolitionists and pro-Union residents as well as those who bemoaned the loss of trade with the South... It was in the midst of the crisis that Francis Gould Shaw, the abolitionist, Louis H. Meyer, a financier, John Bechtel, the brewer and eighteen other Staten Island business men petitioned the state legislature for incorporation of an institution to be know as the Staten Island Savings Bank.

excerpt from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s
proposal to landmark the Staten Island Savings Bank building

The very same bank that Chalky White’s dressing room was parked right across the street from. Or course Bechtel’s fingerprints are all over our little neighborhood. His brewery was also within easy walking distance.

Prohibition is what ultimately put Bechtel’s brewery out of business, and it’s also what made Chalky White so prosperous.

Bechtel’s NY Time Obituary, July 18, 1889, appears on right.

(A couple more things, after the fold...)

Bechtel Beer Bottle Collection

On left: Bechtel beer bottle from  Rick’s Bottle Room; on right: photo of the Bechtel Brewery in 1890 from the Staten Island Advance

If you are a collector of historic bottles, it is vitally important that your collection be housed and displayed in way that signifies its historic significance.

This became abundantly clear to me a while back when I attended a festive community meeting at a historic house in our neighborhood—a house that was built by the Staten Island brewer, George Bechtel and given to his daughter, Annie as a wedding present in 1888.

The current owner now collects rare Bechtel Beer bottles and, knowing that I was interested in vintage packaging, he led me to the table where he had set up his collection for display. When we reached the table, however, it was empty and there were no bottles to be found. It turned out that his collection was not adequately signified in that particular location.

To the folks, serving and clearing food that day, these were just more bottles that need clearing. His entire collection of historic bottles had been efficiently swept up and put into the recycling bin along with the contemporary beer bottles!

Fortunately none of the historic bottles were broken that day and he was able to rescue them.

Above, left: George Bechtel’s daughter’s house as it looks today (via: The Forgotten Borough); on right: a trio of Bechtel “blob-top” bottles (Note: these bottles are actually from Bruce Mobley’s Beer Bottle library) and were not the bottles mentioned above that were almost recycled.)

Workers of the Bechtel Brewery

The Bechtel Brewery was the earliest business to convert to electricity on the Island, with owner George Bechtel installing electricity in 1885. It also was one of the first businesses to employ refrigeration, using compression pumps and ammonia to cool the beer.

The offshoot of the brewing industry during its prime was social activity. Bechtel’s in Stapleton provided picnic grounds and dancing during the summer..

S.I. Advance

More about George Bechtel and his daughter’s house, tomorrow...

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Lisa Dahl’s “Suburban Export”

Lisa Dahl at work (photo by Daniel Carlson from Daniel Carlson NYC’s Flickr Photostream): photo on right from Lisa Dahl Studio Blog

In the past, Lisa Dahl has constructed little houses from wood grained contact paper (Sub Prime) and security envelopes of financial institutions (Trickle Down). This time, the houses are to be made from recycled packaging:

Suburban Export is a paper sculpture series that uses lightweight household cardboard to create small houses, formed from a single template, which are then arranged into neighborhoods based on suburban development patterns. Using this recyclable material to create art humorously points to the never ending flow of products that run through our households — some of which we can reuse or recycle, most of which we throw away. The name of this series “Suburban Export” resulted from the realization that trash is the main commodity that comes out of the residential zones of our cities.

COAHSI’s 2011 Original Work Grantees

(Another photo of the neighborhood, after the fold...)

Steampunk Brewing Sculpture

Photo by Mike Shane for the Staten Island Advance

Scott Van Campen & Mark Zappasodi’s COAHSI-supported “Brewing as Art” project: a portable, steampunk-style brewery.

If you are in the NYC area tomorrow you would be well advised to attend their opening —(at The Nobel Maritime Museum at Snug Harbor, Staten Island: Tomorrow, Saturday October 30th at 7 pm... directions)— where this beer-making sculpture will be put through its paces:

20 Gallons of FREE CRAFT BEER provided by New Brighton Brewing: “Maritime Ale”, “Dusseldorf Old Ale”, and Staten Island Brewfest Bronze Metal Winner “Ginger Foot Saison” will be served until the kegs are tapped!

Brewing as Art blog

I first heard of this project last year when I met Mark Zappasodi and happily consumed some of his home-brewed beer. It sounded to me like a radical gallery project along the lines of Helmut Smit’s “The Real Thing” installation (a machine that converts Coca-Cola into clean drinking water) or Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca” (a digestion/defecation machine).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that “brewing sculptures” were an established practice in home brewing circles:

A brew sculpture is a structure that holds the various vessels... used in all grain brewing. One of the major advantages to using a sculpture is that it normalizes the brewing process allowing for a smoother brew day and reducing setup and tear down time. Vessel to vessel connections can be made somewhat permanently and optional devices like pumps and chillers can be mounted as well. Most sculptures are made as compact as possible and feature castors/wheels to tuck it out of the way between brew sessions. The variance of design is limited only by the brewer's imagination, budget, and fabrication skills.

HomeBrewTalk.com

Most “brewing sculptures,” however, are highly practical affairs—DIY engineering projects for making beer, never intended for exhibition—and certainly not funded by any public arts organizations!

For their brewing sculpture, Campen & Zappasodi clearly paid unusual attention to certain aesthetic details...

Regarding its steampunk vibe, Campen says, “I think the overall aesthetic of using that sort of Victorian style, it sort of evolved from the original discussion we had about how to tie in the history of brewing of Staten Island 150 years ago”

(Another photo, after the fold...)

Toxic Trail Mix

A follow-up on Debby Davis’s Toxic Trail Map project:

Hikers following her map of the toxic trail, might need a quick boost of “energy” —(petrochemical, methane gas, atomic, whatever...)—hence, Toxic Trail Mix.

Based on a tongue-in-cheek suggestion from her brother-in-law [Hal Ludacer], Debby has envisioned what form such a product might take and she’s come up with three varieties: Brookfield Crunch, ADM Salty Snack, and Fresh Kills Clusters.

Her Toxic Trail Mix packaging features a die cut window shaped like oil spill and a sensibility reminiscent of Wacky Packs.

(Larger images follow after the fold...)

www.ToxicTrailMap.com

The screen shot above is part of a project by Beach Packaging Design partner, Debby Davis: an online “Toxic Trail Map of Staten Island.” (There is also a printed version that is to be included as a poster in the centerfold of the Fall 2010 COAHSI newsletter.)

“With the support of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and Staten Island Creative Communities, artist Debby Davis has spent the past year mapping and documenting the areas of Staten Island which have been contaminated by industry corruption and neglect.”

Here is something that plenty of other communities could probably also use: a map of places its citizens might want to avoid.

[Site #15]  Among the places we try not to picnic here on Staten Island: a radiologically contaminated spot near the Bayonne bridge where 1,250 tons of uranium ore, earmarked for The Manhattan Project were once stored. “The site, located in a weed and junk-filled lot adjacent to the Kill Van Kull and the Bayonne Bridge is easily accessible through a rickety chain link fence.”

[Site #36]  But not everything here is so futuristic and atomic. Staten Island was also a major manufacturing center in the days of patent medicine.

The Oakland Chemical Company’s factory was located in the Staten Island town of Rossville. They manufactured hydrogen peroxide under the brand name, “Dioxogen.” Like other medicinal products of the time, Dioxogen’s advertising claimed a multitude of hyperbolic health benefits. “The only active force in Dioxogen is Oxygen—the cleansing force of the universe.” 

Bottle on right was purchased on eBay. Their bottles were also packaged for a time with a paper outer wrap—(very similar to early Listerine Mouthwash packaging.)

Dioxogen packaging photos above via: Sure Cure Antiques

1916 Dioxogen ad via Modern Mechanix

(More about Site #36, after the fold...)

Shopping Cart Toy?

I got this shopping cart last month from the Salvation Army. Is it a toy? I’m not so sure. It’s pretty utilitarian and, aside from being little, there’s nothing to indicate that it was meant to be a toy. (No toy company branding, etc.) I was thinking it might be some sort of retail display prop. If it is a shopping cart toy, it’s the second shopping cart toy that we’ve featured here on box vox—(see: the first one)—and the only shopping cart that I ever actually bought. It’s about 1/3 actual size, but I got it for 1/2 off.  ( $12.00 ÷ 2 = $6.00 )

For the photo I loaded it up with groceries and foodstuffs that we had on hand. A couple of these brands, we’ve covered before. (Remember this one or this one?)

(Update: All questions answered by an astute commenter, after the fold...)

Freshkills Park: Native Meadow Mix

Back in September, (when I had the honor of inaugurating Freshkills as a new battery-powered, outdoor music venue) one thing that really struck me was how the short scrubby grass that I had seen there last Fall had, over the Summer, become like “amber waves of grain.” Atop the landfill: a bucolic meadow.

The “Native Meadow Mix” seed packet was designed in-house by Raj Kottamasu, community coordinator for The New York City Parks Department’s Freshkills Park project. (Coincidentally, Raj is profiled in today’s NY Times.)

The seed packets are not for sale, but will be given away to those attending the free, public bus tours of the Freshkills Park site. The seeds, indigenous to the NYC Metro area, were collected by the Greenbelt Native Plant Center and are the same species that will be used in the restoration of the former landfill site. 

(More photos after the fold...)

Von Buhler's Prize Capsules

Another packaging-related artwork from last weekend’s “Mapping Staten Island” show: Cynthia Von Buhler’s Cynth-O-Matic vending machine. This interactive sculpture caught me off guard and I was putting quarters into it before I had really sorted out my (art-consumer) choices carefully.

“This one has some color,” I thought to myself, “I’ll have one of those...” [turned the handle—made my first purchase] “Oh, it’s menstrual blood... hmmm, what were my other choices? Eyelashes, fingernail clippings, hair, pubic hair... OK, I’ll buy one more capsule, but I cannot be the guy who comes in here and buys only menstrual blood & pubic hair, so I guess I’ll have to go with the fingernails...”

The Cynth-O-Matic machine soon separated this doddering old fool and his money (Photos above by Debby Davis)

Although the capsules’ labels claim that their contents are “100% Genuine” I do have some doubts about their authenticity. As a collector, I don’t want to open these capsules (thereby diminishing their resale value) but, to my eyes, the fingernails look a little plastic and the red seems too bright. (Doesn’t blood dry out and turn brown?) Plus, hair and fingernails take a while to grow. We covered another reliquary type fingernail artwork (here) and, in that case, it took the artist a long time to accumulate a quantity of fingernail clippings. Of course if the contents of Von Behler’s capsules turn out not to be genuine then what I lose as fetish object, I gain in commentary on truth-in-advertising. Her website has this to say about the project:

Have you ever noticed that when you go to an art opening, many people are more focused on the artist than the artwork? Frequently, art viewers do not seriously look at the art. Usually they drink the wine, eat the cheese, and show more interest in the artist than in their art. The Cynth-O-Matic is the answer to this troubling problem. For 25 cents, you can actually have a piece of the artist.

(More photos and another of Von Behler’s package-related vending machines, after the fold...)

Nicholas Fevelo's Water Museum

“Staten Island Water Museum” by Nicholas Fevelo: on left samples of water from various bodies of water on Staten Island (including at least one bottle of someone’s used bath water); on right: “found” bottles of urine (Photos by Debby Davis)

Around 1986, at the height of the 1980s real estate boom, my pregnant wife and I joined a group homesteading an abandoned building in the South Bronx. Plumbing was on a DIY basis and, in one of the bedroom closets of our newly assumed home, we found stacks and stacks of Ballantine Ale bottles, each filled with urine.

Nicholas Fevelo’s “Staten Island Water Museum” reminded me of that. Found objects have had a long cultural history in contemporary art—(Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal comes to mind)—but for someones private collection of urine-filled bottles to be found by someone else and then put on public display raises interesting questions. Whose urine is this? Is this the evidence of a homeless, plumbingless life? Or just the foul aftermath of someones illicit drinking party with no convenient bathroom?

Favelo was one of the ten artists participating in the aforementioned “Mapping Staten Island Show” where stacks of shipping pallets served as the gallery walls and pedestals.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Shipping Pallet Exhibition Space

Top photo by Mike Shane; second row: drawings by Archicorp; third row: photo by Debby Davis; bottom: photo of The Great Unwashed performing among the pallets by Mike Shane

Shipping pallets, formerly a behind-the-scenes, invisible part of packaging are now enjoying a new limelight. (Perhaps because of their current prominence in warehouse stores? Or a general ecological desire to recycle used lumber?)

Archicorp and COAHSI used the idea of “pallet forts” as the guiding principle for creating smaller exhibition areas within the vast container terminal...

The Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island (COAHSI) turned Staten Island’s massive New York Container Terminal into a contemporary museum for a special arts weekend highlighting the work of ten borough artists. The exhibit, entitled “Mapping Staten Island,” explores these artists’ perceptions of their resident borough, through physical installations, video, light, and musical recordings. The exhibit space—created by the newly established firm Archicorp—will be a work of art in itself, as actual shipping pallets will be used to build walls, tables and other structures to display the artwork. After the exhibit, the pallets will be recycled and used for their original purpose of transporting consumer goods...

The selection of the New York Container Terminal as the venue for the exhibit also builds on Staten Island’s specific geography and history. Each exhibition room was constructed from shipping pallets and designed like a fort, 20 x 10 feet long. The pallets were literally “branded” by hot iron brands, bearing the logo or tag line of each sponsor. Deconstructed after the gala, these branded pallets will now rejoin the flow of global trade, sharing with the world a small part of Staten Island.

adapted from COAHSI’s Press Release (I changed from future tense to past tense since the event took place last week.)

(More shipping pallet projects and products after the fold...)

Brendan Coyle's Mortal Coil Pack

It may be a symptom of my own obsessive marginalia, but after attending the “Verfall: Decadence and Decay” show this summer (curated by Ginger Shulick) the piece that really stuck with me was artist/performance artist, Brendan Coyle’s polybagged vampire teeth (upper left) with an “Eternal Life” religious tract as the header card. According to Coyle, “It was kind of like a visual caption or accompanying piece” to his larger “Candy Corpse”—(a candy-colored crime scene with high-fructose body parts, licorice string viscera and packaging evidence of candy & cigarette consumption).

What I like so much about the ‘eternal life’ polybag, is the logic and simplicity of the combination. Summing up in one gesture all that is hopeful, yet creepy about immortality. (Brendan Coyle’s mortal/immortal-coil pack.) It also set me to thinking about the hackneyed graphics of religious tracts, in general, and I even found a nice Flickr Set of them: here —(including a Spanish version of the one Coyle used.

The “sugar power” sugar cube is a bit of “found” packaging that Coyle had incorporated into an earlier performance piece and suggestive of yet another good area of arcane packaging exploration: the sugar cube.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Guitar with Packaging Skin

Originally the idea was that I’d be singing songs about packaging & playing a cigar box guitar on top of the landfill. I had even found an El Producto cigar box on eBay that I thought particularly suitable —(conflating stringed instruments: harp & guitar)—and I planned on commissioning my guitar-builder friend, Ted Crocker to turn this cigar box into a 6-string guitar for me. Unfortunately, The budget would not stretch far enough for that. So I decided instead to just give the Edison Volt a sort of packaging skin. (See: package as skin)

The skin in this case: a corrugated Tropicana shipping case. At first I was thinking of using something more pop and super-graphic. (like an economy size Tide box) But then it occurred to me that that sort of iconic branding could easily overshadow the whole enterprise, making it seem like an event sponsored by that brand. The upside down shipping carton seemed like a way around that, and it happened to coordinate with the brown kraft labels of the DIY CD packaging.

Although box vox had very little to say about last year’s Tropicana branding brouhaha, I could not resist referencing it now in my own small way. (The new orange-shaped cap serves as my tone control knob.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Trash Tracking & Landfill Packaging

Upper left photo from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory site; bottom left and right photos by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

“... once the product has been used up, and the package is empty, it becomes suddenly visible once more. This time, though, it is trash that must be discarded or recycled. This instant of disposal is the time when people are most aware of packages. It is a negative moment, like the end of a love affair, and what’s left seems to be a horrid waste.”

Thomas Hines, The Total package

The moment of packaging disposal may be a downer for the consumer, but after the garbage and recycling trucks pull away from the curb, those “suddenly visible” packages become invisible once more. What happens next is something that many people wonder about.

Elizabeth Royte, in her book, Garbageland, did the environmental sleuth-work of trying to track down exactly where her family’s garbage came to rest, after it left the curb.

Trash Tracking
Now, in yesterday’s NY Times, I see that researchers have begun using electronic tracking devices attached to individual pieces of trash to learn more about the fate of of what we discard into our municipal waste streams:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday...

Brett Stav, a senior planning and development specialist for the Seattle Public Utilities, which collects about 2,100 tons of trash and recyclables a day, said that aside from the help with logistics, he saw “tremendous educational value” in the experiment.

“There is this hidden world of trash, and there are ramifications to the choices that people make,” Mr. Stav said. “People just take their trash and put it on the curb and they forget about it and don’t think about all the time and energy and money put into disposing of it.”

Mireya Navarro
Following Trash and Recyclables on Their Journey
NY Times, September 16, 2009

(Liquid Soap bottle tracking map, landfill packaging song, and more, after the fold...)

Mick Rock: Glam! at Show Gallery

©1972 Mick Rock: David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel

Mick Rock is having an exhibit at the Show Gallery, here on Staten Island, “Glam!” which opens tomorrow night. As the photographer who “shot the seventies” it isn’t hard to find iconic album packaging that he had a hand in. David Bowie's Space Oddity. Iggy Pop’s Raw Power. Lou Reed’s Transformer. I guess I could have made a photo-triptych of those 3 covers and used it at the top of this post. But I decided to go instead with the photo above, of the three of them all together during glam rock’s heyday. (A copy of this photo fetched $1,250 at a Christie’s auction in 2008.)

For me, these three are pretty much the leading glam-rock guys of the period, but, hey, if you’re into Marc Bolan he’s here too... (on the T-Rex t-shirt that Iggy’s wearing).

What does this photo have to do with packaging? Note the cigarette pack in Iggy’s teeth. I don’t know if Bowie ever smoked (he did), but we’ve already covered tobacco & Lou Reed. (See: Arents Medal)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Don Pepino and the Droste Effect

I’ve seen this strange, colorful Don Pepino can any number of times and never really gave it much thought. While shopping last week for pizza-making ingredients, I suddenly saw it with new eyes. What’s that the little chef-mascot on the can is holding in his hand? A little Don Pepino can? (Duh!—and I’d thought I had already fully cataloged all of the “Droste effect” packages that our local supermarket carries.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Black Gold in a Jar

Our friend, Tattfoo Tan—(who participated in the Value Pack show)—has lately been doing ecological art-projects involving compost and worm husbandry. Still dealing with the concept of value, “Black Gold” also is also a comment on packaging and even references the Piero Manzoni “Artist’s Waste” can—(that box vox wrote about: here).

Black Gold took the concept of Piero Manzoni into the 21st century by canning worm casting instead of artist's waste. By purchasing this artwork one is confronted the dilemma of using the compost as a plant fertilizer or not using it and maintain it status as a work of art? Piero also price his work weight based on the current value of gold (around $1.12 a gram in 1960) and coincidentally, compost is called Black Gold by gardener because of its value in improving garden soil.

In an undisclosed location, a secret cellar is in the process of brewing the most creative compost ever. The curing process will take a year long but the final results in pure gold. Black gold to be more precise. The special blended concoction is under the skillful hand and eyes of Master Composter Tattfoo. This limited edition 2009 vintage will be available in early spring 2010. Reserve your bottle now.

from TattfooTan.com

Note: Tattfoo appears In the lower right photo with children of the Parkchester After School Program in the Bronx. His boy-scout-style outfit is also part of the project. The “live animal” suitcase is Tattfoo’s portable worm bin.

(A worm-related song clip, after the fold...)

Tub Packaging

Realizing that I needed a more apropos publicity photo for the upcoming S.A.P. landfill event than the “ye olde” fake-tintype photo I’d been using—(with the Edison Volt guitar, which, while owing a certain debt to cigar box guitars, does not really say “PACKAGING!” in any meaningful way)—I sought a better way to package present myself.

What was needed, I figured, was a photo combining me, a guitar and a whole lot of packaging. After searching the house and failing to turn up any bucket seats or butterfly chairs capable of fully containing me and my groceries, it suddenly dawned on me: the bathtub! Here was not only a practical solution to a logistical problem, but also—(since I care about such things)—an image fraught with artistic precedent. The cover of The Who Sell Out, for example, included packaging, performer and bathtub. (The Mamas and the Papas also come to mind, although: no packaging.)

But after first touting the CD packaging and now the press photo, maybe it's time I reveal a little product...

Here’s a sound clip of the first of 4 “feature tracks” on the Songs About Packaging CD:

The Prettiest Package: This song really started with the title and was sort of named after Bowie’s “The Prettiest Star.” (By no means, my favorite track from Aladdin Sane, but ever since I heard it used in the opening soundtrack of the film, Kinky Boots—I hear it differently now.) But I digress. Aside from the title, there’s nothing Bowie-esque about “The Prettiest Package”. (It has nothing to do with Trans Cans and everything to do with Packaging Drag.)

Note: The sound file above is just an excerpt of the song. There are other full-length mp3 files available here, but I’m just trying to maintain a little artificial scarcity for these 4 new songs. (And as mentioned before: the entire CD will be distributed for free to all who attend the free landfill performance on Sept. 26th.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design