Administración de cadena de suministros (Supply Chain Management).

9 _{John W. Smith, "Saving Time: Andy Warhol's Time Capsules," Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries}

Society of North America 20, no. 1 (2001): 8.

10 _{Simon Elmes, "The Secrets of Andy Warhol's Time Capsules," in BBC News Magazine (Pittsburgh: BBC,}

Ironically, Warhol achieved celebrity status while shifting the art frame to envelope the quotidian, perfectly illustrated by his choice of plain brown boxes to contain everyday items. Examining Time Capsule 51, Matt Wrbican, chief archivist at the Warhol Museum, parses the 54 items inside, reconstructing their historical context as cultural artifacts and as

items connected to Warhol’s life; hence, Wrbican’s essay is interpretive.11 _{Wrbican’s task,}

analogous to the identity projects of most ordinary persons , is to make something

noteworthy out of boxes full of the commonplace and unremarkable, buttressing Warhol’s identity using the flotsam that washed over and adhered to his life.

Warhol’s Time Capsules anticipates the contemporary “unboxing” internet video

phenomenon, where the experience of unwrapping packaging is recorded and the initial moments of object ownership are narrated for the viewer. Accordingly, in 2014 the Warhol Museum auctioned the “unboxing experience” to an anonymous buyer who bid $30,000 USD for the privilege of opening TC 500, the final sealed box. In most YouTube unboxing

videos, however, the contents are already known. As Mark O’Connell wryly observes:

11 _{Matt Wrbican, "Warhol's Time Capsule 51," Criticism 56, no. 3 (2014).}

2-2 Time Capsule 10 contained receipts, cancelled checks, letters and other paper material that Andy Warhol saved from 1967 to 1969. Photo credit: Lauren Ober for NPR.

The “unboxing” video offers … the vicarious experience of removing a newly purchased product … from its packaging. It is a visual document of … that apex of possibility and anticipation right before the … inevitable decline into disappointment and neglect.12

Perhaps, as Bachelard asserted, imagined contents are more compelling than visible ones. The Object Lesson by Geoff Sobelle

Unboxing is something both artist and audience do before and during the theatre piece The Object Lesson. For solo performance artist Geoff Sobelle, the cardboard box is the central prop and he invites the audience to share the stage with hundreds of boxes filled with toys, appliances, shoes, books, hats, etc. During the play, he unpacks boxes, using their contents as cues to reminisce about past events and to engage the participation of audience members. Sobelle opens boxes like they are vintage bottles of wine, filled with the fruits of past seasons; thus, the contents generate new experiences, albeit ones scaffolded on memories.

This image of a container’s contents mellowing or being transformed by the process of aging highlights an important function the boundary layer can perform. A sealed box can allow for a slow forgetting, containing the emotional potency of possessions for controlled decay; this practice circumvents the conscious act of discarding things, helping a person fulfil their obligation to preserve a memory of an event or a loved one. Marcoux’s interviews with witnesses of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 revealed a desire by many to carefully curate the remembrances of that day by compartmentalising souvenirs in ways that allow for forgetting:

By making objects unavailable to the senses, people hope to avoid stirring up or awakening memories. They put photographs, pictures, and other souvenirs out of sight, or they hide them, in an effort to keep difficult memories away, at least temporarily … [like] the persons discussed by Epp and Price (2001) who keep family possessions that do not fit current identity projects in secondary spaces like attics, basements, garages, or other storage areas for a certain period of time.13

12 _{Mark O'Connell, "The Cult of Unboxing," Fortune, 11July, 2013.}

In addition to allowing the slow subsidence of painful memories, sealed boxes can also prevent diminution of experience. This is one of the functions of reliquaries containing Christian relics, which often shield their sacred fragments from view to preserve their potency. As Cynthia Hahn notes:

[R]eliquaries are in their essence a mediation between relics and

audiences. As such … they teach meanings and prepare the audience for

the proper reception and treatment of the holy objects, what Peter Brown calls reverentia, "an etiquette toward the supernatural" (Brown

1981:119).14

14 _{Cynthia Hahn, "What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?," Numen 57, no. 3/4 (2010): 291.}

2-3 Geoff Sobelle dancing through a performance of The Object Lesson. Photo credit: Craig Schwartz/Courtesy of The Center Theatre Group.

The reliquary, the boundary layer surrounding religious relics, supports a sacred narrative and conditions the behaviour of believers by obscuring behind radiant surfaces what might be an ordinary shred of cloth, splinter of bone, or vial of dust:

[I]n circa 1100 Thiofrid of Echternach, who insists that relic and reliquary are truly a single unit, argues that without the compensatory beauty of the reliquary, a relic could be repulsive (Ferrari 1996:xxiii, xxvii; and Ferrari 2005). Ultimately, however … the most common approach asserts that

relics should not be seen, indeed … they should never be exposed to

improper touch or display.15

15 _{ibid., 307.}

2-4 French reliquary, made in Limoges ca. 1200-1220. Metropolitan Museum collection.

An important function of the reliquary is to shield the contents from the corrupting gaze of the unbelieving or the “rustic” viewer; furthermore, to address sceptical pilgrims, the sumptuous beauty of the reliquary’s boundary layer prepares one to believe.

An analogous idea could underlie contemporary storage practices, where special things are sequestered because they have only a private meaning not meant for shared

experience; furthermore, subjecting a treasured mnemonic object to constant viewing might eventually exhaust the sensation one associates with the thing. Sobelle’s unboxing performance might be compelling the first time we experience it but less riveting were we to witness it daily.

EMBANKMENT by Rachel Whiteread

Like Sobelle’s stage props and Warhol’s Time Capsules, sculptor Rachel Whiteread

features boxes at the centre of an artwork. Following the death of her mother, Whiteread found a cardboard box in the attic of her family home. She remembered the box from her childhood when it lived in her toy cupboard.16 _{In EMBANKMENT, she refashions that box}

from polyethylene plastic and replicates it thousands of times to create a topography of containers.

Whereas Sobelle reveals things from within boxes, Whiteread eschews the contained object to portray instead the capacity of a form of containment. I believe her installation

asks, “What do boxes afford us?” The title EMBANKMENT provides a clue. An

embankment is a structure that holds back or retains a spreading force, like a river or a body of water. By multiplying the box castings into towering slopes within the museum hall, Whiteread creates passages that feel like ravines. Here is a metaphor for what a box can do — securing and concealing what might otherwise overflow and inundate our lives.

While Whiteread uses a translucent material to convey an inner volume,

EMBANKMENT primarily exploits the exterior form of the box — the rectangular block that lends itself to creating stable sculptural edifices. In doing so, she demonstrates how boxes create something greater when multiplied, displaying how efficient cloned right-angled

16 _{"Rachel Whiteread: Embankment," The Tate Modern Musem, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-}

forms are for stacking.17 _{Like Time Capsules and The Object Lesson, Whiteread’s}

EMBANKMENT employs the familiar form of the box, creating something impressive through repetition and accretion. All three art works mirror the generative capacity, consumption, and storage needs of Western economies, re-presenting manufactured containers that communicate the scale of current production and possession. In stark