Fittingly, by the time that you come to read this, the physical evidence of Excess Baggage will have been folded neatly away and placed back into storage. It feels especially apt somehow that an exhibition that curates the disposable should itself be short-lived. Or perhaps I was just late to the paper play.

As that pun implies, the throwaway objects of the exhibition’s desire are paper bags. Here, we have a representative selection from the self-explanatory Paper Bag Archive, more than a century’s worth of them, collated under the attentive eye of graphic designer Tim Sumner. Framed on the walls of Liverpool creative studio, Dorothy, they can be read like a slowly unfolding social history, plotting out the caprices of fashion in the cut of their typefaces and the style of their graphics.

Moreover, in the types of emporia they represent, they act as tidal markers of the ebb and flow of the high street, paper memorials to chains which are no longer extant. In this respect, an early example of the much-lamented Paperchase’s portable branding seems especially melancholy, a paper cut that still stings.

Indeed, for all the lowliness of their status, much like adverts for half-forgotten consumer goods in vintage comics, the shops and services the bags represent carry a surprising emotional charge. Less, perhaps, than the manufactured sectarianism of brand loyalty, they speak to a fidelity that’s closer to fondness. That they are able to do so is a testament to the quality of the designs which adorn them. At their best – the gorgeous Chelsea Girl logo which languorously embodies the boho swoon of the early 1970s, for instance – they approach the status of iconography. The heart that beats red at its corner feels almost sacred.

Equally, there’s something admirable in the devotion with which the typically anonymous designers approached their craft, their artistry made manifest in multiples without the Warholian cachet. Commissioned though their canvases were, their blanks were filled with playfulness – the displaced ‘a’ in the Letraset branding, for instance, acknowledging the frustrating fiddliness of rub-down transfers, now themselves almost as anachronistic as C&A.

Other joys are less loftily conceptual. About to go the way of Paperchase, Cornwall’s Knees department stores once high-kicked their way into the local consciousness with stylised Ks jointed punningly like legs. More subtly, an early example of packaging for the Barbican Art Gallery literally spells out exactly what it is in the left-justified line of its initials.

Oddities, too, abound. The dolphins no longer held captive in Brighton look out from their packaging with Stockholm Syndrome grins, a reminder that occasionally history can move in the correct direction. Similarly, St John’s Market’s Nut Centre, whose castaway couple – the female inexplicably topless – barter with monkeys for the fruits of the palm tree, has receded, like its questionable imagery, into antiquity.

Having bloomed all too briefly as a four-week exhibition, it would be a shame to think that the Paper Bag Archive in all the large-as-life wonder of its physical manifestation might not one day be put on display again. Like the often eye-catching ephemera Excess Baggage shows to their best advantage, it’s an exhibition that deserves to be recycled.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: © Dorothy

 

Paper Bag Archive exists on the internet here.