I had tried to create formal sculptures out of the boxes but it seemed pretentious to me.
As I was working in my studio I realized that the stacks of boxes sitting on the other side of the room in a disorganized fashion seemed more interesting to me than the formal shapes I was trying to make with them. It was at that point that I decided to ask the custodians of the museum to put them together as if they worked in a warehouse. In fact I left it up to the custodians at each one of the venues. That is key, in my mind, to how they became art in a different way.
Michael de Courcy Interview Excerpts
Mary Statzer May 2013
The first edition of 400 silkscreened boxes were shown in two very different contexts.
They operated a high art level when they were installed at MoMA and went around the country as part of a traveling exhibition, but at the time, that didn't mean a lot to me. Everyone had to remind me that showing at MoMA was important. They also functioned in a low brow way as the subject of a conceptual print work for the June 1970 cover of artscanada magazine. This involved the photographing of stacks of boxes in 12 different urban locations in and around Toronto. A proof sheet of the resulting images made up the cover of a special edition of the Magazine which reviewed the Photography into Sculpture exhibition.
