Andy Warhol (7 page)

This conceptual reconfiguration of art began in early 1964 with a body of work quite unlike anything done before, when he moved his place of operation from a not-entirely-functional firehouse to a new space—a former factory at 231 East Fortyseventh street in Manhattan, which indeed became known as “The Factory.” The Factory evolved into something that was far more than a place for making art. It became a place where a certain kind of Sixties person was able to live a certain kind of Sixties life. It became, to use a vision projected in the writing of Rabelais, a sort of Abbey de Thélème, the motto of which was
Fais ce que tu voudras
—“Do as you wish.” In Rabelais's Abbey, beautiful
couples followed the paths of sexual love wherever they led. The people who found their way to the Factory were typically beautiful but also lost, so that what they possessed was at most a kind of “piss glamour,” to use an epithet once bestowed on Edie Sedgwick, Warhol's paradigm Superstar. In many cases they were destroyed by the Factory's permissiveness, whether of sex or substance. At the center of it all was Warhol, himself anything but beautiful, whose personality was that of a workaholic, producing art, setting the direction, and using the misfits that found their way to the Factory as sources of inspiration in exchange for being allowed to watch them do what they wanted to do. They called him Andy to his face but “Drella” behind his back—a combination of Dracula and Cinderella, until that term almost became his Factory name.

Initially, however, the Factory was defined not only by work, but by a kind of repetitive, factory-like labor, where Andy and a few assistants produced, in large but manageable numbers, a variety of three-dimensional objects that he referred to as sculptures, but that looked like industrial products—like objects that would normally be produced only for some utilitarian purpose by machines designed to produce them: impersonal, mechanically achieved objects with no aesthetic aura. When we think of sculpture, we think of Michelangelo, Canova, Rodin, Brancusi, or Noguchi, creating unique objects of beauty and meaning. It would, before Warhol, never have occurred to someone to create, as sculpture, something that looked like a cardboard carton
for shipping packages of consumer goods. Not only did Warhol produce exactly that—he did so through a process that in a way parodied mass production. His sculpture looked like the kinds of boxes, ordinarily made of corrugated cardboard, in which cans of food or cartons of cleaning supplies were shipped from the factories where they were made to the places where they were sold to consumers, such as supermarkets. Cardboard cartons, bearing brand names and logos, were entirely familiar items in everyday American life, used, once they were emptied, for storing and shipping things, and for any number of other household functions, their logos continuing to advertise the products they once contained, things that were themselves familiar parts of domestic life. But Warhol was less interested in them for their everydayness than he was in the aesthetics of the unopened shipping cartons, stacked in regimented piles, in the stockrooms of supermarkets, as far as the eye could see. He wanted, in the words of his assistant, Gerard Malanga, “to become totally mechanical in his work the way a packaging factory would normally silkscreen information onto cardboard boxes” (Malanga,
Archiving Andy Warhol
, 34). And for that he needed not so much a studio as a factory. Hence the name of his workplace.

Malanga is our primary source for how these boxes were produced, and for what Andy's vision was in organizing the Factory along industrial lines, paradoxically when one considers that the human beings who came to be parts of the Factory's population were anything but robots. “Andy was fascinated by the shelves
of foodstuffs in supermarkets and the repetitive, machine-like effect they create. . . . He wanted to duplicate the effect but soon discovered that the cardboard surface was not feasible” (Malanga, 94). Since the effect in question
is
usually achieved by the stacking of cardboard cartons in warehouses and storerooms, it is difficult to see what was wrong with cardboard, which Warhol could have used with far less effort simply by purchasing cardboard cartons from the companies that manufactured them, treating them as readymades. It was as though reality was not machinelike enough to accommodate his vision. Equally important, work was so central to his conception of art that the idea of using as art something that was not produced by work would have held no interest for him.

The Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, with whom Warhol is often compared, had introduced the concept of the readymade into art in a set of works “created” in the years 1913–17. His most famous readymade was a urinal he allegedly purchased from a plumbing supply store—a white porcelain vessel manufactured by the Mott Iron Works, which he saw displayed in a plumbing supply store window. He added a signature—not his own but rather “R. Mutt,” presumably a near pun on “Mott”—and a date, and made history by attempting to enter it in an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which was supposed to have no jury and no prizes. It was in fact rejected by the hanging committee, which argued that any piece of art would be hung as a matter of course, the problem being that this was not art. At a stroke, the question
What is art? was raised in a new form. The original Dadaists, who fled World War I by settling in Zurich, had decided, in 1915, in protest against the classes responsible for the Great War, to refuse to make art that was beautiful at a time when it was widely believed that beauty was the whole point of art. That was the first skirmish in the anti-aestheticism that became such an important strand in modern art. If art did not need to be beautiful, what did it need to be in order to be art? Warhol, in my view, took the question of what was art to the next stage. If we think of the history of Modernism as a struggle on the part of art to bring to conscious awareness an understanding of what it—art—is, then Warhol's “grocery boxes” are among the most important of all Modernist works. He in effect brought Modernism to an end by showing how the philosophical question of What is art? is to be answered.

In an exhibition of Warhol's work installed in 1968 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Warhol ordered five hundred cardboard Brillo cartons from the Brillo company, which were used to create the atmosphere of a stockroom, but which were in no sense considered works of art, either in their own right or in the aggregate. By 1968, the grocery boxes, and especially the
Brillo Boxes
, were, together with the
Campbell's Soup Can
paintings, his iconic work, so there had to be some grocery boxes, and ideally some
Brillo Boxes
, in any true retrospective exhibition of his work. In fact, Warhol had arranged for the curator Pontus Hulten to have a large number of
Brillo Boxes
fabricated specifically for the
Stockholm show, which he intended to then donate to the Moderna Museet when the exhibition had finished its final venue. He did that for his 1970 show at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. But for mysterious reasons, Hulten did no such thing. There may have been a few of the 1964
Brillo Boxes
, but mostly there were the cardboard boxes, which were not really artworks, and which were in fact without value. But in 1990, after Warhol's death, Hulten did have about 120 Brillo boxes fabricated, which he then certified as made in 1968, and sold them for huge amounts of money. But they were counterfeit. By contrast, the Appropriation artist Mike Bidlo also made a number of “Brillo boxes” in the 1990s, which he signed with his own name and titled
Not Andy Warhol.
Bidlo's boxes, as part of the Appropriationist movement, are works of art in their own right, raising questions of their own, but they are no more counterfeit than Warhol's boxes were. But it would be a digression to address that matter here, so I return to the narrative of the “Factory made” grocery boxes of 1964.

Since the cardboard cartons actually used by the Brillo company—and facsimile cartons by other companies that were also created for Warhol's 1964 show—were not capable of achieving the visual effect at which he aimed, Warhol decided that the grocery boxes had to be made of wood, and fabricated by wood craftsmen, who were trained in cutting and fitting pieces of wood together according to specifications given them. The craftwork was not part of the artistic process, any more than it was part of the art of painting that the artist should actually make the paint
he or she used. Malanga located a woodworking shop on East Seventieth Street and placed an order for several hundred wooden boxes in various sizes, which were delivered to the Factory on January 28, 1964. It was becoming, in the mid-1960s, a commonplace practice to rely on craftspersons when an artist lacked the skills needed to produce desired aesthetic effects. Donald Judd, the Minimalist sculptor, for example, used the services of a machine shop to fabricate the metal boxes he used as sculptures, since he could not achieve by hand the sharp edges and corners that constitute aesthetic features of the perfectly matched metal units—that composed the “specific objects,” as he called them—that Judd became known for. In the 1990s Jeff Koons routinely sent his pieces out to artisans in ceramic or in metal, knowing that he did not have the skills required to make them himself. He was not an artisan but an artist. The artist had the ideas: there was no reason why he had to make the material objects that
embodied
those ideas. Robert Therrien's sculpture consists of ordinary household items fabricated on a scale of about three-and-ahalf to one: huge pots, pans, folding chairs, folding metal bridge tables. Some of his works consist of stacks of pans or dishes. It would be a waste of his talent, even if it were possible for him to make these objects by hand. Some artists—Damien Hirst comes specifically to mind—consign their paintings to others to paint, so that a show of Hirst's paintings sometimes looks like a group show. Since Duchamp—certainly since Cage—chance was built into artistic production, so that it is thinkable that an artist could
pick the name of a painter out of a list at random, and then exhibit the painting, whatever its style or content, as his. In any case it is no longer part of the concept of original art that it actually be made by the artist who takes credit for it. It was enough that he conceived the idea that it exemplified. Parenthetically, no one else, so far as I know, took credit for the idea of making grocery boxes the way, for example, they did for the idea of painting the soup cans or the Death and Disaster paintings. It was an idea that in its realization incorporated repetition and the effect of being machine-made, both of which were central to Warhol's aesthetic. And their production fit perfectly with Andy's thought that he wanted to be a machine. “I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.”

There is not a lot of difference, in one respect, between selecting a readymade, like a snow shovel or a metal grooming comb—or a bottle rack or a plumbing fixture—and having something fabricated. In both cases the object is produced by someone else, the artist himself taking credit for the fact that it is art. On the other hand, not just any object can be a readymade. In a talk Duchamp gave at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, he said: “The choice of these ‘readymades' was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anesthesia” (Duchamp, “A Propos of ‘Readymades,'” 21). Duchamp's agenda was polemical, as the word “taste” implies. In classical aesthetics, taste, and, in particular,
good taste, played a crucial role: it was connected with pleasure. And in the 1950s and the early 1960s, visual pleasure—what Duchamp scorned as “the retinal”—was what art was supposed to be about. When the critic Pierre Cabanne asked Duchamp where his antiretinal attitude came from, Duchamp replied, “From too great an importance given to the retinal. Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. . . . Our whole century is completely retinal. . . . It's absolutely ridiculous. It has to change” (Cabanne, 43).

In a certain sense, Warhol was a follower of Duchamp. When he asked an assistant, Nathan Gluck, to bring some cardboard boxes from the supermarket near his house, he was disappointed when Gluck brought back boxes with elegant designs. Andy wanted something more common. Malanga intuited his needs: “The brand names chosen consisted of two versions of Brillo, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and Mott's Apple Juice.” (He left out Delmonte Peach Halves and Campbell's Tomato Juice.) But Warhol was not anti-aesthetic in quite the way that Duchamp was. Duchamp was trying to liberate art from having to please the eye. He was interested in an intellectual art. Warhol's motives were more political. Andy really celebrated ordinary American life. He really liked the fact that what Americans eat is always the same and tastes predictably the same. “What's great about this country is that America started the tradition
where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it” (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 458).

Andy's art is, in a way, a celebration as art of what every American knows. Who knows but what his boxes were not inspired by the famous protest song “Little Boxes,” written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and made popular by the folksinger Pete Seeger in 1963? It was a satire on the proliferation of housing developments in which each unit looked the same as every other unit in the development. Unquestionably, McDonald's is the paradigm of universal sameness in food the world over, singled out wherever globalism is protested. But as we know, Andy liked everything to be the same.