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Cardboard Catalogue essay

I’ve seen cardboard homes around the world. They look much the same in Yorkshire, Tokyo, Manila, London, Paris, New York, Perth, except that, in Tokyo, the old domestic rules apply, shoes outside the threshold, futons hung out to air. Almost everywhere the destitute and marginalised dwell in brightly labelled containers from somewhere else, intended for goods they can never afford. Universal cardboard came with consumerism. It is the absolute index of the triumph of capital and globalism and the misery they can bring. Kids build castles from cardboard boxes. It is the most despised, the most humble of materials. It can also be home for the dead, symbolic and practical. George Harrison was cremated in a cardboard coffin.



Strange stuff cardboard, at once endless promise and doomladen denial, glamourous one minute, garbage the next. Tough brown cardboard carries white goods, fruit and veg, glossy, laminated, colour printed pasteboards contain everything else, from shoes and underwear to toothpaste and scent. They can perfume the cardboard package, so you think you smell its contents. They can wax it to hold milk and fruit juice. Then there’s the all too familiar chateau cardboard. Maybe they pack nuclear warheads in cardboard boxes. If you walk down a city street your gaze will always fall on cardboard.



It’s only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea,

But, it wouldn’t be make-believe, if you believed in me.

Old popular song

The mutability of cardboard, its universality, its intimate affinity with all desirable things, its primary status as a container/substitute for everything else, prompts the suggestion that it is the most virtual product possible. This material is never itself, always a veil, a token for some desired object, a revelation in waiting. Even so cardboard is irrevocably enmeshed with modernism and modernity. Playing cards, visiting cards, christmas cards and jigsaws came first in the mid nineteenth century. Early inventors dreamed of cardboard clothes, cardboard furniture, cardboard cars, a cardboard bowler hat. Then came the hard heads of technology. Advertising and the printing industry took hold. Capitalist modernity, that glamourous century long vanishing trick of our richly resistant material world, ran smoothly to a conclusion. Postmodernity has been defined, by Jameson and many others, as the cultural state reached when no nature, no authentic material condition beyond culture and ideology remains to be desired or exploited. If there is a landscape at the end of the third millenium the chances are that it will be cardboard, a pulp and glue packaging memorial to forests woodchipped to ease the world wide progress of consumer capital. In 2001, cardboard is already the most natural thing in the world.



Just Fold Along The Dotted Lines

Back of a cornflakes box

Cardboard, far more than plastic, is, par excellence, the omnipresent substance of modernity. This makes it difficult stuff for art making. It repels attempts to treat it as a medium in the manner of paint, canvas, wood, bronze, stone and so on. Technology long ago reconfigured all traditional artistic media beyond recognition - consider the paint tube or the chemistry of acrylics,- but, for whatever reason, they retain an aura that cardboard never had. Few viewers notice that a painting by David Hockney is hi-tech, nothing to do with Rembrandt or Titian. Cardboard is, always and forever, industrial, inescapably the packaging never the contents. Cardboard is cheap, the most common found material, the most realistic. Artists who use cardboard are freed from pretence, able to disrespect their craft so as to rediscover the material substance of experience.

Cardboard can be stamped, moulded, cut and folded - all industrial processes. Picasso and Braque used it to make 3D versions of their cubist images. There is a famous photo of, I think, Picasso with a cubist cardboard guitar on the wall behind him. The abstract, even arbitrary planes of the instrument, are given by the material qualities of cardboard, the very same qualities produced to the requirements of industry. There has been much pretentious prattle about the theory of relativity in the context of cubism. Forget about Einstein. Think of synthetic cubism as a visionary method of repackaging the world, a fold it yourself tableau on the back of a cornflakes box.

Aesthetics, the pretence that autonomous beauty exists, that it has laws apart from the material, has always been the last refuge of the scoundrel. The very mutability of cardboard, its absence of consistent material characteristics, its association with every banal form and substance in our corrupt cornucopia of consumer goods and tainted desires, endowed it with a remarkable power to scandalise the pretences of high art and its wanker academic acolytes. It was a Dada favourite, a Surrealist sine qua non. A simple figure drawing on cardboard is repackaged by its support, a handcrafted bone flung in the teeth of wolfish modernity. Cardboard collages instantly plug the viewer into a swelling universe of production and products. Cardboard found objects form its doppelganger archaeology. Cardboard locks art into the pains and pleasures of a material existence. It is a valuable political resource. We can do with it what we will.



This way up. Use no Hooks, Please Recycle.

Various cardboard boxes.

George Harrison, a washing machine, a book or a bunch of bananas its all the same to the cardboard box. In the prevalent banal excess the container is the key to all desire - you buy the lifestyle, the pre planned holiday, the degree in Fine Arts, from the package, the pictures in the colour brochure, long before the experience itself. I wish disappointment and depression were likely to follow. The evidence is against me. People prefer to be empty boxes, they compete to be containers for all the crap is around. Big Brother is the biggest cardboard box in the universe and oh boy! have the contestants got the goods! Well, actually, they are the goods. The pathetic attempts of the excluded losers to relocate themselves as quality products strike me as up market versions of the confessions at Stalin’s show trials. This is humanity as a cardboard box, life as an never to be opened package. At the same time, cardboard is the greatest spiritual force we have, the universal reminder that all things must pass, we must all pass through the great waste incinerator. Becoming a cardboard box is no guarantee of immortality nor will it ease the pain of dying.

This exhibition engages the history of cardboard from cards and jigsaws to the ultimate package a Sydney gallery and a real time Paris studio, complete with artist sound and light, packed in cardboard . There are mobile boxes cut into the shape of a human bodies, sleeping like spoons for comfort. There is woven cardboard. There are spaces empty and filled with junk and desire. There are boxes hanging on the walls, packages of packages, life size figures, a pregnant woman, a consumer standing at attention. Will it ever end? Shall we be boxed in forever?.
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Me = Scared^infinity