The paintings of Campbell’s soup cans brought Warhol his big break. They were his first major multiples and the single subject of his first Pop exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in the summer of 1962. They helped to define, and still define, Warhol as a Pop artist, both in his own right and, crucially at the time, as distinct from Roy Lichtenstein with whom he had previously shared the subject of comic book characters. The paintings were presented either on one canvas, as in 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), or in tight series in which the key variable is the flavour of the soup. In either, there is no other sign of life, no other relationship to the world. They exist in an abstract space, with no shadows and no sense of human scale, thus they speak of a larger condition of alienation from the objects of our experience and hence from the embodied, sensory self. They are signs more than objects: detached, immaterial, ungrounded. And, more than any other images in the history of art, they have become mascots for theories of the post-modern, a theoretical territory in which Warhol’s work more generally has become a touchstone. In these paintings, commodity fetishism powerfully unifies sign and object in a new immaterial hyperreality. But we might also say that this sense of abstraction also suggests a reconfiguration of painting under the serial and uniform order of the mass produced commodity object. Thus, painting too comes to be at a remove from itself, it becomes ‘painting’: a frame within a frame from which the commodity appears.
Yet, in these works that reject painting as a harmonious space of mediation between the subject and the world, there is an uncanny sense of substanceless presence: they are like ghosts. As Benjamin Buchloh writes, ‘these paintings are imbued with an eerie concreteness and corporeality, which in 1961 had distinguished Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista. But Warhol differs here […] in that he transferred the universality of corporeal experience onto the paradoxical level of mass-cultural specificity.1 This aesthetic—what Roland Barthes calls a ‘residue of a subtraction’ of the individual—stands in contrast to Abstract Expression’s earlier anthropomorphism.2 These paintings mark the beginning of a moment of wider resistance to the centring and reflection of the subject that Abstract Expressionism might be seen to stand for. And yet, in Warhol’s early Pop Art, what goes hand in hand with a refusal to situate the subject within the image is the idea that the images, as Emile de Antonio said of Coca-Cola, represent ‘us’: modern subjects of consumerism.
But what of works from the same year such as Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (plate 1.1)? In marked contrast to their more famous counterparts Warhol also painted images of soup cans that are recognisably from life, appearing as if happened upon at the kitchen counter, half ultra-modern still life, half dishevelled object of desire. This proximity to life suggests that these cans are not just real things, but that there is, or might be, a subject with whom their reality was interconnected. In one painting from this series, a can opener hovers in position, as if guided by an invisible hand. In another, a pencil and watercolour study, the can is used to house a wodge of dollar bills. If this early series of paintings and drawings of soup cans imply a ready consumer, we, of course, know who that was. According to David Bourdon’s biography of Warhol, ‘Warhol’s mother habitually served Campbell’s soup at home, and Andy grew up on the product.’3
Beneath the labels in a few of the torn soup can paintings (particularly Big Torn Soup Can Pepper Pot and Vegetable Beef, both 1962) the silvery surface of the tin has been rendered by a marbleising technique. It suggests a reflective surface that can carry images by itself like a mirror but its messy, going-no-where grey also provides a striking contrast to the regal red of the label and the bold shapes of its letters. If the side of the can could be considered a mirror surface, one could say that it bears images as a consequence of its materiality, while at the same time the label is just barely material as a consequence of its image needing somewhere to be. There is a state of dissolution and fragility in this painting then, a sense that painting itself is unravelling and rent. Work backwards and re-fuse the two elements that Warhol has drawn apart, and painting as it was to earlier generations of painters is regained: the duality of material self-sameness and cultural signifier in a single whole. But, with the development of his paintings of factory-fresh cans, supermarket shelf cans, and the whole-scale introjection of the commodity sign into the space of painting, there was no going back.
As the torn and used can works were developed in parallel with the ‘supermarket shelf’ images of soup cans, we have to be careful about inferring that the more famous paintings emerged after the traces of thingness, use and the subject had been cast aside. David Joselit’s excellent analysis avoids this kind of storytelling. For him the tearing of the image from the object in Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can only illustrates the trauma more obliquely inferred by the others: ‘Even in ostensibly straight-forward works like his 1962 series of Campbell’s soup cans,’ he writes, ‘the commodity is divided against itself.’4 Joselit sees in both types of painting the same tension between figure and ground, image and object that map on the ‘extra-optical dimensions within a postmodern media-saturated consumer society.’5 However, even as equivalent, there is left the question of what to do with what has been left out by the shifting framework that the commodity has brought on representation. If painting as it was is torn apart, what can one say of the scraps? In these less famous works, the shadows, as it were, of the paintings of ‘clean’ soup cans, the capacity of painting to contain and construe aesthetic value seems to have been made vulnerable, in parallel with—perhaps even as a consequence of—the defaced can’s own uncertain status with regard to value.
In these cases it is sculpture that emerges as the conceptual container for this matter, the ravaged paper and the stripped or spent cans. These disassembled components, and what Warhol did with them, become an important counterpoint to Warhol’s painting as it evolved. The paintings of used and abused cans are not sculptures, of course, but if painting becomes something else at this moment, taking on the order of the mass produced commodity image, they are not that. Outside of the perimeters set by the multiple, mechanically reproduced image and the commodity object, these works are defined by a condition of negation that links them to the three-dimensional work that follows in this chapter. If the torn cans have gone through a transformation that, in their depiction, metaphorically can be seen as also between painting and sculpture, what follows is a consideration of sculptures actually produced by similar kinds of transformation. Processes of crushing and crumpling especially are means through which sculpture emerges out of image space in the work that will be featured in this chapter. Yet, in this work, it is not so much the sculpture’s materiality that comes to be emphasised—images also require material supports—but an inability to conform to the conditions of production that define the modern image and the modern commodity. In the example of the paintings of the soup cans, this non-conformity is also the state in which the subject—and traditional ideas about artistic production and expression—reside, while the image becomes a representation of forces which are ostensibly antithetical to these. In this chapter I show that, in examples of Warhol’s sculpture and in a history of significant practices that followed, the analysis of Warhol’s series of Soup Cans helps to reveal something about the condition of sculpture today but only in so far as this stretches our understanding of what the sculptural is ‘after Warhol’.
Fig. 1.1.Vito Giallo, Andy Warhol’s Folded Paper Show, pen and ink on Strathmore paper, 2013. Courtesy of Vito Giallo.
***
In the book Unseen Warhol (1996), Benjamin Liu and John O’Connor, who both worked for Warhol in the 1980s, talk to (among many others) Vito Giallo and Nathan Gluck, two of Warhol’s early associates from the 1950s. In their interviews with Liu and O’Connor (whose combined voice is italicised in the following conversation), both men describe Warhol’s first solo show in 1954 at the Loft Gallery, run by Giallo and Jack Wolfgang Beck. In their accounts of this exhibition, a sense of the young Warhol as radically innovative hinges upon an idea of the sculptural nature of his work. Beginning with Giallo:
[Warhol] would start with a square piece of paper. He would take the paper and he would fold it, and somehow he got a lot of pyramids out of it. Then he would open it up one way or another, and some pyramids would be sticking out. Next, he would do drawings of heads and people on parts of the pyramids, and he did a lot of marbleizing, oil on water. Finally, he’d hang them up so that they were sticking out from the wall. We used pushpins to hang them up, and they kept falling down; I must have picked those pieces up a hundred times.
O’Connor / Lui: What happened to all of them?
I think he threw them all out. He never sold anything at the gallery. Very few of us did. But I know nobody who even looked at this show. I thought it was fascinating. I was so amazed. It was his turn to do a one-man show, and I thought it would be drawings and paintings, something straightforward. And then when these things came in I was just shocked.6
Gluck’s account of the same show differs slightly, describing a more forthright artistic statement:
Andy did these strange marbled things, and then he crumpled them up and just left them around on the floor.
They were on the floor? I thought they were pinned to the wall but they kept falling to the floor.
Oh, that’s a theory. But I thought Andy had installed them on the floor. Well, maybe by the time you came to see the show it was all on the floor.7
Warhol was a commercial illustrator when he displayed these home-made marbleised patterned papers, approximately 12 in number, to which he had added figures in ink.8
I am going to consider Giallo’s as the fuller account here, as he remembers pinning the drawing/sculptures up ‘a hundred times’, but I think it is also important to include that of Gluck (who in the end concedes it might have been the case that the work originated on the wall) because it gives a sense of the impact the work made on the gallery visitor.
According to Giallo, the intention of this exhibition had been to showcase Warhol’s dainty, folded and illustrated papers. However, in the event these intricate wall-mounted drawings, on folded, coloured paper, kept coming unstuck and, after several attempts to re-mount the work, Warhol instructed Giallo to leave them on the floor where they were trampled by visitors who did not realise that they were standing on ‘the work’. The exhibition was thus re-conceptualised and became known, retrospectively, as the Crumpled Paper Show. In a recent correspondence with the Warhol scholar Thomas Kiedrowski, Giallo made a drawing of how he remembered the work on the floor of the Loft Gallery, prior to being stood on (fig. 1.1). The example of the Crumpled Paper Show places some of the tensions between registers of commodity, image and material object, identified in the paintings and drawings of soup cans, in an explicitly sculptural context. In doing so, the work presents sculpture as a category for what begins as image but which cannot be withheld by it. It exists outside of the frameworks of both the image and of traditional sculpture. The expectations of the viewers, the chance event of the work’s falling to the floor and the reimaginging of the work after the event are what truly establish this work as sculpture, I propose, rather than its mere material heaviness and three-dimensional qualities. It is as if the work’s irreconcilability with the condition of the image, rather than the heaviness of the paper, results in the collapse onto the floor, and it is only there that the work is reconceived. The Crumpled Paper Show became the work it did by being made in the moment of its unmaking, the authorial touch so small a thing as to virtually be a nothing, produced by Warhol finally not allowing the work to be restored to the wall and considered a ‘made’ entity. Yet this artistic touch, so different from what distinguished his work as an advertising illustrator, is a crucial part of the picture of sculpture I am presenting. And what it lacks in craft it makes up for as a gesture. Like ‘scrunched’, the term ‘crumpled’ calls to mind rejected bits of paper tossed into wastepaper baskets. It is suggestive of frustration, dismissal and rejection; it is ‘abstract expressionist’ in a very literal sense. If this process of naming and reconstituting the work in retrospect is as determined as I am claiming, Warhol might have had some art-historical inspiration for doing so. In 1953—the year before the Crumpled Paper Show—he is likely to have seen Marcel Duchamp’s “Dada: 1916–1923,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 to May 9, 1953 at the show of the same title (fig. 1.2). This work consisted of the poster for the coming exhibition scrunched tightly into a ball.9 Like Crumpled Paper Show Duchamp’s crumpling is equally an abstraction, an act against a previously established legibility that occurs in the poster’s transition from two dimensions to three. Likewise, there is a play with tenses in these works: if Warhol’s is partially a retelling of the story, Duchamp make a gesture of denouncement using the material announcing his exhibition, and does so from a point before the event.
Fig. 1.2.Marcel Duchamp,“Dada: 1916-1923,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 to May 9, 1953, 1953. Letterpress exhibition catalogue and poster designed by Duchamp; crumpled version. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother, Alexina Duchamp, 1998-4-49. Copyright: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp.
In Warhol’s work more broadly, we are faced with incidences of abstraction where in paintings and prints, for example, images are transferred off-register or else mis-register completely. We might think of the Crumpled Paper Show in these terms, as failing to register both on the wall where they were placed and with the gallery visitors as scrunches of intricately produced waste-paper on the floor. Likewise, in Warhol’s early films, such as Kitchen and Vinyl (both 1965), accidents create dramatic moments of discord, shocking viewers out of their lulled states when carelessly placed bodies and objects interact on the screen. These moments occur, for example, when a drink falls on the floor or a harsh sound interrupts a scene from off-set. In Peter Gidal’s words, in these moments ‘gestural super-reality converges with overtones of dada-absurdity […] overpowering the visual and aural concentration of the viewer.’10 The sense is that, much like the paper crumples, also a kind of decoration, through accidents and moments of discontinuity props and materials that would otherwise be backdrop insist on their status as contingent, affective and as objects. As has already been considered regarding the paintings of soup cans, here too (and as I will argue of his sculpture and installation more broadly) Warhol can be seen as reversing the figure-ground relationships that supported ideology.
Between Gidal’s analysis of the occurrences of accidents in Warhol’s film and The Crumpled Paper Show there are, however, important distinctions. If the accidents on set shock, the crumples go unnoticed. And while we might think of both incidences in terms of a reality, in defiance of the framework of representation, there is also a sense in which the crumples are abstract, indecipherable, and outside of the awareness and expectations of the viewer. In 1983, Warhol made two quite different sculptures both called Abstract Sculpture and, as their shared title suggests, they help us get a better sense of what Warhol understood by this term and what its relationship to sculpture was.
The first of these Abstract Sculptures I want to consider in tandem with another work, Crushed Newspaper, also 1983. These two works, in turn, are tied to Warhol’s long retinue of hand painted and silkscreened images of newspaper pages. Abstract Sculpture’s content is from the New York Post and Crushed Newspaper’s is from the Daily News, both date from October 1983 (24 October and 19 October respectively). These works stand out from the series of newspaper works to which they belong as they are printed onto sheets of Mylar, the same shiny material used for Warhol’s Silver Clouds, whereas their partner works are prints on canvas. In the case of Crushed Newspaper, the Mylar has been tightly crumpled—crushed—and has then been flattened out for display. Abstract Sculpture, however, has been crumpled and has then been mounted in a Plexiglas case so that the contorted sheet stands up and the silvery surface of its verso can be seen from the other side of the translucent case (plate 1.2). This crumple could well have been done in one movement, exactly the same gesture with which one would discard any sheet of paper, but the effect here is to make a dramatic sculptural object.11 Looking at Abstract Sculpture from the reverse side of the vitrine-like case, we indeed see inside an abstract sculpture, a distorting and contorted reflective surface. In three dimensions, it replays the way Warhol traditionally accompanied his silkscreen paintings with equal sized monochromes, producing diptychs for which he could charge more. Warhol’s ‘blanks’ have been considered by Benjamin Buchloh as a correlative of the theme of the off-register, writing that both techniques ‘identify with failures or resistances to comply with the rigors of the symbolic order.’12 In both Abstract Sculpture as well as Crushed Newspaper this disruption is carried further by the action that has obscured the newspaper text. This is also true of Warhol’s earlier Death and Disaster works. Yet between these works and the Death and Disaster paintings, there are parallels beyond the blanks that accompany the printed portion of the work. These also reproduced images from news media and the content is as grisly as Suicide, Race Riot or Ambulance Disaster. Abstract Sculpture shows page three of the New York Post after a terrorist attack on a Beirut US Marine barracks in October 1983. According to the paper, 172 had been confirmed dead but the headline announces that number could ‘top’ 200. Crushed Newspaper, like Race Riot, refers to another racially motivated act of terrorism by the state against its own citizenry, in this case the student, artist and close friend of Keith Haring, Michael Stewart. Stewart was brutally murdered while in police custody in September 1983. A report of his death in the Daily News newsprint, dwarfed by an advertisement for a sale at a clothes retailer.13 That these crumpled works signify angry, dismayed responses to the news that they contain adds another dimension to the understanding of their status as off-register and abstract. In the case of Crushed Newspaper, Warhol’s reaction does not cohere with the rational order that allots the announcement of Gimbel’s sale a dominant space on the page. In Abstract Sculpture it competes with the legibility of the print by remaining in 3D.
Stewart’s death is also the subject of the other sculpture called Abstract Sculpture made around this time (plate 1.3). The work is a sizeable assemblage that relies for its structure on a large canvas that had been smashed up and then fixed into place. The work thus reflects, in different media, the action of crumpling or screwing-up that occurs in the Mylar works. On the structure, multiple smaller canvases by other artists have been attached. Abstract Sculpture was produced in collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Italian painter Francesco Clemente between 1983–4. Basquiat was already working on a series of large collaboration paintings in Warhol’s studio at this time. Two of Warhol’s assistants, Jay Shriver and Agusto Bugarin both also played some part in creating this work. Italian painter Francesco Clemente and two of Warhol’s assistants, Jay Shriver and Agusto Bugarin, all also played some part in creating this work.14 Matt Wrbican has confirmed, however, that it was Warhol’s idea to smash the large stretched canvas (a task Shriver and Bugarin undertook) commenting that this reflected both the violence of the police and the artists’ anger. Basquiat, who also created Defacement (1983) in response to Stewart’s death, was responsible for pouring pink paint all over the sculpture and Shriver attached smaller paintings to the larger canvas, including the same print of newspaper with the story of Stewart’s death used for Crushed Newspaper. With at least three authors, this is a work of multiple points of view sutured together on a picture plane that is shattered and frozen.15
In the examples above, sculpture seems to emerge out of the practice of painting unable to accommodate or account for the relation between the artist and the subject matter. It becomes a platform and an answer to precisely the ‘defacement’ of reality that goes on in the media. Yet, as in the story of Stewart, the whitewash is equivalent to death and, in these works, Warhol’s feeling about death’s own abstraction is entwined with these ideas. Looking at other sources, for example The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), there is a clear sense that death, for Warhol, was abstract. Over the pages of The Diaries he frequently cuts short his meditations on his own and others’ mortality with the resigned and exasperated expression ‘it’s so abstract!’16 As the 1980s proceed, and age, drug use and AIDS claim more of the lives of those he knew, death features more frequently, and we are confronted with a paradox: death seems to become more abstract as it becomes more of a reality for Warhol and those around him. Crumpling up the Mylar newspaper as if to throw it away can therefore be read as physically acting out this attitude toward what one cannot get to grips with. It is the index of a process in which an abstract idea becomes an abstract form. Yet, at every step of that process, there is an accompanying and very explicit reality, one that can be quantified (‘172 dead’) and preserved. Indeed, perhaps the crucial aspect of the reality of these works is their relation to their times. Warhol’s work ‘tells the time’, reflecting the world and the people that surrounded him. The two works called Abstract Sculpture are exemplary of the understanding of sculpture proposed in this chapter: a modality, in dialectic with image culture through forms of negation such as accidents and acts of destruction, that themselves have a relationship to the subject which can be both abstract while, at the same time, realist.
If Warhol’s Abstract Sculptures refuse the structures of value inscribed by the institution of visibility and, more directly, the institutions of the media, gallery and the artworld that hold them in place, he is not alone in exploring the alternatives. Nor has art history neglected to consider the metaphorics through which these possibilities might be understood. We might, for example, consider Briony Fer’s conception of ‘the unmade’ discussed in relation to Eva Hesse’s studiowork: part-productions to accompany the part-object, and engaged in the metaphorics of the cast and cast-off which we might easily apply to Warhol’s expressive, and expressively passive, gestures above.17 However, Warhol’s place in this history of sculpture has not been fully evaluated, nor have these themes been fully thought through with regard to his work. In itself this reflects a further tendency to think of sculpture as anomalous within discussions of image production and circulation, ones which Warhol’s painting work has otherwise been taken to illustrate perfectly.
Yet in a history only recently coming into relief, for artists working with image production, reproduction and circulation technologies, sculpture has been shown to be a vital context for the understanding of their work. Mel Bochner’s Color Crumples (1966), for example, demonstrate for Fer how ‘conceptually close’ Eva Hesse and Bochner were at the time.18 In these, and Bochner’s later Surface Dis/Tension (1968), photography’s readability and reliability came into question. Photographs of crumpled grids cut to shape produce the illusion of three dimensions, especially when re-photographed. Yet, though these works share a formal vocabulary with Warhol’s Mylar works, perhaps we might consider them closer in kind to the paintings of torn soup cans where the sculptural is suggested in the unravellings of the image’s relation to the certainties of mechanical reproduction. Luke Skrebowski writes, in the context of ‘photography after conceptual art’, that: ‘Bochner’s early concern with the “phenomenology of the photograph” tipped over into its deconstruction, its unmaking, through a process that included the manipulation of the crumpled, sculptural surface of the image.’19 Unlike Bochner, however, Warhol’s experiments should not be described as a concerted ‘manipulation’. Instead, a much greater sense of vulnerability, to violation and to accident, characterises his approach, precisely as it does the subject of the work. To this extent, Warhol’s work is in kind with more recent artists who have explored the failures of mechanical reproduction. As slips of registration are increasingly rarely made by image technologies, they, symbolically at least, become more fraught, as, at the same time, these the automated processes become more enmeshed with our sense of self.
With Warhol’s folded and crumpled papers in mind we might think of Tillmans’s Lighter series, beginning in 2005 (plate 1.4). These are photographic prints of abstract ‘colour fields’ produced by being ‘carefully folded’, ‘crumpled’ and ‘buckled’ and put through the process of development variously before and after this treatment.20 Like Warhol’s crumpled floor sculptures, they began with an accident, in this case a printer jam, producing what would normally (or certainly in the eyes of the printer) have been considered a reject. This notion of the detritus of image production processes or exchange frameworks is an important model through which to view Tillmans’ experiments with medium, which might also include Tillmans’s Silver works, beginning in the late 1990s. These are prints made with the hazardous waste products of chromogenic processing, containing sediment impurities and tiny particles of other prints that would normally cause imperfections in development. Hence, they present not only that which is the fallout of the production of the image, but also that which both constitutes and obscures the image.
Displayed in Plexiglas boxes, the Lighters are uncontestably abstract, sculptural works, as well as works which echo closely the arrangement in Warhol’s Abstract Sculpture. Tillmans describes the Lighters as a form of ‘concrete’ photography which act as antidotes to our inundation with images and to what Tillmans describes as a ‘compulsion’ to represent.21 Yet, at the same time, the work might be seen to extend the photographic process into the gallery, the Perspex cases refracting and bending new light onto surfaces of the print. Variations in the visual qualities of the work are now as much to do with what Tillmans has emphasised as the ‘real’ conditions of shade and exposure caused by the work’s relief. This conception of realism as non-representational, indeed as strategically posited against representation, disrupts the contemporary ease with which pictures are produced and disseminated. This is not about the photograph considered as a discrete object, however, but rather an emphasis on that object’s contingency in contrast with the controlled conditions in which the image tends to be received and which it itself represents. Tillmans’ folds and crumples leave the picture open, they allow for a porosity whereby the influence of light, which, for a limited period, ‘shapes’ the photographic image, now also continues to do so in the gallery and in three dimensions. It is notable that for a long time Tillmans did not frame his work and mostly still does not. The frame protects the image from any risk to its value, but also the value of the cultural norms and commercial properties it is supposed to uphold. Like Warhol therefore, whose act of crumpling was an ‘answer’ in another register to what he read in the newspaper, Tillmans’s work dwells on that which the image refuses by presenting and celebrating the waste products of the image economy. In opposition to the frame and its function of exclusion, Tillmans engages in an ethical practice of inclusivity.
Also related to Warhol through a shared sensitivity to the off-register are the scanned and printed paintings by Wade Guyton which similarly draw attention to the fallibility of the transfer of images. Again, Guyton works with (or against) the photomechanical printer, neglecting it, leaving things to chance, dragging the prints out rather than letting them fall. ‘Tracks’ in the print, strips of extraneous pigment and absences of pigment reveal the weakness of the idea of a direct transfer of images, and emphasise the physical process of the paper being rolled out. Scale is clearly important for this work, in Guyton’s later works, huge scale threatens the status of painting itself, something in Chapter 4 I will argue Warhol also set out to do with Shadows (1979). In conversation with Rachel Kushner, Guyton, dismissing installation or architecture as alternative categories, agreed that the work reveals itself to be ‘sculpture in a photographic skin. In drag as painting.’22
For these more recent artists, technologies of image reproduction are less likely to ‘screw up’. Today the state of the image—which Roland Barthes described as a ‘floating chain of signifieds’ and which Warhol, as Barthes acknowledged, did so much to bring to our attention—has entered a state of liquid dissolution, superseded as digital has superseded analogue.23 No longer does the image swim in the fixing solution of the darkroom; information streams are now constituted by waves of images. Discussing the work of contemporary artist Kelley Walker, Scott Rothkopf has written: ‘images today are never really ours, just slippery emblems that keep moving and morphing as they pass from one incarnation to the next.’24
Neither object nor image, sculpture emerges in the examples above as something incompatible with the totalising register of the image. It represents contingency and destabilisation that threatens both modern production and distribution, and suggests a collapse of the distance of both to the modern subject. In the contemporary artist Seth Price’s work, this contingency is harnessed as a form of resistance in a strategy of ‘dispersion’. Dispersion is a system of re-circulation, diverting content from established circuits of distribution online.25 As with Warhol’s Crumpled Paper Show and Tillmans’s folds, Price’s sculptural work also expresses an idea of fall-out, but what spills out of the screen in Price’s work is an abjection that is far more integral to the structures of circulation themselves. An important example is his Hostage Video Still with Time Stamp of 2005 (plate 1.5). In this series of works, images are screen-printed on what he describes as ‘Mylar crumples’. These sheets of transparent plastic carry downloaded low-res website images of the decapitation of a Jewish-American businessman by Islamist militants, which were at first distributed online but became subject to censor. When exhibited, the rolls of Mylar are fitted with grommets which allow the sheets to be attached to the wall, although all that is specified in the work’s provision to galleries is that the arrangement of the sheets should further distort the image, hence their being crumpled. It is important to Price that Mylar is also the material used to protect books and paper for archival storage, so that this highly sculptural matter, sometimes left as huge bolts of free-standing material, is made from a kind of frame or protective barrier against damage that might occur over time. This idea of preservation contrasts with the image’s relation to a ‘live’ image economy through which the censored image is eroded into near indecipherability.26 On the floor, a place all of the work in this chapter is in dynamic with, Price’s sculptures represent the fallout from the contemporary image-frame of mass circulation on the World Wide Web, yet his is a strategy of reclaiming a relation to content from media similar to Warhol’s reaction to newspaper reports in the eighties; ones whose expression also took the form of sculpture.
We might think of these artists, dragging their work into the world, as contesting the frameworks constituted by the delimiting structure of techno-corporate entities, of media and the category of the image bounded to these. As with Warhol’s paintings of torn soup cans, the work in this chapter refers to something cast off or cast out of those established relays of consumption and receptivity. In doing so it confounds the ways in which we engage with work through traditional categories and conventional understandings. Warhol’s earliest sculpture, and work featured here that echoes it, locates an institutional boundary that becomes a platform for critique. In the following chapter, the literal boundaries, this time of the gallery, become this platform.