The carton, on the floor, by the hundred

Stand in front of one. It is a cube on the floor, not a picture on a wall, about 17 inches tall and 17 wide and 14 deep, the size of a real supermarket carton you could pick up with both arms. (MoMA’s box measures 17 1/8 by 17 by 14 inches, which is 43.3 by 43.2 by 36.5 centimeters; examples vary slightly, since each was built by hand.) That alone is worth pausing on. This is a sculpture you walk around, occupying the exact space and shape a grocery carton occupies. It is not a painting of a box. It is a box.

The surface is faithfully the real Brillo carton. The ground is white (literally white house paint), and across it runs the word BRILLO printed so the consonants read navy blue and the vowels cherry red, with a swooping red wave arcing over the top of the logo. It is a deliberately patriotic, all-American red-white-and-blue, the colors a soap brand reaches for to look wholesome and national. Along the top of the side panel, blue capitals read “24 GIANT SIZE PKGS,” the carton’s contents stated in wholesale-shipping language; along the bottom runs the product promise, “SHINES ALUMINUM FAST,” and a small white “New!” with an exclamation point sits in a corner. Advertising copy, reproduced deadpan as the surface of a sculpture.

Two things give the disguise away, and both reward a close look. First, the print sits on wood. The graphics are silkscreen ink laid onto a hard painted wooden surface, so the ink reads matte and slightly flattened, sitting on the box rather than printed into corrugated card. There is no give, no fold, none of the soft sheen of real cardboard. Second, the imperfections. Because each box was hand-painted and hand-pulled through a screen, the print registration sits subtly off from a machine-printed carton, and no two are quite identical. Set two side by side and the tiny inconsistencies surface. The near-perfection is the point, and those small slips are exactly where the human hand leaks back in.

And then there is the multiplication, which is half the work and the half a single photograph cannot give you. A lone box is a clever object. The boxes by the hundred, stacked in rows several feet high the way they filled both rooms of the Stable Gallery, are something else. The “art” arrives as a warehouse of merchandise: quantity, repetition, retail display. There is no single masterwork box, no “best” one to single out; the rhythm of sameness across a stockroom is the form. A picture hangs alone and asks to be contemplated. These ask to be counted, like cans on a shelf, and that shift, from the unique object to the indistinguishable multiple, is what the box does next.