Gretchen Berg: ‘I’m simplifying.’
Andy Warhol: ‘Yeah.’1
Rain machines, alarmed kosher pickle jars filled with gemstones, replica cornflakes boxes, ‘disco décor’, time capsules, art bombs, birthday presents, perfume bottles, and floating silver pillows that are clouds, paintings, and films at the same time. Museum interventions, collecting and curating projects, expanded performance environments, holograms. This is a book about the vast array of sculptural work made by Andy Warhol between 1954 and 1987, a period that begins long before the first Pop paintings and ends the year of his death.
Warhol made sculptures that he called ‘abstract’ and ‘invisible’, as well as ones which were perfectly true to life, heavy and handcrafted. Though some of these works were part of families, with similar physical attributes and names, generally there was little continuity of this kind between the sculptures that he made. Each were designed for different occasions: some were intended to be shown privately, some publicly, others somewhere in-between. Unlike the painting and film work, which relied on a limited core group of assistants and collaborators, Warhol’s sculpture brought different persons, institutions, media (including newly emerging technologies) and disciplines together. These sculptural projects crowned pinnacle moments in Warhol’s career, but also occupied downtime and periods of artistic and personal change; junctures in his more commercially orientated practices. In an overview of the sculptures produced in the period 1970–72, Neil Printz observes that these were made during a period of ‘crisis and transition’, following the assassination attempt on his life in June 1968 and the move from the ‘silver’ Factory of 47th Street to 33 Union Square in the same year.2 Warhol’s sculpture also represented different aspects of factory life: its birthdays, unique projects, visitors, open-ended commissions, and the ‘leftovers’ from other works. The Time Capsules project, an enormous archive of clutter (1974–87), is the superlative example in this regard. Like Screen Tests, his series of film-portraits (1964–66), or the Andy Warhol Diaries, the filmic and textual equivalents of Time Capsules, Warhol’s sculpture recorded Factory time.
This diverse body of work can be divided according to art historical labels: portrait busts intended for display on plinths, Institutional Critique, archival and collecting projects, eco-art, a continued dialogue with Minimalism and environment work, multimedia and participatory Gesamtkunstwerk, and the recent category of ‘studiowork’.3 When Warhol bought a large property in the exclusive Montauk area of New York, he teased his new neighbour by telling him that he was going to dig up some of the surrounding grounds as part of an earth-art project. In fact, this may be the only post-1960 category of sculpture to which Warhol cannot be tied.4 Yet despite all the ways the work can be associated with the discourses that surround sculpture, it can equally be seen as resistant to sculpture as a category, existing almost in spite of it. In 1996, Warhol’s friend and one-time assistant, Christopher Makos, characterised this relation to sculpture while considering a tricksy late concrete work that Warhol had given him as a gift:
The Warhol sculpture—I think it’s from 1982—was a Christmas present. Andy would use big holidays as reasons to purge his creativity. Andy was always asking me and his other friends, ‘What can I do for sculptures? What’s unusual?’ Those were hard questions for Andy because he thought in very linear terms. He didn’t think in three-dimensional terms at all. Photographic terms, canvas terms, flat terms. He couldn’t figure out what you do to do something sculptural.5
Warhol made sculpture to ‘purge creativity’, not to put it to use. There is a suggestion here that sculpture was not considered work or even artwork at all. Yet, at the same time, Makos’ statement sums up the dynamic at the heart of this book: the dual direction of travel between Warhol’s relation to sculpture and sculpture’s relation to Warhol. It proves that Warhol was very much concerned with sculpture and, in some way, orientated himself around it. But what I want to suggest, and what Makos does not, is not just that this dynamic existed but that it was incisive in both directions. Warhol did something unusual with sculpture, something radical to do with sculpture emerging from those ‘hard questions’, and in tension with the traditional notion of the ‘three-dimensional’ that Makos describes. With its many incarnations, its unresolvedness, its reflection of personal and working life, and its sheer complicated difficulty, Warhol’s sculpture can also offer unique access to a figure whose work is notoriously hard to read and explain, and whose motivations were well-guarded. Contained within Makos’ words are two tendencies that I propose broadly categorise Warhol’s sculpture: first, in relation to Warhol’s ‘purge of creativity’, there is a dynamic between waste and production and, second, there is an antipathy between the image—the ‘flat’ or ‘photographic’ terms—and the sculptural object.
These themes are present in Warhol’s own most explicit statement on sculpture, which both echoes a sense of him acting from behind a veil and the potential of sculpture to lift it. It occurs in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (much of which was ghosted by either Pat Hackett or Bob Colacello): ‘My favourite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.’6 For a study that puts sculpture first, it is not a great start. Here sculpture is essentially demoted, made to defer to the status of the image and the ‘terms’ in which Makos recognises that Warhol thought. Yet this ‘wall with a hole in it’ is, nonetheless, one that suits our purposes: Warhol’s sculpture is a glory hole which offers access back to the space where he stands, a portrait of Warhol which would otherwise be hidden and which entails a certain trespass onto a secluded space.
In the formulation ‘Warhol, sculptor’ we therefore already have a picture, a portrait, of Warhol himself that reaches beyond the idea made famous in the oft repeated words of Gretchen Berg’s 1966 article ‘Andy Warhol: My True Story’: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: my paintings and my films and me, and there I am’.7
Berg’s article was based on an interview conducted in 1966, and appeared in three versions between 1966 and 1967. It is a classic portrait of Andy Warhol as a picture of cool: ‘against interpretation’ and yet presenting himself, as much as his work, as something to be viewed. Though designed to grab its contemporary audience, the quotation still reverberates and is worth some consideration. The words are, in fact, Berg’s and not Warhol’s, but they are credited to him.8 His role in this case (as in many others) is to be a reflective surface, a mirror and, in allowing the words to be put into his mouth, Warhol acts out the very characteristics attributed to him. Since the publication of this interview, Berg’s characterisation has become historically important, both as evidence (‘the truth about Andy Warhol’) and as an influential approach to writing about Warhol. It concedes that what is beneath the surface is unreachable while what is on the surface is transmittable, exchangeable and reproducible. Perhaps the wall with a hole in it from The Philosophy is also part of that surface, a screen. If it was, it nonetheless proves there is something behind it to be looked at and understood, and suggests that sculpture provides a way in.
If Warhol is usually associated with the short period between 1962 and 1966, two of the works from this time whose impact was greatest, and above all else established his place at the forefront of artists working in America, are sculpture. These include the Brillo Boxes, from 1964, and Silver Clouds shown in 1966 — described by Brian O’Doherty as ‘one of the sights of the 1960s’, which ‘changed every particle of the gallery space.’9 In addition, Rain Machine (c.1970), shown at the 1970 Expo in Japan, represents one of Warhol’s largest commissions, while Raid the Icebox I (1970) is significant for the way in which it anticipates major new forms of artistic practice that are still current today (in this case, ‘artist in the museum’ works). Given the prominence of these sculptural works it is remarkable that there has not been a serious study of Warhol’s sculpture outside of the three (soon to be four) volumes that make up the, albeit excellent, Catalogue Raisonné.10 In the history of art, the sense that Warhol’s sculpture was not essential to his work or to how he operated is pervasive: the sculptural is a ‘hard question’ for art historians working on Warhol, much as it was for Warhol himself.11
Faced with this question, as this book is, it has more often than not been those books which record and inventory Warhol’s output that have therefore been vital. They reflect a life spent recording, collecting, delegating, collaborating, socialising and making in all media and, in studying Warhol’s sculpture through archival sources, we get a sense of just how interconnected the various aspects of Warhol’s life were. Amongst these there are a few representative publications including Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (2006); Georg Frei, Neil Printz and Sally King-Nero, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volumes 1–3 (2002–2004); Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (2004); John Smith, Mario Kramer and Matt Wrbican. Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21 (2004). Further, much of the detail in this book about Warhol’s less well-known sculptural work has been gleaned from sources in which it features coincidentally, such as diary entries, interviews and recordings whose object, again, was to record what happened or was happening. Careful analysis of installation shots, first-hand accounts and interviews have been vital for understanding the work’s meaning.
Taking a broader interest in Warhol’s work, there are, of course, a great many other resources on which to draw, many of which feature the more famous sculptures. However, it is rare that the status of these works as sculpture, and their distinct function in that regard, influences an overall thesis or is placed in proper context. One exception would be Thomas Crow’s analysis of the ‘absconded subjects’ of Pop.12 Meanwhile, the literature on Warhol’s films, paintings and biography—the various sites which Warhol, in Berg’s text, names in regard to a ‘surface’—has become vast and hugely varied and it is notable how many of these readings produce portraits of Warhol that have become influential from narrow studies of short periods, single series and even single works. In much of this literature, Warhol’s work has been considered a demonstration of postmodernist theory, especially in terms of the impact of the ubiquitous mechanically reproducible, screened, and non-embodied image. Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Frederic Jameson all wrote on Warhol between 1966 and 1997, influencing the historical reception of Warhol’s work as a point of contrast to Minimal and post-Minimal art’s orientation around the subject in space, around the body—both as a space and in space—and around the physical and material conditions of the work itself.
Branden W. Joseph has observed that the idea of Warhol’s art and persona as presenting an unyielding surface,
has inflected much of the critical and art historical commentary on Warhol, where a dialectic frequently unfolds between the attempt to define the artist’s meaning and the tacit assumption that neither he nor his art will provide the means to do so. In a large portion of the writing on Warhol, the result is an analysis that cedes to projection, with the overall impression being one of an ineffectual and unenlightening hermeneutic spinning out of control.13
For Joseph, wariness of Warhol’s mimicking, slick surface is at the root of sophisticated arguments about the work. Despite their differences, this is certainly true of the work of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (1989), Hal Foster (1996) and Douglas Crimp (1999) who all take care to avoid the trap that Joseph describes, of merely seeing oneself and one’s own preoccupations reflected back in the mirror Warhol holds up. To an extent, these writers agree that the crux of Warhol’s work is in its reproduction of the modern socio-economic phenomenon of mechanised capitalist production and the entanglement of the subject within it, leaving all that is holy—desire, death, identity, and art as a potentially radical endeavour—in peril. In Crimp’s text, his own agenda in writing about the complexities of ‘getting the Warhol we deserve’—a phrase appropriated from Hal Foster—is to advance the work of cultural studies as a discipline, and to encourage a queering of our understanding of the work and its context. Indeed, one way that the literature on Warhol might be divided is between disciplinary approaches: between the context of art history, both a particular history and the particular toolkit for doing it, and the wider context of visual culture and cultural studies. In Crimp’s analysis, Warhol’s mirror surface is a projection by art history that disguises the blatant issue of unstable identities. In this way, Warhol’s queerness, and the importance of it for his work, is both there on the surface and hidden for Crimp.
One might likewise reflect on the queer status of sculpture within the discourse on Warhol. It too is there for all to see in his work but is, at the same time, masked. And while the observation that Warhol made sculpture is one that privileges an art historical category, and arose from my own art historical approach, I shall argue that the work nonetheless underlines the importance of a context wider than art history. It acts to collapse and undermine the category of sculpture as it is traditionally understood and, importantly, as it was reinventing itself in the 1960s. It is an approach based on conventional art historical categorisation and formal analysis that nonetheless clashes with conventional understandings of art’s history so that, ironically, it is Crimp’s account of cultural studies—to ‘supplant the rarefied art history with other histories’—that describes the work in this book.14 Warhol was a photographer, pornographer, author, cinematographer, publisher and even philosopher; he was a Pop artist, conceptual artist, abstract artist, mogul and queer revolutionary. An attempt to understand his sculpture explicitly calls for all of the Warhols at our disposal. Looked at from the other way, the works enhance our understanding of different aspects of Warhol’s art and his other business and private interests, subject matter and social groups. Warhol’s sculpture is vital in thinking through his collaborative experiments in mixed media and in the media; his influence on contemporary artists; the relationship between his painting and film works; and his explorations of the institutions of art and social space.
How Warhol’s work sits within art history is therefore central to the book, yet to consider it in terms of sculpture is to already place it within a fraught and much-contested territory. This is especially true in the context of the 1960s and the rise of Minimalism, where writers have tended to treat Warhol, in relation to this dominant narrative, as a complement to, or counterpart of, Minimal Art, as per the work of James Meyer (2004), Briony Fer (1997 and 2009), Alex Potts (2001) and Hal Foster (1996). However, one context that does remain vital is that of Pop. Though many of the sculptural works in this study appear far from the paintings generally associated with Pop, the themes that arguably characterise Warhol’s Pop, such as unnaturalness, trespass, bringing the outside in and mis-registration, are nearly always present and are often elaborated in his sculpture. Yet reading the infinite number of blurbs for the infinite publications centred on Warhol, many beginning with lists of Warhol’s diverse activities, we find they hardly ever include sculpture as a distinct category of work. Thus, as a study of Warhol’s sculpture, this book’s deviation from other approaches to Warhol’s work is directed by a Pop ethos of de-sublimation. This book argues that attention to Warhol’s sculpture, and the certain kind of attention to spaces of reception and display that the study of sculpture brings, also helps put into relief the complexity and sophistication of Warhol’s Pop Art.
One of the key themes in this respect, which will be developed throughout this book, is that of the ‘off-register’. The off-register is that which does not cohere with the predetermined systems of representation. In being that quality of fragmented or diverted presence, a transgression of boundary lines, or simply the quality of something ‘not lining up’, it thus concerns both formal and socio-political observations. The off-register was always a part of Warhol’s work. Benjamin Buchloh has argued that ‘lapses’ and ‘hiatuses’ of registration were a formal procedure that blurred the lines between Warhol’s commercial illustration work and the later Pop Art.15 While an advertising illustrator in the 1950s (though the work continued to sustain him into the early 1960s) Warhol made drawings using a blotted, transfer technique, which gave a messy, carefree impression. Colour was applied to these drawings with little regard for the discipline of ‘staying within the lines’. With this off-register work, Warhol enjoyed enormous success at a time during which photography was, according to a late interview, ‘sending art down the drain’; its increasing dominance putting many other illustrators out of business.16 The mechanically produced image is itself considered in terms of registration in Hal Foster’s analysis of Warhol’s Death and Disaster (1962–3) series: here, that which is off-register provides moments of drama. He describes the ‘pops’ or tears in the image-screen as a ‘slipping of register’, describing in paint the psychic process through which a subject realises, with horror, that an event one fears to be real has passed unnoticed, without registering.17
The subject as off-register, as ‘beside’ itself, might also pertain to ideas of performance and role play. Integral to Crimp’s analysis of the queer aesthetics of Warhol’s films is ‘the separation of actors from their roles’, of working at ‘cross purposes’, and abrupt ‘jump’ cuts or splicing. With its refusal of any fixed or determined identity, this constantly de-centring work is also determinedly off-register. As I have suggested already, Crimp’s analysis equally finds the discourse on Warhol, with its failure to grapple with the queer status of the work, as much off-register as he finds the films themselves. Again, this condition of Warhol’s queer cinema is akin to the situation with Warhol’s sculpture: neither the idea of ‘Warhol, sculptor’, or the 3D work he made, fits into the parameters that art history has assigned for Warhol; both are out of register with the conventional parameters for the reception of his work. Moreover, and proving Crimp’s point, the mis-registrations in Warhol’s work had a meaning that was immediately apparent for a circle of artists and writers, all of whom were gay. During this time, Warhol’s mis-fitting line took on a special significance: for William S. Wilson, who wrote for Mario Amaya’s Art and Artists magazine (1965–8), the off-register was symbolic of a means of figuring and refiguring identity. In a preface to the re-publication of a piece written on Warhol in 1968 he spelt it out:
Mario Amaya, Ray Johnson, Paul Thek and Joseph Raffaele felt misrepresented in a society in which they were discouraged from representing themselves as men who loved men (in that specific decade). Such themes of misrepresentation were emerging in the art of Andy Warhol, whose off-registration of silk-screen images was an aesthetic elaboration of the off-registrations in his daily life.18
Warhol’s mis-registration signals, I think it is possible to say, estrangement from norms, being missed and missing, but as such it registers or represents those who have been estranged.
These themes of estrangement and fitting in can be seen in many of Warhol’s works. His Dance Diagrams (1962), painted in large-scale and displayed on the gallery floor, are among the most innovative of the early paintings whose subject is the attainment and mis-attainment of certain standards. Other paintings of this time, such as the Do It Yourself (1962) colouring-in paintings, the Before and After (1961) nose-job painting and the Cover Before Striking (1962) match books, also all seem to share a single commanding voice, instructive about how to fit in. The original diagrams used for the Dance Diagrams were taken from a book of common dance steps whose pages also bore written instructions about what to do. It was imperative at that time, for many hoping to gain social acceptance, that one could take part in dances at such social meets as organised by neighbourhood churches and so on: dancing could be a fraught subject. Michael J. Golec has written on these works in terms of this kind of social inclusion, using as an example Dance Diagram Fox Trot (1962) with its missing instructions and cropped seventh step.19 Here, a missed step signifies a failure to remain in registration, but on the part of a subject who is going to some lengths to conform. Ideas of stepping on toes and the crossing of lines that signify social norms relate to another central theme of my book, that of trespass, both in terms of gaining the entitlement to enter social space and the deviations of missteps. While Buchloh has argued that the work signals the kind of participatory aesthetics that capitalist society offers – proscriptive, limiting, even punitive – for Golec, this source of social anxiety is more textured and it is here that an idea of the ‘artworld’ comes into play. This idea, introduced in Chapter 2, is something that will be vital to my analysis throughout the book. Golec argues that although social participation was an aspiration for those ‘left out’, the artworld audience stands self-consciously apart from the mainstream. The gallery changes the work’s message; it can skew how one sees things. Thus, though the Dance Diagrams represent the aspiration to conform to social norms, the off-register could also be emancipatory. Warhol’s ability to occupy a space with his work that appears to be on both sides of social boundaries – the artworld and the real world – is crucial to the criticality of the work I want to highlight in this book, and is essential to Warhol’s Pop aesthetics.
If the registrations of these ‘command’ paintings might be read predominantly in terms of class, in another pair of early paintings the role-play of social class and sexuality both share space and do so more explicitly in relation to the artworld. These are the portraits that Warhol made of Robert Rauschenberg in 1962–3, a period overlapping with Rauschenberg’s first career retrospective and the year before he became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Yet Warhol reframes the artworld’s darling in a context that was meant to jar. The title of one of these works refers to James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ 1941 book: Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. In this work, we see Rauschenberg in family photos, a biographic quarter cycle that reveals humble Southern origins. Class and sexual identities entwine with one another here, as they did in Rauschenberg’s own life. Warhol, I think, makes Rauschenberg’s less-than-emphasised social origins also stand for his equally camouflaged sexual orientation.20 Though I do not think that Warhol is ‘outing’ Rauschenberg (who was wary of the ‘swish’ Warhol) he does cast a shade over the more famous artist’s public face. Recalling William S. Wilson’s comments, cognition of social difference needed to be suggested, but not explicit. In Warhol’s other portrait of Rauschenberg we see the artist assuredly staring into the middle distance through varying levels of inky haze. This painting is called Texan; Warhol again ungenerously puts Rauschenberg’s socio-geographic origins before his status as an artist, and again, claims to ‘reveal’ something about an aspect of the homosexual Rauschenberg’s ‘real’ identity.21
At this time, Abstract Expressionism had established a monopoly on interiority, profundity and deeper meaning (things which Berg had posed as the opposite to ‘surface’ in her famous article), equating these things with art’s ultimate purpose and value. This was done via a model of the artist as a heroic persona, one who, in practice, was also ‘profoundly’ and ‘deeply’ homophobic, machismo and intellectually idealist. Surface, in this sense, was a boundary between art and the social world, with all its ills. At the time when Warhol set out to begin painting, around 1960, the values privileged by Abstract Expressionism were in a kind of perfect registration with the values of the artworld: their interiorities coalesced, their boundaries mapped over one another. In the first pages of POPism, his account of the 1960s, Warhol writes that Abstract Expressionism had ‘become an institution’, while, in contrast, Pop’s subject was ‘all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionist tried so hard not to notice at all.’22
Pop therefore proposed a competing worldview that was art-historically and institutionally off-register with the reactionary template of the artworld. In his early book on Warhol, Rainer Crone took seriously Warhol’s persistent denial of having a critical agenda regarding the content of his images. Crone contends that whereas works such as the 1964 Race Riot paintings do not contain a critical message intrinsic to their image, they ‘become criticism as soon as they are received into the machinery of the art market and thus accepted by society as viable artworks.’23 The criticality of work such as the Race Riot paintings comes not in the visibility of their images—the visual and critical attention they would receive in the gallery context—nor in the accusation that these images from the media, perused at America’s breakfast table, go unnoticed in the ‘real world’. But rather that, within an art institution at the time of Abstract Expressionism’s reign of ‘trying not to notice’, these images—commodities also—blown-up to 17 feet tall like road side billboards, went unseen on some fundamental level precisely by those who made it their business to ‘look’. It is in these ways that Warhol’s Pop stands for, very fundamentally, the work of setting content against framework, whether it be the framework of class, of gender and sexuality, the institution, style or the technology through which that content is communicated. The off-register is fundamental to the notion of Pop Art; it is there in its name—‘Pop Art’. The two things are historical antinomies, as is the idea of Warhol and sculpture.
Another origin myth in POPism gets to the crux of the matter of class, the ultimate site of the clashing of registers in Warhol’s Pop work. This myth tells the story of how Warhol settled on his famous clipped, hard, painting style for the paintings of soup cans and Coke bottles that were so important in establishing his work. Warhol explains how he presented the filmmaker Emile de Antonio with two versions of paintings of Coke bottles. In one, an image of a Coke bottle competes against a hashed, messy homage to Abstract Expressionism. The other, Warhol describes as ‘just a stark, outlined Coke bottle in black and white’—a ‘cold, no-comment’ painting.24 The first of these de Antonio scorns: it was ‘a piece of shit, simply a little bit of everything’, he is reported to have said.25 The other, with the gestural paintwork dumped, de Antonio calls ‘remarkable—it’s our society, it’s who we are’.26 Warhol’s subtraction of painterly gesture paints a picture, a portrait, of ‘society’ that many would argue should be more like the ‘little bit of everything’ of the first picture. Warhol’s new portrait of American society, represented by the singular and untarnished commodity image, is very different to the one Ralph Ellison gives in the Epilogue of his novel Invisible Man: ‘America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain’.27
The work of Anthony E. Grudin has helped deepen our understanding of the significance of de Antonio’s proclamation. Grudin uses the example of Superman (1961), first displayed in the window of the Bonwit Teller department store. Here, Grudin observes that in photos of this installation the works appear without the funny, messy crayon scrawls and the partial erasure of text that they acquired in later versions.28 Grudin argues that these additions are an elaboration of the trials that the working class undergoes to keep within the lines, to assimilate with the American ideal of a ‘classless’ professional middle class like that represented by Clark Kent. In his analysis, Grudin concludes that stylistic imperfections were neither an ‘Abstract Expressionist holdover’ nor ‘accidents’, as many have ascribed them, but a qualifier to the myth that one might gain entrance into American society through various forms of assimilation and cultural reproduction: ‘at its best and most incisive, Warhol’s art was […] about the possibility of mass-cultural participation within capitalism.’29 At the same time, Grudin persuasively argues that the brands that Warhol borrowed in his early paintings—those of Coca-Cola, Brillo, Campbell’s and so on—were specifically associated with the working class, who were the target audience of these companies at the time. Again, what these brands harnessed was an attempt to associate with a core American identity on the part of a population excluded from it.
Thus, in Grudin’s reading, Warhol’s messy, off-register elements highlight the difficulties of assimilation through tracing the signifiers that stood for real social, institutional and physical spaces. Indeed, these real spaces and their representations frequently overlap in Warhol’s work. We see this in the Dance Diagrams which map over floor space but, I would argue, it is best realised in Warhol’s sculpture. As early as 1989, Benjamin Buchloh highlighted the importance of not allowing iconographic readings of Warhol’s work to overshadow an approach that belongs, historically, to the sculptural.
The endless discussion of Warhol’s Pop iconography, and even more, those of his work’s subsequent definition in terms of traditional painting, have oversimplified his intricate reflections on the status and substance of the painterly object and have virtually ignored his efforts to incorporate context and display strategies into the work themselves.30
Buchloh thus redirects consideration of Warhol’s work. He opens up the possibility that this kind of thinking about materiality might also be transversally connected to the material conditions through which the social world that Warhol was part of, and represented, is negotiated: where spectatorship and participation bleed into one another. This saves Warhol’s work from the macro scale at which iconographic readings have tended to operate and is crucial for thinking about many of the works in this book, which are specific to the worlds that Warhol inhabited. It shows how the act of taking one’s place, as audience or author, bore a relation to all kinds of social negotiations. The work could be about entitlement as much as it could be about aspiration, and could target individuals as well as social groupings. Indeed, arguably, the question of the significance of Warhol’s art is redundant without a prevailing concern for the symbolic space in which Warhol ‘deployed’ it. If Rainer Crone has made the case that seeing Warhol’s work in terms of theatre is a productive way of looking at it, this book could be said to be all about ‘scenes’.31 Certainly I make no apologies for writing about Warhol’s ‘shows’, as his opening nights were often unprecedented social events. The aforementioned symbolic space in question was, predominantly, the artworld but I argue that more care needs to be taken about the particularities here. Charles F. Stuckey’s work on ‘Warhol in Context’ certainly sets a precedent for this focus on what he calls Warhol’s ‘wry sense of conceptual contextual gesture’.32 For example, Stuckey suggests that the installation of Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery was ‘a parody of the happenings and installation exhibitions that had been organized by the artists associated with the Hansa, Judson, Reuben, and Martha Jackson galleries including Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg.’33 Key to Stuckey’s observation is not just the importance of the influence of happening and environment artists on Warhol but the idea that his approach to this influence is parodic.
Yet the idea of a theatrical Warhol, very much the artist-decorator and artist-set designer (as well as court fool), is one that puts the already fragile sense of a ‘Warhol sculptor’ in jeopardy. In the case of the installation of Brillo Boxes, object and environment literally come to be pitted against one another: if the impact of the work came through there being a critical mass of boxes, this impact would be diminished as the boxes (as individual works of art) got bought up. Yet, at the same time, the effect of taking over the gallery, and making it appear more like a warehouse than a space for an elite form of commerce, had an impact on the commodity status of the Brillo Boxes. Perhaps the failure of this exhibition, in terms of sales, was also a mark of its success. Indeed, further to this, if this environmental Warhol is one better understood by thinking of him in 3D, through an approach in many ways most appropriate to sculpture, there are, on the other hand, no clay or plaster works in this book, no bronzes; little that would connect Warhol to sculpture’s traditions. And while Buchloh’s invitation to think of Warhol materially and in terms of an encounter is foundational, there is little either in his own work or in work that follows his lead, despite Stuckey’s contribution, that accounts for Warhol’s sculpture as a body of work.
The overall contention of this book is that Warhol’s sculpture constitutes a series of critical, oppositional recodings of the institutions of art. The work attempted to undermine what was most anti-social about these institutions, particularly their containment of social distinction within select spaces. It did so through a series of interventions into the artworld that singled out the reification of objects on which these institutions rested and through which they expressed their sense of their own value. Warhol’s strategies for doing this can be divided approximately into three, though none of the works in this book exclusively relies on any single one. First, was the proposition of the anti-object: the insertion into the artworld of objects that failed to reflect the value mutually upheld between the spectator and the gallery or museum. These were objects in which value was absent or fleeting, or which parodied the values, or valued objects, of the particular context in which the work was shown. If this co-constitution of value between the spectator and the work was in dynamic, this relationship relied on maintaining categorical distinctions, particularly between real and representational space and, indeed, sculptural object and image. And this leads us to the second strategy: Warhol’s sculpture supplanted and confused such categories and was, therefore, capable of being representative in more than one sense. Lastly, Warhol’s work with sculpture was about invasion and trespass. It shows an acute awareness of the striations of social space and the way in which privilege, entitlement and social standing defined and delineated one’s access and belonging to its many levels. All of the major exhibitions in this book were also major events, and these invasions of the sedate space of the artworld all defined moments of social mixing and social force that Warhol had carefully orchestrated. In the following chapters, the different pathways through which Warhol engaged with these aspects are thematised. This means that the same works are discussed at different times if they provide readings relevant to the different themes, and chronological order falls away so that each chapter spans large periods of time.
The first chapter, then, begins with some of Warhol’s earliest works: the development of the hand-painted Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). There is a tension between some of the works in this group, where the material or haptic qualities of the cans are communicated, and others, indeed those that would finally be shown, in which there is a systematic reduction of these qualities that anticipates Warhol’s later silkscreen technique. My argument here is that an understanding of sculpture can be seen as emerging from the qualities that were ‘cast-off’ in the development of Warhol’s ‘no comment’ style: something haptic, spatial, and outside of the metaphysical frameworks of image reproduction or circulation. The sculptural can act as a refuge for what does not meet the conditions of the reproducible image and which is also, at this period in Warhol’s work, synonymous with the commodity form. The work discussed in this chapter is collected both through the poetics of failure and the unfinished, as well as the formal tropes of the discarded and waste. It begins with Warhol’s first solo artistic exhibition in New York City in 1954, remembered by Warhol and his associates as the ‘crumpled paper show’. Crumpled paper becomes a subject that Warhol would revisit again as late as 1983 in the work Abstract Sculpture, made of newspaper print on Mylar. Such work has both important art historical forebears and progeny. In 1953, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a crumpled paper poster for his exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and in 2005 Seth Price began displaying ‘Mylar crumples’ bearing an image from a banned newsfeed.
The second chapter begins with the development of Warhol’s epoch- defining sculptural statement, his 1964 exhibition The Personality of the Artist, which featured Brillo Boxes amongst other facsimiles of packaging. Uniquely, the chapter considers this work as an event of critical and institutionally reflexive installation art. Key here is the analysis of the themes of trespass, entitlement and agency in the ‘artworld’, a term used by Arthur C. Danto in his 1964 article on the same exhibition. Important to my argument about this work and, more broadly, for the book at large, The Personality of the Artist takes place at the same moment as Minimalism. This central chapter contains a re-reading of Warhol’s most famous sculptural work in tension with the art historical paradigms that emerged in parallel with it.
The third chapter looks at sculptures, from the 1960s and 1970s, which bring together Warhol’s painting and film work, and the two different ‘worlds’ to which they belonged. These works are: Large Sleep (1965), Silver Clouds (1966), Rain Machine (c.1970) and a holographic portrait from 1976. They exemplify the tendency within Warhol’s sculpture towards collaboration and technological innovation. Silver Clouds, which marked his so-called retirement from painting in 1966, was made in collaboration with the scientist Billy Klüver, who had worked on the Bell Labs/NASA Telstar satellite launch in 1962. Rain Machine was shown at the Osaka World Fair in 1970, and emerged from the Art and Technology initiative run by LACMA. These works constituted the major focus of Warhol’s efforts during the period when they were made. Their interest—and also, I suggest, the reason for their neglect in art history—lies in their hybridity and the disruption of categories that they threaten to cause. In these works Warhol reaches beyond the limits of the imaging technology available to him. Expressed through an idiom that is, in the last instant, sculpture, he fuses film and painting whilst simultaneously critically reflecting on the values attached to the media he attempts to leave behind.
The fourth chapter looks at Warhol’s Shadows exhibition from 1979. This work, installed at the Dia Beacon, has been preserved for the public in a way that the earlier Personality of the Artist show has not. However, little has been said about what Shadows says in relation to the art of this time. My analysis of the work considers how, in league with the polemical thrust of contemporary movements Pattern and Decoration and Photorealism (movements that art history has endeavoured to sweep under the carpet), Warhol at once produced a rebuke and satire of Minimal aesthetics and a reassertion of what he called Pop’s ‘commonist’ challenge to the artworld. That this vast painting-environment, commissioned and displayed by one of Minimalism’s great patrons, was one in which Warhol associated himself with ‘the art across the street’, could be said to be characteristic of the attitude of Warhol’s work not just in the case of Shadows, but more generally. In my reading of the exhibition of Brillo Boxes, Silver Clouds and Shadows, the three moments together provide a new appraisal of the artist that considers the importance to his work of sculpture and installation, and his critical engagement with Minimalism over an extended period of time
The final chapter begins with an appreciation of Warhol’s overlapping collecting and art making. He collected objects, people and images, and all were used and reused in his artwork. Returning to the ‘waste paper’ with which the book begins, I read this recycling of ‘junk’ as a prototypical means of re-dissemination which engendered further collecting and consuming activity. Warhol’s artist-curator project Raid the Icebox I (1969–70) forms the centrepiece of this chapter. Though the work finally received scholarly attention in the mid-1990s, its importance, particularly for Institutional Critique and the work of artists such as Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser, is still under-established. The truth is that Raid the Icebox I is an entirely remarkable work, one of the first ‘artist in the museum’ works ahead of similar, canonical, projects by John Cage and Joseph Kosuth. In this chapter, I shall argue against assumptions that the exhibition was an apolitical piece of theatre: at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Warhol expanded the ground of sculpture, orchestrating assemblage and installation across media and institutions. Though Raid the Icebox I is the primary work cited in this chapter, a discussion of the 612-part Time Capsule project, and his collecting more generally, as well as some experiments with concrete and chocolate, all emerge from this study.
The above has, I hope, introduced the variety of works that will be considered in this book and how collecting them together under the category of sculpture relates to the existing literature on Warhol’s work. This aspect has been a primary concern in my research because, by way of an art history of Warhol’s sculptural output, what I attempt to provide here is also a picture — a portrait — of Warhol’s place in art history that goes beyond two dimensions.