Colourful cardboard graphics, emblems of industrial food and product packaging, are returned to waste almost as soon as they are delivered, turning smiling mascots into soggy, smelly relics. Using Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share (1949) to explore cardboard waste as a capitalist expenditure, the cheerful logos of consumerism become macabre reminders of its excesses when discarded. Cardboard Contagion surveys a range of mascots and typography stenciled on the sides of cardboard packaging collaged into mixed cryptic messages. This zine is produced in the vein of underground publications, such as G.B Jones and Bruce LaBruce’s J.D.s anarcho-punk queer zines (1985-1991), or the eclectic design of Pleasure Dome’s The John Porter Film Activity Book (1998), and Keewatin Dewdney’s esoteric scrapbook that accompanied The Maltese Cross Movement (1967). This project merges the cinematic with the still, decay and preservation, and trash with artistic value. Or, is this another piece of contagious litter, like the zines of old?

Why cardboard? Cardboard, a paper-based everyday packaging material used for shipping and storing is so common that it blends into our environments without much notice or scrutiny. Yet, cardboard is also one of “the single largest waste product in the developing world. It has been estimated that over 24 million tons of cardboard are discarded each year.”¹  A symbol of industrial capitalism, commercial cardboard boxes originated in England in 1817 as a luxury item that was further developed in the United States with easy to assemble corrugated folding boxes.² Graphics evolved with packaging to address the need for businesses to differentiate and develop brand recognition as mass consumerism evolved in the early 20th century. In Bataille’s definition of “the accursed share,” excess is intrinsic to economies which inevitably necessitates spending without recuperation, or when a surplus of energy is not spent for growth, becomes lost.³ The transgression of the meaning of cardboard, from a valuable carrier of commodities to waste, is a form of contagion: the rotting paper material represents a loss in cardboard’s symbolic, functional and monetary value.

Zines represent a similar ephemerality through cheap inks and paper that often mimic the non-commercial attitudes of the communities that adopt them, as in queer or film cultures. The small run of J.D.s queercore zines from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, were DIY xeroxed publications featuring stories, photographs and artworks that drew on the aesthetics of punk and gay subcultures. Pleasure Dome’s The John Porter Activity Book, while not physically a zine, evokes the spirit of one in its survey of a Toronto underground film legend and the visual playfulness of text and image and its interactive quality. Keewatin Dewdney’s scrapbook that accompanied his experimental film The Maltese Cross Movement is only accessible by few low resolution images on the web which has only heightened its stature as an arcane hierographic puzzle. Its visual power even Margaret Atwood wrote about, suggesting that it “raises scrapbooking, that thing you did with old magazines and a pair of scissors while recovering from the measles, to an art.”⁴ In the digital age, zines are still being produced, collected and trashed.

Cardboard Contagion, references historical and artistic precedents that interrogate the history, symbolism and ontology of cardboard through Bataille, queercore and film zines and themes of contagion and consumerism. Ultimately asking and questioning, how do we as a society, in museums or institutions, archive (or not archive) ephemeral cultural artifacts that were never designed to be preserved? Or, why are we so fearful of loss? Maybe the smiling icon on the side of your delivery box knows something we do not.