The beauty of custom cardboard boxes is that a well-designed box can be used to store and ship practically anything safely and securely, and an art exhibition in Vienna aimed to showcase just how much invention, creativity and artistic brilliance a box could hold.

The exhibition in question, titled Thoughts In No Particular Order, Given The Circumstances, aims to answer that question with a simple premise; all of the artists must be able to fit their exhibition inside of a cardboard box that will be posted to the exhibition space.

Much like how the cardboard box was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, the simplicity, versatility and customisation of a cardboard box not only make it perfectly suited to any business need, but can be used to form wholly original artistic pieces.

To find out how all three elements interlink, it is important to explain the exhibition, why cardboard boxes are at the centre of it, and what businesses can learn through the eye of the conceptual artist.

Why Is A Cardboard Box Art?

Thoughts In No Particular Order is named after a chapter in the Felix Guattari book The Anti-Oedipus Papers, an unusual, enigmatic and highly debated book that was designed to be fragmentary in a way that made any engagement with the work a mirror of the mind.

This inspired the use of a cardboard box in the same way; all six of the artists were given a box and were told to create a work that fit inside it, display and exhibition instructions, and a way for it to be posted back.

Every artist took a very different approach to not only filling a box with art but using the cardboard box itself. For some artists, it was a storage and display implement, whilst for others the box was the art itself.

How Was A Cardboard Box Turned Into Art?

To explain the artistic potential of the humble cardboard box and what more utilitarian users can learn from an act of artistic esoterica, it is worth quickly describing how the six artists explored the brief in very different ways.

False Gods - Troy Montes Michie

Built from a Kodaslide compartment box, False Gods uses its own shipping box alongside other specialised storage to create the impression of an almost religious plinth, intended to reflect an almost fanatical devotion to preservation and history.

Mess - Ceidra Moon Murphy 

By contrast, Ceidra Moon Murphy’s work is much more divisive and conceptual, wrapping the cardboard box in a bin bag filled with empty military ration pouches, reflecting both the end product of many shipments and the end product of many wars.

Polylectern For Simultaneous Recitation Of Five Scripts - Kofi Moller 

Unlike the previous two pieces, Kofi Moller’s polylectern uses the box itself as part of the art, crafting a sculpture from it, tape, primer, and paint pots, creating a result that looks formalistic but defies convention.

Untitled -  Mara Jenny

By contrast, Mara Jenny’s piece creates bizarre inner and outer worlds and focuses on the place and space of the cardboard box.

At first glance, the piece consists of an empty standard cardboard box resting against a window, close to a pair of painted gift bags that resemble the type you can buy in bulk at a card shop.

However, the framing of the boxes highlights the unique secret behind the bags; the box is in the foreground of several historic house facades, but hidden within the bags themselves are models which resemble the facades framed by the box.

Portrait Of A Stool - Anna Budniewski

A black and white photograph of a stool printed onto cardboard with a patchwork of acrylic glass on top of it, the patchwork nature of the printing and display medium, designed to not only fit into but come from a cardboard box, creates an organic quality to what are entirely artificial components.

Headboxe (Aluminium) - Clementine Adou

Resembling three-quarters of an insulated cardboard box stuck to a wall, Headboxe focuses on how perceptions and behaviours are shaped by consumption, surveillance and power, using the most basic of adaptations to the box itself.

What Can Businesses Learn From Cardboard Box Art?

The ultimate theme of Thoughts In No Particular Order is how constraints and containers shape art, and where the lines between a shipping medium and its contents can be drawn.

These questions can and have shaped product development, with much greater emphasis on customisation and design made with display and the performance of unboxing in mind.

Boxes, particularly product boxes, are part of the sales pitch, and they will drive purchases and customers excited by unboxing and getting their hands on something they want.

In an age where so many products are wholly digital in nature, the tactile pleasure of opening boxes cannot be understated.