Cardboard, Collapse, and Creativity

For some months, cardboard has interested me as an artistic medium. When I had the urge to create, I did it in cardboard. I have not had that urge often, but when I did, I created with corrugated fiberboard.

Cardboard interests me because of its marginality, imperminance, and ubiquity. Modern industrial society produces cardboard not as a goal, but as a side-product of packaging and shipping, and sometimes organization. Cardboard lacks inherent usefulness- it packages and protects other things, but does little else. If we did not make and use so much stuff, we would not need cardboard- its ubiquity derives from our ubiqutous consumption of other, non-cardboard things.

Cardboard crumples and breaks when exposed to water. It must live indoors, in the same conditions that humans feel comfortable in- cool, dry places. The elements make quick work of it if any kind of cardboard is left outside.


Cardboard is a great medium to work in when you are poor and creative. It's the junky crap of an overloaded culture bent on shipping material goods half-way across the world, maddeningly enamored with outsourcing, distance-sourcing. It's the side effect secondary cud of the great modern industrial machine, the ubiquitous trash of a culture made with things. It's everywhere, it's free, and it's big. It's not a shiny, expensive medium. It's not vellum or canvas. It doesn't require upkeep. It CAN'T be upkept. It's emminently replaceable, entirely suitible for rapid prototyping, quick acts of making and creativity. It's great for making a bunch of things fast and loose. It's great for making things that will disapear in a week.

It's there, it's ubiqitous, it's easy to collect huge amounts of it quickly. It works well with tempera and zip ties- sudden, dirty billboards, a little more solid than flyers and posters, but just as fast to fall appart and disapear into the mushy strangeness slicking in every city gutter.

It's great because you don't have to care about the logistics of what you make- you don't have to worry about making it too big or too small, or worry about wasting canvas or paint or time. You can just take ideas and get them out there quickly, get them done and into the world, where they can only be improved upon. And if you hate them, they are gone in a week, forgotten and melted like the Wicked Witch. Put them out into the world, and the good ones will survive.

Do it now, and do it in cardboard!

The City Squid, in Cardboard