Art in the Public Space
by Titus Gee
Mountain Dew has got it figured out.
Until Wednesday, the last time I “did the Dew” was in college when I depended on a steady stream of caffeine and sugar to fuel seemingly endless weeks of all-night shenanigans and philosophical conversations.
You might say I regressed a bit last week. Coffee had no effect on my afternoon slump, so I cruised down to a nearby vice emporium in search of a little liquid kick in the pants. While perusing the soft-drink/Eastern-herbal-chemistry section, I discovered a fine art painting wedged in among the glaring logos for COKE! MONSTER! and VAMP!
I suppose you would call it a surrealist drawing, in a chaotic collage style familiar to anyone who hangs out at contemporary art museums. Dali had something to do with the inspiration, I’d wager.
I pulled out the 16-oz aluminum bottle that served as canvas for this particular artistic exploration and spent two or three minutes looking at it before I noticed the “Mountain Dew” symbol on the neck. The only explanation for this beverage anomaly consisted of a web address above the nutrition information — greenlabelart.com
Some of you probably have followed the Green Label Art project since it launched in May 2007. For those who haven’t, Mountain Dew has been working to encourage and highlight the work of emerging artists by distributing their work on limited edition aluminum bottles. In the 2007 campaign each of 12 designs ran for a couple of months in select markets.
Volume 1 of the 2008 series tapped six new creators ranging from tattoo artists to graffiti specialists and action figure creators, with a few niche commercial designers mixed in. Their bottles appeared in convenience stores starting in February and March.
The color frenzy that caught my eye was created by Chuck Anderson, a freelance artist and photographer in Chicago. His bottle launched in February.
Anderson liked the bottle so much he has a huge shelf full of them in his studio — all empty of course.
Back in the mini-mart, I glanced around the cold case and spotted some Dew in the more familiar bottles and cans that I still associate with the slightly queasy haze of sleep deprivation that was college. My arms felt weak at the very thought of picking one up. Meanwhile, Anderson’s bottle had grown warm in my hand. I swapped it for a cold one and headed for the register.
The contents of the bottle proved to be standard Mountain Dew, a familiar flavor that still tastes like pure energy, just as it did in college — pure, decadent, frivolous energy. But energy I never would have tasted if it had not come packaged in a wrapping of fine art, or even if the art had been overlaid with a giant MOUNTAIN DEW! label in the traditional position.
The beverage company took a more humble attitude, preferring to focus on the art and on using the ubiquity of commercial packaging to take fine art into the public space.
The same humility rules at the Green Label micro-site, where it took me half an hour to discover the origins of the project. The site says almost nothing about Mountain Dew, preferring to zero in on the artists themselves with video interviews, galleries, and links to their other work. It even has a design engine to allow Average Joe to enter an as-yet-unelaborated label design contest.
My search for the project’s PR packet took me over to the Mountain Dew homepage, where I found a whole new set of original content, including Diet Dew video ads about homicidal ferrets, spotlights on little-heard musicians, and an original series called “The Dew Report” that highlights emerging sports — from the now-familiar Parkour to Mountain Unicycling (known as “Muni”).
Here lies the future of advertising for the 21st century. While other ad execs write panicky articles about the audiences demand for ::gasp:: “entertaining advertising material,” Mountain Dew has embraced the new milieu. Meanwhile their savvy focus on the intersection between extreme sport and indie art grants access to the latest definitions of cool.
Will Anderson’s can restart my years-long addiction to what we used to call “nectar of the gods?” My workout schedule says no.
But I’ll keep the can. I’ll send their kickin’ videos to my friends. And perhaps most important, in the long view, I’ll feel good about the cash I dropped on the mini-mart counter, because it bought me more than the afternoon jump start I was looking for. It also got me the chance to participate in something positive on a grander scale. And that makes it a rare and pleasant experience.
Images from a free wallpaper download available at greenlabelart.com
Chuck Anderson
Muni
