Fig. 5.1Materials for abandoned version of Invisible Sculpture, ca. 1979. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, there’ll be more waste than there should be. Everybody would always have something to sell back, so everybody would have money, because everybody would have something to sell. We all have something, but most of what we have isn’t saleable, there’s such a preference today for brand new things. People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their old shampoo bottles, their old magazines. We have to get more organized.1
The condition of Warhol’s sculpture has often been described in my analysis as negative, as that which is cast off. It stands for missing bodies, as much as it is a ‘body of work’ that is missing from our understanding of Warhol. In Warhol’s sculpture we often find him shying away from the demand, seemingly made by an object-world, that he should fill space. In the major exhibitions on which I have focussed, the sense is that Warhol is making his absence, rather than his presence, felt; hence the irony of the title of the Brillo Box exhibition, The Personality of the Artist. Instead, there is an equivalence between the objects in these exhibitions and the people who fill them as spectators: the boxes left scattered become indexes of the spectators. As a hindrance to access, the work contested the viewers’ sense of entitlement and belonging, provoking their jostling the boxes in order to re-secure their space in the gallery. The work highlighted a misidentification, or perhaps a struggle for identification, between artworld and real world brought about by the blurring the installation produced. If, for Rainer Crone and Hal Foster, the critical punch of Warhol’s images of this period came from their being walked past (either in the gallery or in relation to the oblivious ‘passer-by’ in White Burning Car III (1963) on whom Foster dwells), the boxes create the same effect by being walked into. As we have seen, The Personality of the Artist works by doing exactly what Arthur Danto said it did not: it created, in parallel to the gallery space, an illusory ‘ghost’ environment that gestured outside the gallery and the artworld and towards the stockroom—or, in the case of the exhibitions of Shadows and Silver Clouds, towards the disco or underground cinema space. In Invisible Sculpture, twenty years later, the empty plinth is a social platform but one that spectacularises the very absence of spectacle, putting a question mark over the status of spectatorship. As Neil Printz writes, Warhol ‘re-zoned’ empty space as sculpture and, in doing so, Warhol made the empty space of the gallery also a real world ‘elsewhere’, requiring different forms of interaction.2 And it was primarily sculpture that enabled these operations in Warhol’s work. The clash of registers, played out on the level of installation and social position and placement, created obstacles of the self; the spectator is always, as Warhol remarked of himself in The Philosophy, the wrong thing in the right place.3
Although his sculpture often included painting in its composition, throughout his career Warhol attempted a more direct translation of his painting practice into a three-dimensional format, experimenting with holographics, projected film images and 3D paintings. The promise of these technologies was that they seemed to extend the photomechanically produced image into three-dimensional space. However, despite the holographic portrait made with Jason Sapan in 1977, Warhol’s lasting ambition to make his own perfect 3D images was forever out of his reach. His final attempts came in the 1980s. In the book Thank You Andy Warhol, Stuart Pivar, ‘scientist, entrepreneur, collector and art patron’, describes how Warhol, in the years before his death, enlisted his help to source the technology for making what Pivar calls ‘sculpture portraits’ from camera images. Pivar describes something very much like today’s 3D printing machinery, whereby lasers cut into or bond material in accordance with designs or images from 3D imaging technologies. This technology, which today is increasingly commonplace, was too expensive for Warhol to access and so, according to Pivar, he instead resorted to plan B, making life casts enlarged by a third and painted.4 Pivar was Warhol’s first subject, but the series never took off. Instead, what remained in the aftermath of the abandoned project were pedestals. Pivar recounts that, following these investigations into 3D portraiture, Warhol claimed that it ‘was harder to find a good pedestal than make a good piece of sculpture’,5 and so planned an exhibition of them: ‘wood pedestals, marble pedestals, alabaster pedestals, wood pedestals painted to look like marble and alabaster’.6 The plan for this exhibition of Warhol’s hard-won collection of these things replaced the out-of-reach project for mechanical portrait busts. The idea harks back to the empty pedestal alongside which Warhol exhibited himself.
In turn, Invisible Sculpture’s earlier incarnation—the burglar-alarmed space in Warhol’s studio—left a box, now in the Andy Warhol Museum Archive, full of dismantled motion-sensitive burglar alarms (fig. 5.1). Packaging boxes also reappeared in two later works, both made during Warhol’s experimentation with cement in the early 1980s.7 The first, Concrete Block of 1982 (fig. 5.2), was a plain cardboard box, filled with cement; the second is Whitman’s Sampler (c.1984), the cement-filled candy box with a cellophane wrapper. Both works are signed on the inside of the boxes, gestures that, again, hint at an equivalence between art and emptiness. Everywhere it is as if there is material piling up. Everywhere there is junk left behind by Warhol’s attempts to erase, to do without subjects and objects, and make art out of atmosphere and emptiness. It is this material that today fills the empty space left by Warhol’s life, but it had begun doing so long before he died. The consideration of this material, as it mediates between social, personal and artistic values, is the subject of this chapter.
From Leftovers to Recycling to a Critique of the Category of Appropriation
Warhol complains in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol that ‘what I’ve always wanted, [is] not to have anything—to be able to get rid of all my junk—maybe put everything on microfilm or holographic wafers—and just move into one room.’8 By condemning his own possessions to the status of ‘junk’, Warhol expresses a sense of feeling burdened by objects. The statement is reminiscent of the mantra ‘one less object’, which ten years earlier had provided the rationale for Silver Clouds and the hope that they would float out of the Castelli Gallery window. As objects symbolic of Warhol’s painting, Silver Clouds did more than self-negate: they took with them not just the paintings they represented, but an entire aspect of Warhol’s identity as Warhol-the-painter amid Castelli Gallery cohorts such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Warhol wanted to spring clean and start out fresh. Yet the familiar Warholian fantasy of substituting the object with the three-dimensional image, and taking the image beyond the constriction of two-dimensional illusionistic space, is also expressed by this work. We find a similar idea in the above quotation from The Philosophy about the holographic wafers in the desire to retain a kind of access to the things he wishes would disappear. Objects and empty spaces; art seems to have the potential both to become junk and to clear junk space. Warhol gives empty space the status, as well as the kind of commodity value, that is reserved for only very distinguished objects. In contrast to space’s irrefutable worth, the value of the object becomes questionable. His ‘stark’ and ‘no comment’ early work is a painterly equivalent to this emptiness, one given an ironic twist in the case of The Personality of the Artist, as Brillo and Campbell’s box facsimiles filled up the actual space of the gallery.9
In 1988, 13 years after the publication of The Philosophy, Sotheby’s posthumous auction of Warhol’s possessions included over 10,000 objects in collections of 3,436 lots, and raised $30 million (with an average price per item of $3,000). Warhol clearly never achieved his ambition of getting rid of his valuable junk. One might see the auction as a final bid to create his idea of a perfect sculpture: an empty room seen through a peephole from the other side.10 We get a sense of the breadth and depth of Warhol’s collecting from a description in the catalogue of his collection of Americana and folk art shown in the 1977 exhibition Folk and Funk:
Andy Warhol, the consummate collector, is passionate about all forms of folk art—cigar store Indians, carousel figures, ships’ figureheads, weathervanes, whirligigs, decoys, primitive paintings, shop signs, quilts, coverlets, hooked rugs, painted furniture, and pottery. He also collects jewellery from the 1940s and 50s and good signed pieces and mass produced plastic jewellery from the 1930s; great Art Deco furniture by master French ébénistes like Jacques Emile Ruhlmann; tapes of conversations with celebrities; American Indian artefacts; contemporary and historical paintings by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Maxwell Parrish; junk mail; American Empire furniture; gold coins; thousands of carats of mineral stones; books of all kinds; and ‘Americana’—architectural ornaments, amusement park appurtenances, nickelodeons, pinball machines, cookie jars, toys, copper molds for manufacturing dolls and toys, Fiesta Ware, Westinghouse refrigerator ware, 1939 World’s Fair souvenirs; no Andy Warhols.11
But Warhol’s collection also included many things that did not make the list above, so another account is required. Bob Colacello, in his book Holy Terror, recounts a conversation with Brigid Berlin in the immediate aftermath of Warhol’s death in which she gives what we might consider as an alternative inventory to that in the Folk and Funk catalogue. She describes a visit to his home, a place which Warhol kept private from his friends and colleagues during his lifetime:
It was unbelievable. I wanted to puke. You couldn’t get in the dining room, there were so many shopping bags and boxes and statues. It was disgusting. Sad. The only thing I could think was ‘Has Jed seen this?’ And then I went upstairs to Jon Gould’s room and when Jon left Andy didn’t move one thing. Andy’s Valentine’s Day cards to Jon were still in the drawer. And the whole house was filled with shopping bags filled with Andy’s collections […] it was all consumption and possession and just that, just having things to have them, not to make the house look good or anything.12
Warhol’s collecting overlapped with personal difficulties with hoarding and letting things go, something Evelyn Hofer’s photograph of Warhol’s dining room clearly shows (plate 5.1). In interviews with survivors of Warhol Enterprises, he is repeatedly described as a ‘pack rat.’13 The difference between the accounts given by Berlin and the exhibition catalogue is a question of framework, of public and private space. But the Americana, which Warhol first bought as junk in the 1950s, could only be seen as having a value at that time (regardless of the value it was to take on later) if imagined within the latter, pathological context; one that considered all things, all kinds of junk, as worth retaining. The sickening, overbearing immensity of the junk that Warhol left behind should be redeemed as a vital, though problematic, corollary of that which was skimmed off the top and taken to Sotheby’s.
When Warhol began going to junk shops and flea markets in the 1950s, there was no established collectors’ market for folk art and Americana, certainly not for the kind of Americana that Warhol predominantly collected which would have then been described with the very loaded term ‘kitsch’. Sold as junk, the objects, however, later took on significant value as a market emerged.14 Although this market was flourishing when his collection was displayed to the public as the exhibition Folk and Funk, curated by Elissa Cullman and Sandra Brant for the Museum of American Folk Art in 1977, Warhol was apparently discouraged from further pursuit of his collection and he expressed regrets about the display of his objects. Importantly, Warhol’s collection of Americana and folk art began in tandem with the development of early work, such as the series of Campbell’s Soup Cans. This is significant, and not just for the shared subject matter of American identities. As we have already seen in relation to the work of Anthony E. Grudin, as symbols of aspiration, working class people consumed ‘all-American’ products like Campbell’s because they promised a gateway into a culture that was otherwise intolerant of, and unwilling to represent, their kind of social difference.15 If, following Grudin, the subjects of the early paintings might represent a modern America, and the rites of belonging to it through belongings, then the collected objects from times gone by represented what was hokey and had been replaced.
However, perhaps the situation is not quite so dichotomised. A considerable portion of the subjects of Warhol’s early work was what had been leftover, left out or even killed off by the American machine. For example, in the Death and Disaster series, participation is revealed as fraught with danger (something made especially apparent by Tuna Fish Disaster of 1963). The cycles of production and consumption, undertaken by Warhol at this time, picture, in turn, the cyclical nature of the culture that he observed. Such an ethos was also expressed elsewhere in the work of the artists that Warhol most admired: in the reuse of items found on the street in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as through the influence of Emile de Antonio who had fostered and supported Warhol’s artistic development. Writing on the aesthetic of overspill that he shared with Warhol, de Antonio stated that ‘my long history with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg enlightened me about the uses of junk, the detritus of modern industrial society as a source for the materials of art.’16 De Antonio’s own breakthrough work, Point of Order (1963), re-edited the used kinescope footage of the Army-McCarthy hearings which, according to Branden W. Joseph, de Antonio ‘found languishing in an old CBS warehouse’.17 This work was conceived by de Antonio as a critique of the machinery of American political power:
My movie is against the whole Establishment […] the film is not an attack on McCarthy. The film is an attack on the American government. My feeling is that if you look at the film carefully, Welch comes off as badly as McCarthy. He comes off as a rather brilliant, sinister, clever lawyer who used McCarthy’s techniques to destroy McCarthy… I wanted the whole system exposed.18
To repeat an observation made in Chapter 3, in both of their works Warhol and de Antonio present the American spectacle as the means through which people are ostensibly offered access to identity, culture and public discourse, but are, at the same time, inhibited from political agency. Without commentary, their work merely repeats the spectacle in a new context, re-presenting the visual material—perhaps the only viable strategy of critical framing when it is ‘the whole system’ that is considered to be problematic. It is an engagement with ideology that is, in a direct way, also an aesthetic position defined by an un-slanted, depthless perspective on that culture. This is something made literal in Warhol’s early paintings, a challenge both to ideas of critical distance and to elevated bourgeois tastes for depth.
Like de Antonio, Warhol orientated his aesthetic around both the source material and the attitudes left over from the boom era of the 1950s. It has been noted that many of Warhol’s early subjects are rooted in this same era, even if they are also stimulated by an immediate present. The Marilyn series begun in August 1962, for example, is a response to the film star’s death on the 5th of that month, but the image that Warhol uses is from a publicity photograph for the film Niagara (1953), taken right at the moment when Monroe became a star.19 This might also be said of Warhol’s production technique, which is usually considered in terms of the technicised Fordist factory line, and hence as being modern. But, like the Hollywood era to which Monroe belonged, by the early 1960s the heyday of the American factory was over, and postwar economic prosperity had come to an end with the advent of unsettled socio-economic times and an economic crisis that began in 1957 and lasted until 1961. When it came to making his own films, Warhol also used leftovers. His radical, unedited approach blurred the line between what was waste and what would make the cut, but it was the performers themselves whom he explicitly identified in terms of leftovers. In a passage from POPism he recalled:
The people I loved were the ones like Freddy, the leftovers of show business, turned down at auditions all over town. They couldn’t do something more than once, but their one time was better than anyone else’s. They had star quality but no star ego—they didn’t know how to push themselves.20
The leftover refers to something overarching and essential about Pop: how Warhol dealt with and related to the material he used, and how that material occupied space. Leftovers are an important theme in both The Philosophy and POPism that, more than any other, makes it possible to read The Philosophy as something serious and coherent, a real philosophy emerging above the montage of voices simply imitating Warhol that it is often taken to be. With leftovers, Warhol gives us an explanation of his Pop strategy and process:
At the end of my time, when I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers. And I don’t want to be a leftover […] I always like to work on left overs, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers […] I’m not saying that popular taste is bad so that what’s left over from the bad taste is good: I’m saying that what’s left over is probably bad, but if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you’re not wasting as much as you would otherwise. You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a by-product of other businesses. Of other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact.21
If Pop’s material is leftovers, its process is that of recycling. Warhol describes his vision of Pop as a form of recycling: how Pop Art is not just a reflection of popular culture but a means for the interrelationship between the two through recycling.
Fig. 5.3.Andy Warhol, You’re In, 1967. Silver aerosol paint on bottle of Coca-Cola, 20.3 × 6.4 cm. Photograph Takao Ikejiri.
Warhol’s retaining of the leftover might be more hoarding, more pathology, but this is legitimised by an economy of reintegration, as well as a war on waste. Pop re-represented an American populace whose aspiration it was to consume, it deepened the penetration and visibility of the things that high culture overlooked, and put high culture itself to work in doing so. Yet, as Warhol himself makes clear, the leftover maintains a direct correlation with the commercial entity from which it is derived, one that threatens to trespass both on the artworld and also the commercial space from which it originated. One early example that did this rather too well is the 1967 work You’re In/ L’eau d’Andy, which had been evolving as an idea since 1964 (fig. 5.3). Warhol remanufactured 100 Coca-Cola bottles, painting them silver and giving them new tops, and then filled them with perfume. Unlike his soup can paintings, which were considered ‘art’ productions, producing a consumable—such as perfume — fell into the category of ‘directly competitive business’ in the eyes of the Coca-Cola company, which subsequently issued a cease-and-desist letter. This provocation must also have had something to do with the work being a series of sculptural objects, an actual series of things to sell. The pun in the title of the work emphasises recycling’s practice of taking what is leftover and making something desirable out of it. In The Philosophy Warhol remarks on recycling faeces as food, and this is almost that idea in practice: Andy’s waste water re-consumed as perfume from a container originally intended for a beverage.22 The whole work riffs on Warhol’s celebrity status, and the condition of being ‘in’. Of course, today many celebrities have released at least one fragrance for sale. You might also become ‘in’ by consuming the aura of the zeitgeist-capturing Warhol, whose celebrity originated in the recycling of that which was considered a waste product of culture.23 Little has been made of these ideas of Warhol’s, in the terms he set out, yet his use of reuse overlaps with, and is considered as vital to, the history of another concept that is today ubiquitous in art history and criticism: appropriation.
Appropriation’s critical bite is given to lie in its relationship to theft. This, for example, is something highlighted in Rosalind Krauss’s important discussion of the term in relation to the work of Sherrie Levine.24 In the famous examples of appropriation art in art history, by Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, what is appropriated represents dearly held values (not least originality) and with their appropriation there is an immediate implied challenge to them: it follows that you would only want to steal something of value. Yet the Marlboro advert, or the Brillo Box, or indeed the folio plates re-photographed by Levine, are also ubiquitous and, in some way, vacuous, at a distance from the discerning gaze of high culture. With their translation and transubstantiation, the images can take on other values given to them, and so a territory is redefined. Though it is the case that the term recycling sometimes features in conjunction with appropriation in writing on art (for example, in Nancy Spector’s catalogue essay for a 2007 Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim, the terms ‘recycling’ and ‘appropriation’ are used both by the author and in quotations from the artist), only ‘appropriation’ is used in passages of elevated consequence, or where the work is placed in the larger context of art history.25 Instead of theft, therefore, I want to suggest that appropriation might be seen as enabling the expansion of elite culture into the territory of that which is common. This suggests that, when we talk of appropriation in art history, we are confronting something that is reactionary and territorialising about our discipline — in its relationship with the wider world — as much as we are dealing with its capacity to critique.
In cultural studies, Andrew Ross and Evan Watkins have latched onto the passages in The Philosophy in which Warhol describes his ‘philosophy of leftovers’.26 They both see Warhol’s recycling as perverting the heavily determined ground of cultural production, its target the culture of omission and distinction (precisely the condition of elite cultural discourse) that leads to neglect and waste. Watkins observes how good taste is constituted through an academic or academic-like culture that holds the high in check with the low, posturing as both anti-elitist and yet also as rightful custodian of the avant-garde. Recycling blurs these distinctions on which values, local to art and good taste, rely.27 That these studies do not take place in art history perhaps suggests a residual distaste for models of production that threaten the bourgeois currency of good taste. Today, the use of the term appropriation ‘automatically’ gives work left-political kudos: yet, as the term itself becomes endlessly recycled in art history, we are not fully mindful of how loaded it is.
It is important that during both the moments to which the art I have referred to belonged, the early 1960s, and the late 1970s and early 1980s, the perceived autonomy of elite culture was considered to be under threat. Pop, for many, seemed to collapse the distance between high and low. Pictures generation appropriation artists competed in the ‘culture wars’ with artists who embraced a new proximity to markets and commercial demand. The most vilified of these latter artists were targeted for their ‘bad’ appropriation, their pluralism, yet perhaps we might see recycling in some of their work today and give it new consideration. Warhol was caught in these culture wars, adored by the Neo-Expressionists while his early work became newly appreciated as proto-conceptual and proto-appropriation by the academy. Warhol’s work is pivotal in this history then, but I would suggest with de Antonio that recycling owes its origins to Robert Rauschenberg. A telling feature of the initial reception of Rauschenberg’s Combines (approx. 1954–64) was that their inclusion of everyday objects was criticised for not being properly integrated into a coherent artistic form. The work was compared unfavourably to Dada which, despite its emphasis on sociological forms of fragmentation, was considered to do this. Rauschenberg had failed to make the things he used ‘his own’ in this work. Yet, this sense that the everyday object retains some autonomy is important to the aesthetics of recycling; re-use is not totally transformative, but originates in the Cagean idea of letting things speak on their own. The independence of the recycled object means that its value lies in something independent or distinguishable from the overall body of the work: a singularity, even a functionality, that survives transition into the context of ‘art’. Of course, Warhol’s mechanised procedures of production put pressure on this model, but what is crucial here is the displacement of the pre-existing values of the artworld by the everyday commodity brought into the gallery. As Warhol states (and it bears repeating): ‘You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a by-product of other businesses. Of other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact.’28 Instead of models of reproduction and multiplication, what I am proposing with the model of recycling is that value always has a location, and a loss of value is always implied with relocation of that value elsewhere. The example that again comes to mind is Invisible Sculpture, where Warhol draws to our attention the contingency of his presence, making an artwork, a sculpture no less, out of the absence he leaves behind. This understanding of Warhol’s work problematizes the all too easy assumption that it is seamlessly compatible with the modern conditions of duplication and mechanical reproduction belonging to his famous subject matter of media imagery. What follows is an account of two of Warhol’s largest recycling projects, Raid the Icebox I (1969–70) and Time Capsules (1974–), and an analysis of how these works confront and upset the values art history sustains through relations of space (proximity, distance, territory and trespass) that are central to the aesthetic judgements for and against work, like in the examples above, in which the material of the work is sourced directly from sites otherwise considered valueless.
Mental Space: Warhol’s Raid the Icebox I
In 1969, Warhol was invited to curate an exhibition based on articles chosen from the backrooms and stores of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. He was the first of what was hoped would be a series of artists to guest curate in this way, hence the work’s title: Raid the Icebox I. During the summer of 1969, he and a small entourage, including the writer David Bourdon and Warhol’s business manager, Fred Hughes, visited the museum storerooms with the museum’s curatorial staff including Daniel Robbins, the director of the museum until 1971. Both Bourdon and Robbins wrote essays for the exhibition’s catalogue while Warhol himself documented the proceedings with a Polaroid camera and tape recorder. In his lively catalogue essay for Raid the Icebox I, Robbins wrote of the effect Warhol’s intervention had: ‘our conception of our jobs as curators is rather sweetly altered.’29
The exhibition opened in Rice University Institute for the Arts in Houston (opening 20 October 1969); and travelled to the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans (opening 17 January 1970); and finally, Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art in Providence (opening 23 April 1970). At each location, the objects were displayed in curious arrangements, quite unlike traditional museological presentation. The collection of objects retained the sense of having risen from the shadows of the stores as understudies of the stars of the museum’s collection. But by replacing objects that exemplified the best that historical periods, cultures and tastes had to offer, with objects that eschewed this kind of representation entirely, the work, as I will argue, fashioned a highly suggestive approach to thinking about the political stakes of the museum display. With Raid the Icebox I Warhol took the Pop strategy of recycling the leftover to the institution and extended sculpture’s ground into institutional and architectural space. Lisa Graziose Corrin, a curator who, in the 1990s, did much to establish the place of ‘artist in the museum’ works as a key form of critical intervention, writes that Raid the Icebox I was ‘not an exhibition, it was a fully conceived installation artwork in which even the seemingly random choice and placement of the objects was consequential’.30
In the course of his visits to the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, Warhol directed the removal and transportation of nearly 400 objects from the museum stores to the floor spaces of the museums to which the show would travel (fig. 5.4 and plate 5.2). His arrangement of the items preserved much of their appearance as he had encountered them in the stores. Collections of objects, sometimes simply piled up, crowded areas, abandoning the disciplines and practicalities of display. The objects chosen were often specimens that were in some way less than exemplary, and the way in which Warhol displayed these works in rafts made the discrimination of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ examples more or less impossible. It was a commentary on cultural values, one that sought to redress hierarchies through a display that disrupted the order of things in the museum. Warhol’s rehang subverted an American ideology of distinction: advanced, yet absorbent of European traditions, master of historical narratives, and, within the museum, supported by a culture of originality, strict discernment, striation of value and quality of example. The rehang revealed American elite culture as one among many, with varying examples, varying values, and no less adrift in the swim of history.
Fig. 5.4.Installation view of Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, April 23-June 30, 1970. Courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
Turning the museum inside out, Warhol displayed whole racks of objects from the stores as they had been found: shoes, some odd, some duplicates, were massed together in cupboards six shelves deep, with stacks of decorative hat boxes sitting on top, and piles of magazines and assorted publications tied with string on the floor. There were art objects on display too, including paintings, though some were torn and either waiting for or beyond repair. Fakes were included, as were real works by members of the Western canon: Velazquez, Cézanne and Degas, for example. Much of what was exhibited could be described as junk, but Warhol insisted that each object be meticulously labelled and classified. As a result, by far the largest inventory in the catalogue, which is arranged primarily between ‘single objects and objects in series’, pertains to the footwear that featured.
This organisational scheme rather camouflaged, however, the huge range of Native American pieces that Warhol chose. Robbins writes that, when showing Warhol around, the objects that he (Robbins) thought noteworthy, such as fine Oriental vases, notable pieces from antiquity, ‘the most extravagant laces, the richest Ecclesiastical vestments’ — in other words, those objects which reflected the values of the museum—‘did not elicit a flicker’ from Warhol and that, instead, Native American work was frequently chosen.31 The inventory of items in the catalogue supports this perception of things, but only to an extent.32 Warhol did choose more Native American work than might have been representative compared to the whole array of the store’s holdings, and he certainly passed over major examples from other collections.33 But, despite this interest, works by Native American peoples did not constitute anything close to a majority of the work in the exhibition overall. Further, in the catalogue they were organised according to the same order as everything else: not ‘other’, as Robbins’ commentary suggests we should understand them, but featuring under the anonymous subheading ‘Baskets, Ceramics and Textiles’. Although Warhol’s actions during his visits certainly made it seem to Robbins that he was privileging Native American work for display in the catalogue the work is both equal and invisible within the museum’s hierarchy of objects. Robbins’ account seems not to be troubled by what this curatorial decision to pit the Native and colonial against each other might have meant, and that silence has continued in later discussions. Nonetheless, determined identity correction and overt politics is certainly one way of looking at Warhol’s approach here. The period of the exhibition overlapped with the Red Power occupation of Alcatraz Island and anticipated the time, three years later, when Marlon Brando, due to receive an Oscar for The Godfather, boycotted the award ceremony and caused a public scandal by sending human rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place.34 The fact that Raid the Icebox I so resembles the sets of some iconic American films, particularly Citizen Kane’s Xanadu and, even more so, Big Daddy’s cellar in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, emphasises this sense of colonial or imperial misadventure in a typically Warholian way through reference to Hollywood’s golden age (fig. 5.5 and 6). With Raid the Icebox I Warhol was, perhaps, recreating the pathetic final scenes of these movies in the museum. These portrayed the American Dream with nowhere to go, disappearing amid epic piles of priceless yet unwanted and unvalued antiques, plied from Europe and the colonies with the huge wealth of American industrial empires. Warhol thus figured the institution, and America, as another Kane or Big Daddy—or indeed, as it would turn out, another Warhol.35
Fig. 5.6.Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [Film still, Big Daddy’s basement], Dir. Richard Brooks, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1958.
Comparisons of the installation of Raid the Icebox I with views of the stores themselves were made in published material at the time and there is no doubt, taking the catalogue into account, that the space to which these broken, undesirable objects belonged was also on display. The objects themselves were anti-objects that transferred the dark of the museum stores to the space of the gallery in the same way Silver Clouds had brought the underground to the institutional surface three years earlier. One of the most dramatic features of the exhibition was the hoard of Windsor chairs, many broken but kept for spare parts to use to maintain the museum’s finer examples (fig. 5.7). These were exhibited all in one room, on the floor in crushed rows and mounted, as if hovering, on the wall, a hanging electric light casting shadows in all directions.36 Elsewhere a group of large gilt-framed paintings, of a variety of traditional scenes, were stacked together. Bourdon describes them:
Some were sideways, some had only their backs showing. Warhol declared he wanted the whole stack, including the miscellaneous sandbags that were strewn around on the floor. And he wanted to exhibit them ‘just like that.’ ‘We’ll put the best one on top, show a corner of one, and the back of another.’37
One wonders what the status of ‘the best’ precisely consisted of here for Warhol. Again, Warhol’s hostile disregard for these paintings echoes the statements of disregard for painting he made at the time of the Silver Clouds exhibition. On both occasions, the works were taken from their normal place on the wall and instead entered into a larger, cluttered world. The paintings were the best of the worst perhaps: rejects, donors, unwanted gifts—a carnivalesque parody of connoisseurship that occurred across the installation as a whole. In so being, the category of ‘best’ becomes, in its ambiguity, also emancipatory: work that did not fit in with fashion or taste, but which was well-made or attractive, could be appreciated alongside the failures that showed up the museum’s pretensions.
Fig. 5.7.Installation view of Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 23 April- 30 June, 1970. Courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
The inventory for the exhibition also included a ginkgo tree much like the one that Warhol had spotted in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s sculpture garden. This was displayed at the front of the exhibition. David Bourdon, in his catalogue essay, recorded:
Returning to the Director’s office, Warhol glanced out a window at the enclosed sculpture garden, pointed to a ginkgo, and said: ‘I want that tree.’
‘Fine, we’ll get a copy. Write that down,’ Robbins snapped at his assistant. ‘Tree to the right of the bust of Ingres.’
Back in the office, Robbins informed the curator of the costume collection that Warhol wanted to borrow the entire shoe collection. ‘Well, you don’t want it all,’ she told Warhol in a rather disciplinarian tone, ‘because there’s some duplication.’
Warhol raised his eyebrows and blinked.38
This episode shows that, as we have seen multiple times in this study, Warhol’s dealings with objects were mercilessly levelling: tree, shoes and bust of Ingres. We might think of Émile Bourdelle’s bronze cast of Ingres (thought to be the second casting; the first, and more famous, resides in the Musée Bourdelle in Paris) as representative of the category of art. Here it sits awkwardly between the natural one-off and the mass-produced, artistically insignificant multiples. It is reduced to a site marker (both literally, locating the whereabouts of the tree and, metaphorically, as marking the place of culture) in a reconfigured moral order in which the other objects have preference. This suggests that Warhol was interested in natural history, something that the worn shoes and ginkgo cannot hide about themselves, but which is quite distinct from the art history for which the portrait bust stands. In a piece on Warhol’s collecting of Native American artefacts, Tony Berlant, another Warhol associate, tells Ralph T. Coe that Andy ‘liked to think how things evolved, how works were used within cultures, and how they passed (in his mind’s eye) to myriad owners and cycles of usage’.39 Things that are part of ‘natural history’ seem to have something to do with recycling and how Warhol imagined the sculptural too. Of the Navajo textiles he collected he said: ‘I like them best when they have holes in them, they’re cheaper, and they’re more sculptural.’40 In a way that is akin to my argument in Chapter 1, sculpture here has to do with a sense of something as subject to accidents, duration and the environment, and this is how we might understand the objects above, ironically pitted against the traditional category of sculpture represented by the Bourdelle.41
The equivalence Warhol’s curatorship suggested between different kinds of objects and different ways of considering them also enabled these objects to speak to one another. Not only did the space of the reject invade the space of the example, but objects impacted on each other, breaching individual spaces of meaning, category and narrative order. From Warhol’s Polaroids of Raid the Icebox I we get a sense that things have taken a life of their own, autonomous of the space that they previously commanded as certain kinds of visual object (plates 5.3–8). As both these and the exhibition photographs show, Warhol achieved an effect of animation and bizarre anthropomorphism. Walt Disney, of course, was Warhol’s favourite ‘living’ artist (a view he stood by in interviews even a decade after Disney’s death).42 In photographs of Warhol’s arrangements, the faces in the paintings and sculptures seem in discourse. All kinds of objects strike up relationships, brought into proximity within the visual framework of both the museum and Warhol’s Polaroid camera. A selection of images in the catalogue, which match up with Polaroids of the time found in the Warhol archive, extend this sense further, using this second layer of mediation of the photographs to continue the play. One prominent oil-on-canvas portrait in the exhibition features on the front and again on the back of the catalogue. Both times it is propped up by the same man who we see behind the picture’s frame and whose face is now also a portrait. He wears a slightly glazed look, staring into the middle distance. The two individuals, the woman in the portrait and the handler, look as if they might have just had a falling-out: the expression of the woman in the painting looks very disapproving.43 The photograph brings into another medium the sense of animation that Warhol’s handling of the museum objects brought to the exhibition spaces. In the photo, the real person becomes involved in a moment of drama like that occurring between the objects throughout the exhibition. The sense of mischief in Warhol’s approach is palpable from the catalogue, with both essays from the time emphasising the ‘fresh eyes’ with which Warhol approached the material.
Raid the Icebox I has been considered a partner work to Folk and Funk, notably in the essay by Michael Lobel on Warhol’s combined ‘closeting’ and ‘collecting’, published in Art Journal in 1996, and in the essay by Lisa Corrin, published in 1995 for a special issue of Rhode Island School of Design Museum Notes which followed the death of Daniel Robbins. Deborah Bright, in a later essay, provides summaries of these two articles:
In Lobel’s [essay], Raid the Icebox I and Folk and Funk both offered the artist an occasion to recontextualize objects from high culture, folk culture and popular culture, investing them with new value. Lobel likens this activity to the way the closet allows the gay subject to take the heterogeneous elements of his life and create an erotics of simultaneous display and secrecy that preserves access to, and mobility in, straight society while mirroring back a coherent image of an idealized and eroticized self.
Lisa Graziose Corrin contributed an essay on the importance of Raid the Icebox I in developing a genealogy for 1990s museum interventions by conceptual artists such as Fred Wilson, Joseph Kosuth, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler, Christian Boltanski and James Luna. Though unique as an activity in Warhol’s oeuvre, Corrin viewed Raid the Icebox I as entirely consistent with Warhol’s aesthetic in its blurring of the boundaries among categories of taste, its refusal of judgement and selection, its preoccupation with series, its parallels to Warhol’s own acquisitive passions and the artist’s reconnecting of the nineteenth-century museum to its mass-market twin, the department store.44
Both authors consider Raid the Icebox I as overlapping with the shopping, collecting, curating and hoarding that went on in Warhol’s personal life. However, Lobel’s reading of the haphazard arrangement of objects in Raid the Icebox I and Folk and Funk is contrasted in his essay with the presentation of objects at the Sotheby’s auction which, he says, emphasises the extent to which the image of Warhol’s collecting at the latter was ‘tidied up’. This point about tidying is central to Lobel’s article, which draws out a ‘correspondence between the logics of the museum and of the closet […] by which […] a seemingly stable and closed sphere of heterosexuality is constituted in relation to a debased sphere of homosexuality.’45 Warhol’s untidiness, his ambiguity, disrupted the outward order maintained by both museum and hetero-normative orders, and thus disrupted the cultural priorities that they represented. This was achieved through the exposure of the closet, which, importantly for social order, mediates public and private spaces. Lobel’s suggestion, further, that Raid the Icebox I (as well as Warhol’s studio and living spaces) was a kind of mental space and also that Folk and Funk was an approximation, on the part of its curators, of how Warhol saw his own collecting and its excited, rampant hold on his attention, will be central to the following analysis. The objects in Folk and Funk were ‘in casual disarray’, according to a review, and Lobel sees this as suggestive of the collection ‘as a sort of playscape of the artist’s mind’, while ‘both closet and collection provide material or spatial models for thinking the self.’46
While Folk and Funk might symbolise the ‘outing’ of the contents of a closet, it is another question whether or not it was representative, in any faithful way, of the subject Andy Warhol. Before Folk and Funk, Warhol’s collection, dispersed and mostly, though not all, hidden in amongst the expensive junk of closed rooms, arguably resided only in the space of Warhol’s imagination.47 The display of Warhol’s collection of Americana and folk art at Folk and Funk took the objects away from this mental space into the ordered, buttoned-down space of museological display, despite having been arranged to dimly echo the chaos of Raid the Icebox I. Thus, although the exhibition gave some sense of the heterodoxy of Warhol’s taste, it was indicative of the process of normalisation that the collection underwent when put on show. Perhaps its bad likeness—the shock, not of outing and exposure, but of misrepresentation—was why Warhol expressed his dissatisfaction at the time over Folk and Funk.48 By comparison, Raid the Icebox I might be considered to have been an actualisation and, therefore, faithful representation of the mental space that Warhol’s collections inhabited; played out in, and in defiance of, the order of the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. Yet, despite its symbolism, Raid the Icebox I should not necessarily be celebrated as a representation of Warhol’s mental space. As we have seen, this could be deeply dysfunctional. The disarrangement of the objects in Raid the Icebox I foreshadowed the state in which Warhol’s possessions were found in his home after his death, where, according to Newsweek’s Cathleen McGuigan, ‘Jewellery was found in cookie tins; a Picasso was stuck in a closet. Another closet was stuffed to the top with stunning Navajo blankets.’49
Lobel’s vision of Raid the Icebox I as a mental world is echoed in Corrin’s essay:
In Raid the Icebox I, Warhol knowingly exhibited the world according to Warhol. Even the exhibit invitations—hot pink object labels from storage combined with a photograph of Warhol in the act of clicking his Instamatic camera—eloquently announced that the subject of Raid the Icebox I was Andy Warhol, as Daniel Robbins stated in his catalogue.50
We might think back here to You’re In/L’eau d’Andy, with its reuse of Coca-Cola bottles sprayed silver. This work, like Raid the Icebox I, re-orbits an established American identity to instead circle around and reflect Andy Warhol by referring to his ‘essence’, in this case his urine, and silver, the identifier for his hip status. With Raid the Icebox I, Warhol found a way to augment and orchestrate the currencies of the museum, taste and historical and discursive order around himself in the same way as he diverted and recirculated aspects of the commercial world in his earlier art. As Corrin states, the idea, which appears throughout the literature on Raid the Icebox I, that Warhol was the true subject of the exhibition, has its origins in Robbins’s catalogue essay, the best description of the work from the time. Robbins writes: ‘all things become part of the whole and we know that what is being exhibited is Andy Warhol.’51 Similarly emphasising the playfulness and masquerade of the work, Peter Wollen writes:
It is as if the label ‘Andy Warhol’ would signify, not a person, in the sense of a human subject, but storage: boxes, reels, spools, Polaroids, all labelled ‘Andy Warhol’. It would be an immense museum of junk (or rather, since it could all be metamorphosed into commodity form, a department store or gigantic thrift shop). At the root of this attitude we find once again many affinities with Cage’s aesthetic.52
Generally, the literature on Raid the Icebox I by Bright, Corrin, Lobel and Wollen, and the essays by Robbins and David Bourdon in the original catalogue, give the reader a sense that Warhol nurtured, even indulged in, a form of solipsism, to the extent of devising an idiom of solipsism in his approach to ‘artist as curator’ and ‘artist in the museum’ works. However, in this ‘in-his-own-world’ aesthetic, in what seems to be solipsistic, there is a position of critique that continues the mode of Warhol’s earlier work and the influence on it by Emile de Antonio that I have argued for in this chapter. De Antonio also emphasised an art form that presented the idea of a whole system, a complete picture. Point of Order, like Raid the Icebox I, is entirely constituted by, and conceived in relation to, the leftover, with de Antonio also using material from stores. Yet Raid the Icebox I, because of the apparent solipsism, the proximity to Warhol’s personhood—seen as ‘zany’ or somehow not serious—is seen as a refutation rather than instantiation of considered critique.
In Robbins’s description of his time with Warhol, showing him around the museum while following his instructions for the exhibition, Warhol is presented as a genius, and at the same time as someone who needed minding. Interestingly, in terms of the overall theme of this book, Corrin proposes that Robbins acted as a ‘discrete but sculpting presence’, suggesting again that Warhol himself was the subject of the exhibition — as if he too were some kind of artefact. Robbins’s assessment of Warhol’s work, however, is nothing but respectful, indeed rather awed, and his overall impression of the work is, rightly, that it was radical. Warhol’s action causes Robbins to exclaim: ‘what violence the idea of spare parts does to our fanatical notion of uniqueness and the state of an object’s preservation!’53 But in stressing the singularity of Warhol’s ‘innocent’ attraction to objects, Robbins rather glosses over the potential criticality of Warhol’s specific choices by imagining Warhol as an instinctive, natural, force. Here the idea of Warhol in his own world is partly down to Robbins’s lack of appreciation of the social content and substance of what Warhol chose. Warhol’s inclusion of Native American work is put down merely to his esotericism. Bourdon also mentions the partiality of Warhol’s selections, half-apologising for them on his behalf. This characterisation of Warhol is echoed by Corrin when she describes the Raid the Icebox I project as a whole as ‘charming in its remarkable lack of self-consciousness.’54 What Corrin admires in Warhol’s work is contrasted against the austere seriousness of the moment in which she is writing. Corrin acted in Robbins’s role in 1992 when she worked with Fred Wilson on the production of Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society. This was one of the 1990s’ most significant works of institutional critique, in which Wilson drew attention to the museum display’s complicity with, yet erasure of, the history of slavery. In her article she writes of her fatigue, four years on, with ‘clichéd’ artist in the museum projects and laboured discourses of criticality, and she sees Raid the Icebox I as the ‘pioneering forerunner of the “movement”’, and refreshingly devoid of any political agenda.55 For her, Warhol is a pioneer of the form that later critique would take, rather than of the critique itself. Yet Warhol’s inclusion of artefacts that signalled a history of a repressed people, placed in dialogue with the objects of those guilty of that repression, prefigured exactly the strategy Wilson employed in Mining the Museum. Where the two works differ is in the forthrightness of Wilson’s agenda, which contrasts with the occlusion of Warhol’s curatorial decisions, both by the protocols of categorisation (‘Baskets, Ceramics and Textiles’), and by Warhol’s self-representation as idiosyncratic and incapable of advancing a determined agenda.56 His provocativeness during the visits, described by Robbins, are put down to his reputation as a mischief-maker.57
One way in which Corrin’s assessment is like Bright’s and Wollen’s is the way that Warhol’s behaviour—described as distracted, perusing and waiting to be titillated—exposes the museum as the kin of the shopping mall, a point we have seen made already by Mark Francis in relation to Warhol’s Shadows and Personality of the Artist exhibitions.58 In Bright’s account, we find a Warhol even more in character:
[Warhol] violated the boundaries of masculine seriousness, scholarly detachment and that palpable sense of larger mission that characterizes the curatorial project, giving voice to the spontaneous feminine passion of the impulse shopper […] Like a shopaholic on speed.59 It is true that when Warhol came across objects in the museum stores which he wanted to include he gave the cue: ‘I’ll take them.’60
Thus we might agree with Bright and see Warhol as consciously representing a position outside the institution, one of gendered specificity and even ‘class sensibility’ which he brought to play havoc with the masculine elite order of the museum. Bright characterises Warhol as a scruffy, nutty embodiment of commercialism; his critique as a rather blunt sabotage and subversion informed by an affinity with the cheapness of proletarian and feminine tastes and habits.61 The distracted, browsing, blue-collar Warhol that Bright describes contains echoes of the ditzy genius described by Robbins. Yet she claims, without evidence, that Warhol was ‘ambivalent about the project from the start’, and that his assistant, Fred Hughes, had led the way, eager to exploit his connection with the de Menils and to ‘feather his own and Andy’s nests’.62
In Wollen’s text, the seemingly arbitrary way in which Warhol made selections for Raid the Icebox I is understood in the context of the work of Rauschenberg and Cage, and their uses of found objects and chance procedures: ‘At the root of this attitude we find once again many affinities with Cage’s aesthetic: the refusal of hierarchy or consequence or narrative.’63 Indeed, as I have suggested, Warhol’s use of leftovers, discussed throughout this chapter, has much in common with Rauschenberg’s and Cage’s bypassing of traditional modes of authorship and their use of reuse. But, for Wollen, even Cage’s influence does not redeem Warhol’s contrariness, leaving him to conclude, as we have seen, that the main exhibit in Raid the Icebox I was Warhol himself. Wollen’s assessment quickly devolves, like those above, into an assessment of personality: in this case that Warhol, ‘the childhood reject and misfit’, was projecting, surrounding himself with the leftovers with which he identified. Further, in doing so, Wollen says in Raid the Icebox I Warhol was commoditising his persona in the art form of those leftover objects he chose for display.64 This kind of psycho-biography may not deserve extensive focus in its own right, but it is remarkable that in relation to a work of such acknowledged importance all the authors above reach the same diagnosis, which I have characterised as akin to solipsism, each time undermining the status of the work as critique.
The above authors are squeamish, I want to suggest, about the proximity to valuelessness and waste that Warhol’s work threatens. They recoil from the dusty and dysfunctional; from the status of underling; from a cheap world, an essentially tasteless world. However, such a proximity is implicit in the process of recycling, during which the valueless and the valuable blur into each other. And the threat of this proximity is psychic: that these objects, usually not considered worthy of display, might actually have a certain power. In his essay, Robbins describes his own encounter with this power:
Warhol made a specification at this point: he requested that the catalogue entry for each item be as complete as possible […] each object is obliged to carry its full set of associations, and a weird poetry results; the combination of pedantry and sentiment that can be read in the entries is the serial imagery of history. There are personal overtones of almost unbelievable poignancy in the now-anonymous rubbed kid heels of some fine lady’s shoes.65
While museum displays formalise the presentation of objects of historical value on behalf of those that history places in positions of authority, a worn shoe catches Robbins off-guard. He makes an identification that recognises the vulnerability of this authority even at the risk of his own investment in it. The ‘weird poetry’ that Robbins describes might be interpreted in the terms that Jonathan Flatley has used in his more recent work on Warhol’s collecting. Flatley takes up Walter Benjamin’s concerns with the collector’s ‘ “physiognomic” interest’ in objects.66 Benjamin was interested in a form of reception, just as in Robbins’ description, whereby leftover fragments can produce vivid historical insights akin to psychoanalytic unearthings. Moments such as these helped Benjamin to imagine an alternative to what he called the ‘once-upon-a-time’ model of level and homogenous linear history — precisely the territory of the traditional museum display.67 Flatley suggests that Warhol in Rhode Island, free-associating, mingling amid the leftover oddments of the museum stores, shares something with Benjamin’s collector. It is this threat of exposure, what Flatley calls an ‘affective openness to the world’, that is at the heart of what I have argued has caused others to distance themselves from what they saw as Warhol’s solipsism and peculiarity.68
In Benjamin’s thoughts on collecting, published as ‘On Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, there is a suggestion of solipsism: ‘To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire.’69 Taken in the context of the rest of the work’s advocacy of second-hand and cast-off books—of the leftover, and the collector’s special relationship to it—the expression of this desire provides an image of a revolutionary solipsism of renewed worlds emerging from the world built around the self (a collector’s collection always locates the individual at the centre of it). This idea of renewal describes the way in which the old world of the historical past becomes animated through the collector for Benjamin: ‘inside her there are spirits, which have seen to it that for a collector, ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in her; it is she who lives in them.’70 Renewal, an encounter with the new world of the past through a collection, was the radical potential Benjamin saw in the activity of the collector, but one could also become submerged, like the fictional figures of Big Daddy, Kane and Warhol himself, amid ruinous mountains of expensive junk.
Benjamin’s and Warhol’s use of the leftover is, in both cases, an art of recycling. Indeed, describing his Arcades Project, Benjamin was keen to stress that it was reuse, rather than appropriation, that was essential to the way he employed quotations:
This method of study: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will not appropriate any ingenious formulations, not steal anything valuable. But the rags, the refuse: I will not describe but rather exhibit them.71
If Benjamin’s radical aesthetics of recycling mirrors the endless revolutions of the production and consumption of the commodity—setting mimesis against mimesis, fetish against fetish—Warhol’s Pop work did so with an even greater sense of overlap. In Raid the Icebox I, Warhol usurped space that was already attributed to the elevated cultural value of art with his own equally powerful cultural value, allowing the objects he represented (and which could only, otherwise, be interpreted as representing him) to communicate something of their identity and the historical significance of that identity. That is the key to the work’s transgression, not so much a trespass but an invasion and an unleashing. But it is also true, of course, that Warhol’s Pop recycling mirrored the commercial cycles belonging to the commodity and were ambivalent in a way that de Antonio’s and Rauschenberg’s use of the leftover were not. Companies such as Campbell’s and Coca-Cola quickly took positions on the use of their products in Warhol’s art. In some cases, it was seen that Warhol added to the kudos of the brand, and so his recycling came to be appropriated back. Today, this kind of recycling, in which part of production’s role becomes the harnessing of consumption for the purposes of driving more consumption, is increasingly important. Like Warhol’s choice of Campbell’s soup, our commodity choices are surveyed and information about our buying habits are sold on to advertisers. Making consumption visible produces a new commodity, as well as promoting more consumption, thus perpetuating value. The model of the ‘prosumer’ — the collapse of producer and consumer — has been key in recent analyses of art that reflect the introduction of these mechanisms into everyday life, and, of course, the primary example is our use of the Web.
Fig. 5. 8.Kelley Walker, untitled, 2006. Laser cut steel, digital image (scanned poster), and gold leaf, 146.1 diameter x .3 cm. © Kelley Walker. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Today’s corporate realisation of the potential of making consumption visible is expressed by artists for whom recycling is a key theme. Here, Warhol’s precedence and influence is essential, yet is so far under-analysed. For these artists, recycling’s corporatisation is an inescapable fact. For Kelley Walker, an artist who has persistently referred to Warhol’s oeuvre (recycling it, from the Death and Disaster series to the Rorschach paintings of the early 1980s) recycling ‘connotes not just reclamation but also the countering never-ending cycle of consumption necessitating recycling’.72 Walker has used the three-arrowed recycling symbol in sculptures since 2003 (fig. 5.8 and plate 5.9). Then, at his debut at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and for a period afterwards, the symbol appeared cut in large steel discs. On one side of the discs are printed digital images of scanned surfaces—such as cereal box packaging—with gold leaf on the other, glowing on the wall against which they are propped.73
The situation that Walker describes—whereby recycling is necessitated and structurally incorporated in different ways, simply in order to feed production rather than to reclaim or conserve — is a global-financial reality. It also describes the circulation of images in digital relays. Reflecting the argument of this chapter, this state of recycling is something that Walker, like Benjamin, places in opposition to the art-historical paradigm of appropriation: ‘I think appropriation points to or suggests some sort of original — a locatable source that one appropriates and in many ways eclipses.’74 Thus, confirming what we have seen already, both appropriation and the related act of plagiarism simultaneously demarcate and ascertain value, and are unlike recycling in that they either add to, or threaten to take away, the value of an original, while at the same time changing its significance. In recycling, value is located in the act of exchange—value as exchange rather than exchange value — because exchange is a unit of the continuation of the system. Warhol’s instinct that recycling could be integrated into commercial models on a wide scale, as demonstrated by the passage at the start of this chapter, was right. Today, the retrieval of different kinds of value has been hardwired into technologies of image distribution. Indeed, the arrow logo itself speaks of something undeniably corporate.75 Yet in considering recycling as partly ‘about reclamation’, Walker affirms what de Antonio and Warhol saw in recycling’s politics. This is to do with reframing and reclaiming for the subject, perhaps not a public sphere, but at least a space of collective identification that has been taken over by ideology. What we concede is what Warhol demonstrated with Pop: that perhaps you can only do this with the material that increasingly insidious institutions and mechanisms provide — and only in short windows before that identification is fed back into the system.
However, the discussion of online technologies as ‘image economies’ somewhat misrepresents the imagined and fantastical worlds that they foster. And here, again, Raid the Icebox I provides a useful model for thinking through the contemporary moment. We maintain an idea of object-hood in the ways we draw things into relation around ourselves online, even when these ‘things’ exist on a technological platform that deals exclusively with images. This gets lost in the theory and intellectual culture determined by the image, because the technology through which we both filter our experience of the world—and communicate it to others — is predominantly image-based. While this is apt to represent the extensity and morphism of the modern imagination—and of course determines that imagination so that it becomes compatible—there is a continued object-orientated perversity in the way in which we negotiate the virtual world. Therefore, the spatial metaphors applied to the Web (such as ‘navigating’, ‘surfing’ and ‘cyberspace’), which have been derided as misleading in critical approaches, in fact have a value as they describe a spatio-temporal, phenomenological engagement. And, although it is certainly misleading to suggest that the Web itself is appropriately described as a space, one’s engagement with it is frequently determined by the same mental work of orientation as, for example, collecting, shopping in a supermarket, or rifling through a museum’s stores.76 It is this work of locating and location, locating oneself in relation to what else is out there, that indicates that the Web is negotiated as an object world. Similar orientation work was performed by Warhol at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1969. Perhaps this work provides a richer lens through which to consider our relation to the Web than the ideas about planes of pure imagery — perpetual and liquid exchange from a place of disembodiment — which more closely characterise, and are influenced by, the post-modern reception of Warhol’s painting. In Raid the Icebox I, Warhol’s work of browsing, liking, sharing and recycling describes today’s internet user.
One other recent work that shares much with Raid the Icebox I, but makes explicit the relationships between collecting, curation and Web use, is The Pale Fox (2014), by the French artist Camille Henrot. Henrot’s work, like Warhol’s, developed from her time behind the scenes at a major American museum, in this case, the Smithsonian. Yet, again in parallel with Raid the Icebox I, while the evolution of the exhibition began with her findings at the museum, and the experience of being lost in it, the shelves of eclectic objects, images and music that are exhibited in The Pale Fox, in a ‘blue-screened’ gallery space, are the result of patterns of thought and association circulating as much around Henrot’s subjecthood as the organising principals of the museum. In being so, crucially, this work is also to do with the Web, and the orchestration of this work matches Marisa Olsen’s description of a ‘post-internet’ condition of subjecthood, influenced by experience online.77 Henrot presents her thinking as filtered through a contemporary experience of internet searches and eBay purchases but, equally, works in the mode of these systems, recycling her own ideas and material in her work so that ‘nothing gets lost.’78 In The Pale Fox, what caught Henrot’s eye in the museum has been reworked and reinterpreted in the mind of the artist habituated to time online, accompanied and embellished by technologies that arbitrate over the direction of thought. Like Warhol’s experience in the museum stores, Henrot’s work recasts the voices and narratives that the museum holds in an idiosyncratic, crucially opaque unfolding, onto or through images and objects from the Web. Equivalent to the intrusion of the contents of the cold storage space into the museum in Warhol’s earlier intervention, and with that space’s accommodation of Warhol’s off-register sense of things, in Henrot’s work there is a disruption of the contained coherence of the museum by the alternative space of the Web. But there is also a challenge to the Web to contain the coherence of its commercial frameworks when triangulated by the obscurities of the museum and the bizarre relational connections that the objects make when presented together in the gallery. Both Warhol and Henrot’s rearrangements, therefore, are consequences of a hijacking by the artists of the agendas of Web, artworld and museum alike: structures which essentially offer frameworks of interpretation. Out of these emerge re-understandings of the content belonging to those frameworks determined by idiosyncratic, highly subjective approaches that hold chaos and order in a more delicate balance than before.
If there is, here, a suggestion of the kind of solipsism by which Warhol is characterised in the literature on Raid the Icebox I, and that I have wanted to reclaim for a Benjaminian vision of the historical-materialist subject, this solipsism reappears more problematically in readings of the post-internet subject. Thanks to ‘cookies’ and the information included in our digital tail, companies can manipulate content so as to advertise specifically to us, and customise our experience according to our historical use of the Web. This is a museum of commodities that wraps itself around us; one in which we neither need confront those spaces, like the stores or the arcade where the material of history lies indeterminate, nor develop capacities by which we might benefit from doing so. Recycling, in the work of Warhol, Benjamin, de Antonio and Henrot, is a process of renewal and is, therefore, something temporal. But this temporal operation also determines how the objects are encountered in space. In the cases of Henrot and Warhol’s museum works, this is a spatiality in which the subject is surrounded, a formation connected to the idea of solipsism and the themes of ‘worlds’ of Benjamin’s collector. We might, therefore, think of this process of renewal today also in terms of a transition from 2D to 3D, whether or not things, in actuality, make any transition. Renewed nonetheless, objects can speak to audiences so that their own place in the world is ‘sweetly adjusted’, as Robbins described. But renewal can also threaten to destabilise. In The Philosophy, Warhol’s solution to the threat objects present (his ever-encroaching sea of possessions, like Kane’s, like Big Daddy’s) is to re-instigate the order of the museum and create a holographic virtual reality for his stuff; perhaps so that he could order things from it should the desire take him. This virtual reality of holographic wafers was never realised, but by the time The Philosophy had been published, another storage project had begun.
Fig. 5.9.Installation of 72 of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules at The Andy Warhol Museum, 1994. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Time Capsules
What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind.
Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That’s another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they’re handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday.79
Warhol’s account of his Time Capsules describes some of the difficulties, as he says ‘conflicts’, with recycling. Renewal, as in Benjamin, required the care and attention of the collector, impossible if he had become subsumed by his collection or was repulsed. The whole enterprise could be jeopardised by the sheer amount of material belonging to the past that needed sorting out but was not necessarily of any immediate value. Of course, it was precisely this kind of difficulty that Warhol had brought to the space of the museum in Raid the Icebox I, exposing how museums dealt with the past by ‘tidying it up’. Michael J. Golec has observed of the passage above that, in it: ‘the interplay between nothing and everything and losing and finding […] constitutes a theory of the archive itself—a load off the mind.’80 For him, the Time Capsules are an equivalent of the cold storage spaces of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. However, while they are surely related, we should not see the Time Capsules as merely about preservation and protection, about a consolidation and fixing of value in the object. This suggestion underestimates the importance of recycling for Warhol’s project, how integral an idea of future use and value was to it.
The 612 Time Capsules have acted like an epilogue for Warhol’s practice since 1994 when their contents began to be archived, a task that has now been completed (fig. 5.9 and plate 5.10). Begun in 1974, during a move of address, Warhol continued thereafter to fill removal boxes with papers, drawings, prints, cards, invitations, tickets and bills, that is to say, mostly things in 2D. Nevertheless, the Time Capsules also included objects: stolen crockery, food, fashion, leisure accoutrements, the massive spirit level used in the publicity photos for Shadows, and a whole host of other knick-knacks; in fact, nearly everything he had to hand and which he had no immediate use for. It was a work of clearing space, as the passage above describes. But if it had only been the monthly act of simultaneous recording and wiping, which the passage from The Philosophy makes it out to have been, there would have only been 156 Time Capsules, as Ronald Jones has pointed out.81 Clearly the project had a life of its own, as long time Warhol Enterprises employees Vincent Fremont and Brigid Berlin agree:
FREMONT: Time Capsules were growing…
BERLIN: They were fucking alive, those Time Capsules.82
The Time Capsules reflect the sense, now familiar, that objects were a problem for Warhol and that he saw their relation to the spaces they occupied as problematic; both the socially reflective and hierarchical places of the artworld and the collection, and, disastrously, his limited personal space. The Time Capsules address the latter. Indeed, as their own institution under Warhol’s curatorship, they became a container for the degree of threat that Warhol sensed objects and things presented:
FREMONT: Andy liked getting a present, but he’d want to keep it as a collectable immediately.
BERLIN: He didn’t want to open anything that he got because he thought there was a bomb in it, so he’d give it to us to open. He always thought he was going to get poisoned or shot or blown up […].83
Fremont, whose inspiration the project had been, made a note of the period each capsule covered on the boxes. The space that the Time Capsules helped clear, on and around Warhol’s desk and office space, was, as a significant piece of uptown real estate, valuable. Yet, as much as it cleared space, the project, having become a curatorial and collecting endeavour, filled space elsewhere and filled-in time: past, present and future. Thus they had a value in their own right. They prevented loss; something that perhaps determined Warhol’s hoarding in the first place (Fremont describes Warhol as a ‘recording angel’). The Time Capsules both formalised and marketized the operations, in Warhol’s day-to-day life, of recycling, collecting and re-evaluation that were so central to Warhol’s practice.84 Warhol had considered the value of the Time Capsules and expressed in The Diaries how he:
took a few time capsule boxes to the office. They are fun – when you go through them there’s things you really don’t want to give up. Someday I’ll sell them for $4000 or $5000. I used to think $100, but now that’s my new price.85
It remains to be seen if the Time Capsules will ever be sold off one by one, or, if they are, whether they reach the kind of prices that Warhol imagined. But what I would like to consider with regard to this statement, and these works, is the action that Warhol describes. Seeing the value of the work as determined by the experience of opening the box, I would suggest, is not just another means of appreciating what the work is, but signifies a transformation: Warhol was giving the work a new value here because he recognised a new aesthetic experience in unboxing. This is crucial because my argument has been in this chapter that, like in the example of Raid the Icebox I, his approach to the art-object, to sculptural space and to the institution amounted to a critique of the traditional values invested in them by destabilising their protection and preservation of that value. As Benjamin Buchloh described of Warhol’s work, he ‘unsettled for a considerable amount of time any secure notion about the object status of his artistic production.86 Part of the security Warhol targeted was the way in which the artworld sheltered, or contained, its special objects in museums and galleries against America’s larger culture of persistent novelty and renewal. In the case of Time Capsules, Warhol finds a way of resisting this subjection by objects that piled up on his desk in such a way as to be able to throw them out and re-access them afresh later on. And, of course, this emphasis on renewal is crucial to what I have argued in terms of Warhol’s longstanding operation of recycling. Time Capsules deal with the pressure of excess material, making space for recycling in time by offsetting it to the future. Opening the boxes becomes part of the work and part of its value.
These moments of unboxing are moments of uncertainty, of chance, of anticipation: of time having become an agent. The Time Capsules are novelty machines. Yet they are also intimate moments of revisitation of one’s past. They are separate from the more structural states, defined on the one side by the original context of the object’s possession and, on the other, by the category into which the object is archived and its historical meaning. Here, again, we might think of Raid the Icebox I with regard to this liminality. For a short while the object is new, curious, defamiliarised: neither with a determined place in the world, nor a position in the archive. It is from this nakedness that the experience of boxing and unboxing gains its own aesthetic effect.
Fig. 5.10.Jeff Koons, The New (Installation View), 1980. Courtesy of the New Museum, New York. Photo: New Museum.
It is the work of Jeff Koons, however, that has best made the argument for newness as an aesthetic experience of its own. And it is important that he did this, alongside Warhol and others, precisely at the time more established figures in the artworld attacked the concept and power of the new in critiques of ideas such as originality, authorship, and later of the slew of ‘neo’ movements of the early 1980s. Koons foregrounded newness as the subject of his first major project, The New (fig. 5.10), his 1980 series of fluorescent-lit Plexiglas boxes containing out of the box, store bought, brand name appliances, most famously Hoover vacuum cleaners. In writings on his website, Richard Prince recalls the moment, in 1980, when Koons showed him the work in development during a visit to Koons’s sparsely furnished apartment:
So what’s getting me is the washer/dryer. This “tag-team” even has the labels still attached.
And I’m saying “so uh […] What-Is-Up?”
And Jeff says, “The New.”
Everything is brand new.
That’s his turn. His twist. His contribution. His continuation. His “third place.”
And his “new,” immediately makes sense. I like the sense and I like what it makes. Making sense is something that good art does.
Sometimes.
The apartment is a showroom.
And even though what he’s showing are store bought appliances […] that small gesture of not touching what is generally […] immediately, unpacked and “plugged in,” is, in the words of Madison Ave., “ a big bright flash of white light.”
Turn On, Drop Out, Plug In.
That’s what happened at the New Museum.
When Jeff was invited to make a show in the windows. (This was when The New Museum was on 6th Ave. and 14th St.). He somehow got the museum to buy him four vacuum cleaners and the story goes […] that one of them got plugged in and he found out and told the staff that he couldn’t use it. It was “used.” Old. “No good.” Its integrity had been compromised. He told them they would have to go out and buy another. The same. The same kind. A whole new vacuum cleaner. And of course the New Museum had no budget, but what could they do?
Jeff’s foot was down and unless the object was BRAND NEW […] the object became irrelevant, second hand, garbage.87
These are the aesthetics of physical newness, of being ‘box-fresh’. Suspended in the moment of their unpackaging, before being plugged-in, Koons’s work developed the aesthetic of unboxing that Warhol discovers reopening the Time Capsules.88 More generally, the exploration of commodity aesthetics in Warhol’s work, especially the pristine boldness of the Campbell’s Soup Cans’ and Brillo Boxes’, was a crucial platform from which Koons was able to pursue the taut impeccable surface of newness.
In an interview between Koons and Warhol’s long-time associate Gerard Malanga, published for the 2004 exhibition Andy Warhol: 5 Deaths, Koons speaks of his high regard for Warhol’s sculpture before going on to talk of his own work. In relation to The New, he describes how the most banal of commodities becomes the site of heightened aesthetic feeling. While it is important, as we have seen, that the object was brand new, Koons reveals the vacuum cleaner also symbolises an encounter that is in other ways unfamiliar, and this, in turn, adds a dimension to the significance of its being new. For him, the vacuum cleaner drew his attention when he was an infant. He describes it as ‘anthropomorphic’ and the ‘first aggressive object’ he encountered as a child, seen from a position in the immediate vicinity of his mother and from the lowered perspective of the floor. Certainly we might consider this in terms of a kind of fetishism other than commodity fetishism. But, what is important about these relations is the extent to which they have to do with the alteration of scale and perspective through the memory of a child’s view and how, following the logic of fetish but not (reductively) its conclusions, this encounter revolves around all kinds of absence and loss associated with childhood. Additionally, the aesthetic is one set askance by a medium (memory) which re-places the commodity in the home. Indeed, Warhol’s ‘unboxing’, and Koons’s aesthetic of the untouched, straight out of the box commodity, balance between homeliness and the uncanny. Though it might not have been apparent, The New, therefore, suggests a quality of intimacy that is also crucial to both the aesthetics of Raid the Icebox I and Time Capsules.
The same dynamics of newness and structural order, aesthetic strangeness and the domestic are also true of the contemporary YouTube sub-culture of ‘unboxing’ videos. This I want to offer as a final context for thinking through the relevance of Warhol’s collecting strategies and for thinking contemporary culture through Warhol’s work. ‘Unboxing’ user-uploaded videos were first popular with technology aficionados filming themselves taking newly bought gadgets from their packaging, usually giving some commentary to the camera at the same time.89 In the lifeless machines and toys, whose first moments are recorded in unboxing videos, the limitless potential that their advertisers promise is latent. Usually the commodities are not even demonstrated. Instead, we only see the blank, unanimated screens of the uncharged machines while the gadget’s functionality goes largely unevaluated. The appeal of the videos is, rather, in the excitement of unboxing itself, in the fleeting moments before new commodities become ubiquitous. This, again, is an arena where commodity fetish is as much to do with temporality as it is the thing. In fact, these videos combine the gesture of presenting the commodity as emergent and untouched, which Koons made with The New, with Warhol’s processes recycling the by-products of other businesses. Like Koons’s work and, indeed, Warhol’s, the content of the work emerges from the apparently non-commercial, real world environment of the home, however, in this case, it is YouTube rather than the gallery that does the work of reframing and redistribution. The videos have now begun to inform television adverts and marketing campaigns, but it was the consumers themselves who captured and distributed what had previously escaped un-monetised. Unboxing video authorship, and viewership, has gained popularity with a wider public and today total viewership is in the hundreds of millions. The unboxing phenomena has now found its largest audiences with videos, made for children, of toys being unpackaged. One single unwrapping video (uploaded by YouTube user DisneyCollector, and featuring the unwrapping of a variety of surprise plastic eggs with film-themed toys inside) had had 95,167,291 views at the time of writing this book (fig. 5.11).90
Fig. 5.11.Still from DisneyCollector, ‘Angry Birds Toy Surprise Jake NeverLand Pirates Disney Pixar Cars2 Spongebob Huevos Sorpresa’ available at http://youtube/aoc8d0gcf08 (accessed 11 December 2014).
Unboxing videos, because of their setting in people’s homes and their non-professional presenters, are seen as real in a way advertisements are not. In contrast to the artifice of commercial presentation, where subject and object are shown as completely integrated, the videos communicate an explicit and unembellished moment of contact with what is both unfamiliar and, initially, separate. This might also be said to have been the case with Pop, which intervened in an artworld that, at the time of Abstract Expressionism, presented the integration of subject and object in paint in a way that we might see as analogous to the integration of subject and object in the car or iPod advert. Yet, if Abstract Expressionism, like advertising, offered a fantasy of aesthetic experience that was unalienated, that, like advertisements, guaranteed a quality of being ‘in touch’, it would be equally fantastical to suggest the unboxing video or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can, offers anything more real. Rather, we might think of these encounters in terms of a hyperreality in which experience is itself simulacral, an ‘other’ phenomenology without distinct referent to normal conditions of experience. The videos’ soundscape of packaging noises and close-up first person camera work makes the videos points of entrance into phantasmic phenomenological worlds in which new forms of object relations take place.91
In the unboxing video and in Jeff Koons’s work The New, the mass produced commodity has become a platform for aesthetic investigations into newness that add extra dimensions, indeed extra value, beyond what the companies that produce the products can account for. But newness is a fragile state, a last frontier of commodity aesthetics perhaps, a territory where value might still escape, where experience might yet go without a price tag. In this work, aesthetic enquiry emerges and re-evaluation takes place, perversely, on the site of prescribed and determined aesthetic value. These are works in which newness is a distinct aesthetic state. Meanwhile, we might think of the renewals of Raid the Icebox I and Time Capsules as providing an alternative to precisely the structures of value that constrict the aesthetic possibilities of our encounters with objects.
In Warhol’s personal spaces objects inflicted a pressure, not just on a limited space, but on his sense of his own freedom. Their spatial and temporal presence was a burden, it restricted possibilities. The Time Capsules responded to this dual burden, preventing the past, as much as the things from the past, from spilling out all over the place. Warhol saw museums and the institutions of art as problematically nurturing this un-freedom of pastness and clutter in the name of historical value. He responded by recycling, a process of renewal already intrinsic to the development of Pop Art in America in the early 1960s. In these practices, recycling is about re-entering circulation across the divides between world and artworld, it is a re-making present, imperative, that which has been discarded or disregarded.92 And, as in the case of the Navajo blankets Warhol collected, discussed above, recycling was something that was related to sculpture’s identity. In being made from what is leftover, having accumulated social footprints, recycling becomes politicised and emerges in Warhol’s work in the framework of sculpture.