You may know Beach Packaging Design from such seemingly random-but-incredible blog posts as The Weirdly Banal Canadian Marlboro Man Ad Was Created To Stymie Philip Morris’s Marlboro Man Campaign, Because PM Doesn’t Own The Marlboro Trademark In Canada.
Now BPD’s tracked down the source image for one of Cady Noland’s silkscreened aluminum panel works. Clip-On Man (1989), features a guy with a beer hack: two six-pack loops attached to his belt, with one can of Budweiser left [yeah, packaging!]
Turns out it was from Charles Gatewood’s 1975 photobook of the American underbelly, Sidetripping, with a text by William Burroughs. Gatewood had been taking surreal, wacked out photos of the counter-culture since 1964. And in 1972, when he went to shoot Burroughs [sic, heh] in London for Rolling Stone, Gatewood pitched his own project, a dummy of his book, and asked Burroughs to write a text for it. From Gatewood’s memoir:
Burroughs moved to London in 1965. Despite the success of Junky (over 100,000 copies were sold) and the notoriety of Naked Lunch (banned in Boston), Burroughs was not especially well known in America. His “cut-up” novels — including The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded — were non-linear in structure and difficult to understand. Bob Palmer hoped our Rolling Stone story would “give Burroughs the mainstream exposure he deserved.”
Our first surprise was Burroughs’ modest one-bedroom apartment. The walls were almost bare, and the place looked way too neat and clean. The only hint of weirdness was the life-size cut-out of Mick Jagger standing next to a Uher tape recorder (and the faint smell of hash smoke perfuming the room).
[bold added on the part that also sounds like Cady Noland. I don’t believe it for a second, she does so much more, but what if-just what if-Cady Noland’s project got its start in the gonzo [sic] image/cultural stylings of peak Rolling Stone magazine? When Sidetripping dropped, she was 19. And 18 when Patty Hearst went down.] I have not, as yet, found a picture of a life-sized cutout of Mick Jagger, Burroughs’s or anyone else’s. But when I do, you know I’ll post it here. And probably print it on aluminum.
Cady Noland’s 1989 Clip-On Man [beachpackagingdesign, s/o @br_tton]
William S. Burroughs, Charles Gatewood, and Sidetripping [realitystudio]
While their art historical value remains under-appreciated, copies of Sidetripping are egregiously low-priced [amazon]
Previously: Namess (Cowboy) 2016