Joe Hall

The Container Store Joe Hall

Poetry. Joe Hall and Chad Hardy's THE CONTAINER STORE explores the construction, implementation, and erosion of economic and social authority, commodity, and corporeality. As both found and original language moves from domestic space to city, office-scape, and borderland (economic, political, bodily), it examines the (lack of) agency that the individual has in a world flooded with borders, bodies, commodities, contracts, and fragment. The work that Hall and Hardy undertake here is reminiscent of 20th century experimental movements such as Situationism, Futurism, and Dada, as well as 21st century net art like that of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. It is a mash up of high art and the profane, a typographical assault. The book itself is an enactment of the very spectacle that it reveals.