My use of branding & packaging

Perhaps the mimicked packaged branding could be a platform for debate in a similar way, to distinguish hypereality and the authenticity of mass production?  Artist Anne Rook, manipulates  food packaging to question awareness of the standardization of food production. These two opposites are finding a way of entwining together in materials, the idea of mimicking what is being critiqued, and the marrying of function and form. In order to truly know what the work is critiquing, perhaps, one needs to either deconstruct it’s opposite,  has it been a success for Jaques Derrida (1930-2004), Dali suggest, Buddha, ying and yang?  

As an example, this has been explored in the artwork titled ‘Jar of Paper Rollmops’ (2013) made both to raise awareness of the degeneration of the fishing community and critique information contained on the mass produced packaging of actual Sainsbury’s brand roll mops.

The Missing ingredients: cultural values, social importance, fishing cultures identity and economic support.

Added Ingredients: Alienation, lack of values, isolation, estrangement and depersonalization.

Preservatives: History, museums, postcards and films.

Benefits: They help fight against a variety of degenerative policies and fading economic insights.

Allergy advice: contains a processed fish alternative. 

Safety: every care has not been taken to prevent the removal of the fishing industry.

‘The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages”.  Jaques Derrida

Baudrillards (1929-2007) text talks about Carl Marx theory of alienation – ‘entfremdung’, meaning the separation of things that naturally belong together, perhaps opposites belong together in order for existence and finding a balance between the two opposites is what is important to life. Baudrillard uses the term ‘absurd paradoxical formula’ on p28 a paradox of reality and illusion, the TV is an example of this, which passes reality into the ‘hyperreal’. Baudrillard is questioning authenticity, truthfulness of origins and intentions of power, capitalism, politics and mass media and material culture.

The drive to mimic branded goods could also be visually critiquing authenticity of mass production and an observation of the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality (hyperreality). Perhaps if we lived in a more ‘syntonic’ (described below) environment hyperreality would not be such an ongoing unresolved topical issue for sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists and political commentators.