MentalPolyphonics

Karen snapped this today:

I love it for a couple of reasons.

First, it exists at several removes from any kind of reality. The box originally contained a ceramic coffee cup in the shape of a paper coffee cup, which is itself a proxy for a ceramic coffee mug. So we’ve replaced a mug with a proxy (paper cups) then made an ironic simulation of the proxy (ceramic “paper” cups) and replaced that proxy-simulation with a proxy purporting to be a simulation (the paper cup “speaking” through the text on the box — yes, it’s also anthropomorphic). Then we made an image of it in addition to the image on the box itself.

If you followed that, follow this:

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Karen was able to take that picture, therefore objective Truth does not exist and we are probably living in the Matrix[*].

Second, it reminded me of The Treachery of Images, but it’s a little more treacherous. Sure, the photographic image isn’t a paper cup, but if you think of it as sculpture it gets weirder. The box is not a paper cup, but what’s inside it actually is (though the box goes into detail about how it’s not). The work is telling us the truth and lying to us simultaneously.

Third, it’s all empty. What we’re looking at is packaged packaging. The box used to contain a cup, the cup used to contain coffee, but it’s actually all empty. In a sense nothing is there.

But by wrapping the wrapper in a wrapper the nothing becomes enough of a something that people were still looking at it after we left our copy of the Seattle simulation of an Italian coffeehouse. It made me wonder at the extent to which we ascribe meaning to packaging: It doesn’t look like garbage, does it? It’s lying to us again, semiotically.

Doesn’t the boxed cup look too important, too much like an “official” object to throw out? But we know the secret: It’s actually empty garbage appropriating the symbolism of Consumerism, which makes it politically ironic — Why did we fetishize the permanent masquerading as the disposable in the first place?

Symbol-stealing packaged empty packaging truth-lying to us about it’s contents: “I’m a simulated proxy! Or am I?”

A fantastic piece that has absolutely nothing to do with coffee.

[*: Re-reading this in the morning I realized how insane it sounds. Baudrillard was criticized, perhaps rightly, for saying "hyperbolic and declarative" things like that. On the surface I'm playing with hyperbole too -- that argument doesn't work, however I do believe that all of its components should be fiercely wrestled with.]