Logo Removal Service

Singing the glory of visible labor and repairing the supply chain, one meagre t-shirt at a time

L.R.S. started as a way to remove unwanted branding from otherwise appealing objects. I didn’t want to be a walking billboard. This viewpoint, from 2006, smacks of the 1970s, pretty old school.

Simultaneously and spontaneously, at the time of the first logo removal, L.R.S. invented something improbable to as replacement, to fill the void. As a logo comes out, in goes (or grows) a weird shape, a shape neither text, nor image, nor icon. A shape that’s a mystery or, some people say, a Rorschach test. Someone seeing a Logo Removal is confronted with a question—what is that?—rather than a certainty. No brand recognition possible.

L.R.S. originated in an art context — albeit with vaguely hopeful commercial aspirations — and played off my interest in making visible connections between labor, wages, mass-production and creativity / customization. When most goods are made far away, out of view, it’s difficult to track their value by any metric other than money. When a mass-produced object is explicitly, clearly hacked — and as a performative act — it may provoke uncertainty. And, indeed, L.R.S. finds there are always people who are bothered by the service and its results.

How much did that t-shirt cost in raw material — the field where the cotton grew, the processing of boll to yarn, the knitting, cutting, sewing, dyeing? in transportation from field to mill to warehouse to container to store to home to thrift store? How much does a t-shirt cost in labor? How much would it cost if the sewer were paid a proper living wage? What would it be like if we had a view into the work and living conditions of the many people, possibly 2o or more, who touched this shirt as it grew from spun cotton to knit fabric to sewn shirt?

As the L.R.S. founder, I’ve performed live Logo Removals from the project’s inception. A departure from my typical artist behavior— hunkered down alone in a studio — I accepted an invitation to participate in the 090909 conference at UC Berkeley, where organizer Greg Niemeyer suggested I do a Logo Removal, live, during my presentation. The action dovetailed perfectly with my interest in _showing_ the labor of what goes into things.

http://www.logoremovalservice.