Andy Warhol (8 page)

He thought that that was what was great about America. And after all, he grew up in squalor, in a depressed neighborhood in Pittsburgh. He once said that the house he grew up in “was the worst place I have ever been in my life” (Watson, 5). The “little boxes” of Daly City, California, would have been palaces in comparison to the slum he knew as a child in Pittsburgh. The warm, tasty, nourishing food from the supermarkets was a daily treat.
Against the grinding poverty in which he grew up, the storm doors and refrigerators he painted were warmth and satisfaction embodied, just as blankets and fat were the antidotes to cold and hunger in the symbolic system of Josef Beuys. “Ticky-tacky,” applied to the little boxes by those protesting the spiritual poverty of suburban life, betrayed the fact that those who used the expression had lost sight of the fundamental needs that the victims of hunger and cold would give their lives for. “I adore America,” Warhol once said, “and these are some comments on it. My
Storm Door
, 1960, is a statement of the harsh impersonal products and brash material objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us” (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 458). And in an interview on Pop art, he said: “The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all” (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 461). But who before the Pop artist would have thought to make sculptures out of grocery boxes?

In any case, now that we understand why the boxes had to be made of wood joined together by cabinetmakers, let's return to the factory-like way in which the grocery boxes were made. Once the boxes were delivered, Andy and his assistants began the “arduous task of taping the floors with rolls of brown paper and
setting out each box in a grid-like pattern of eight rows lengthwise.” In fact, the Factory was being decorated in a way that made it as unlike a manufactory as can be imagined. Walls and ceilings were being covered with silver foil or silver paint by Billy Linich, a downtown bohemian who was to play a decisive role in determining the demographics in what came to be referred to as the Silver Factory, with Linich as a kind of factotum and supervisor. Meanwhile, he was pressed into service, along with Malanga, in painting the boxes in white or brown Liquitex, to match the colors of the original cardboard cartons. Malanga, a poet, had been hired early to help Andy make silk-screened paintings at the abandoned Hook and Ladder that had served as a temporary studio.

Meanwhile, the original cartons were flattened out, and silk-screen stencils were made of them by an expert. Once the underpaint had dried, Warhol and Malanga began silk-screening the painted boxes, ultimately producing replicas of what the eye would see as containers for juice or canned food or, in the most memorable of the boxes, Brillo pads. The “Factory workers” would move from box to box, completing perhaps two sides of a given sort of box in a day. The bottom was left blank, and unsigned. Malanga says that the grocery boxes were “literally three-dimensional photographs of the original products,” which explains why they so looked like the originals. Of course, screens get clogged, and the paint gets splashed or dripped. But Andy never discarded anything. For Warhol, these “blemishes” were
part of the process. So the Factory's boxes would not have been tolerated in a genuine factory, which would exercise quality control. They look mechanical—in a way, and from a certain distance. For Warhol, the accidents were part of the process. So he never edited anything out. And these two qualities—unedited but mechanically reproduced—became part of the Warhol aesthetic, whatever medium he might work in.

Readers of Wittgenstein may be struck, as I was, by this picture of how the grocery boxes were created in the Silver Factory, and Wittgenstein's picture of a “language game” in
Philosophical Investigations.
A “language game” is a highly simplified situation in which a small numbers of objects are associated by a small number of words.

Here is the language game as Wittgenstein describes it: “The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and his assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block,' ‘pillar,' ‘slab,' ‘beam.' A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such and such a call.—Conceive this as a complete primitive language” (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, I, 2).

The assembly line in the Silver Factory has one artist—Warhol—and two assistants, Malanga and Linich. Warhol calls out “box,” and one or the other assistant brings a box. Warhol then
calls out “stencil,” and the stencil is brought and positioned. Then Warhol calls out “squeegee,” etc. Repeated orders and compliances soon enough create enough grocery boxes for a show. Whether this throws any light on the somewhat puzzling notion of “language game” I cannot say for certain, but the resonance between the two came to me in a dream while writing this book, and for better or worse I could not resist including the comparison here.

This brings us to the great philosophical question the grocery boxes raise. Whatever the accidentalities, the Factory
Brillo Boxes
look exactly like the real cartons one could see in the stockroom of any supermarket in the land. There is a photograph taken by Fred MacDarrah of Andy standing between some stacks of his
Brillo Boxes
, but anyone unfamiliar with cutting edge art in 1964 would have seen it as a photograph of a pasty-faced stock boy standing amid the boxes it was his job to open and unpack. In truth, it would have been impossible for anyone unfamiliar with avant-garde art in 1964 to have seen the boxes as art at all. One can put it even more strongly. It would have been impossible for Andy's boxes to have
been
art before 1964. The great art historian Heinrich Wolfflin said that not everything is possible at all times. The history of art opens up new possibilities all the time. But it would not have opened up the possibility of something like a Brillo box being art in, say, 1874, when the avant-garde art was Impressionist. Had such an object existed at that time, it was just possible that an Impressionist might have painted it—
but he or she would not have been painting a work of art. They would have been painting an object that had whatever function it might have had, but it would not have been art. The Impressionists had a hard enough time getting their paintings accepted as art in 1874. Many people saw their canvases as little more than paint rags. To see the Factory's
Brillo Boxes
as art, one would have had to know something about the recent history of art—know something about Marcel Duchamp, for example—and have some understanding of why someone would have made hundreds of objects that looked exactly like what could have been seen in any stockroom in America. What made Andy's boxes art, while their real-life counterparts were simply utilitarian containers, with no claim to the status of art at all? The question What is art? had been part of philosophy since the time of Plato. But Andy forced us to rethink the question in an entirely new way. The new form of the ancient question was this: given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object? One could say something like this: Andy's boxes were made of wood and the ordinary Brillo cartons were made of corrugated cardboard. But surely the difference between art and reality cannot consist in the difference between wood and cardboard! After all, there are plenty of boxes that are made of wood, in which, for example, wine is shipped. Or someone could say, Andy's boxes are full of accidentalities, while the commercial Brillo cartons are impeccable as far as printing is concerned. But Andy's could have been impeccable as well. The difference between art and reality would stand.

Major American artist/stock boy, or artworks/mere real objects? Noted
Village Voice
photographer Fred McDarrah recorded Andy and the
Brillo Boxes
at the Stable Gallery. Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

As it happens, the designer of the Brillo box was himself an artist—James Harvey, an Abstract Expressionist painter who was a part-time package designer. Harvey was stunned when he visited the opening of Andy's show of grocery boxes, realizing that he had designed the very boxes that the Stable Gallery was selling for several hundred dollars, while his boxes were worth nothing. But Harvey certainly did not consider his boxes art. They were, one might admit, commercial art. And as commercial art they were brilliant. There has to be an explanation of why everyone remembers the Brillo box, but not, say, the Mott's apple juice box. Andy gets no credit for the brilliance of
Brillo Box
's design. The credit is entirely Harvey's. What Andy gets credit for is making art out of what was an entirely vernacular object of everyday life. He turned what no one would have considered art into a piece of sculpture. He did the same with boxes far more nondescript in design than the Brillo box—the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box, for example. Each of the eight varieties of grocery boxes was sculpture, not just the
Brillo Box.

The writer Edmund White wrote that

We might qualify this by observing that Andy did
not
sign the grocery boxes. But White has it right: Andy negated pretty much anything philosophers have said about art. And it is fairly easy to understand how: nothing that the Brillo box and Andy's
Brillo Boxes
have in common can be part of the definition of art, since they look—or could look—absolutely alike. What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye.

I shall not go further into what philosophers call the ontology of the artwork—what it is to
be
a work of art—what are the necessary conditions to be a work of art. For that I must direct the reader to my collected writings on the philosophy of art. Negatively, however, Andy's various challenges to what philosophers and others have said that art is
pale
in comparison with the grocery boxes. Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why can't anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work of art? That
means at the very least a new era of art in which artworks cannot be discerned from real things, at least in principle—what I have called The End of Art. Critics have asked why I think Warhol ended the history of art as art had been understood before—why not Duchamp with his readymades? Well, Andy actually made his grocery boxes, whereas Duchamp could not, in principle, have made his readymades. But then not every object can be a readymade, since Duchamp restricted readymades to aesthetically undistinguished objects. But why do that unless one has some animus against retinal art? One thing that has to be said about the
Brillo Boxes
is that they are beautiful. My wife and I have lived with one for years, and I still marvel at its beauty. Why live with dull anesthetic objects? Why not objects as beautiful as
Brillo Boxes?

Andy's second—and last—exhibition at the Stable Gallery opened on April 21, 1964. The space was filled, floor to ceiling, with grocery boxes. The front room, on Seventy-fourth Street, was given over to the now familiar
Brillo Box
sculptures, red and blue on white, and there were about a hundred of them. The Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes were in the rear gallery. The gallery was on the ground floor of an elegant upscale white-stone town house that has since been incorporated into the Whitney Museum as its business entrance. The entrance area has a black-and-white marble tile floor, with a delicate staircase to the right, and a polished brass balustrade. One entered the gallery itself through a large mahogany door, which, during the few weeks that
the show was up, had the utilitarian look of a stockroom. The contrast between the delicate entrance of the building and the space of the Stable gallery was like the contrast between waking life and dream—it was as if one were suddenly transported to a crass utilitarian space, radically discontinuous with the upper-class atmosphere of Madison Avenue and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Entering the show was like living a surrealistic experience. The installation was by Billy Linich, and by my recollection it felt like a jumble, not quite the geometrically ordered edifice that corresponded to Warhol's vision. One had to follow a path through the piles, so the gallery was not crowded, although it was a show that everyone interested in art at the time had to see, and on opening night the lines stretched out the doors of the building and down the street. But that had more to do with the fact that there was room inside for only a handful of people at a time. Most of the literature on the
Brillo Box
, critical and philosophical, tends to talk about the individual boxes, since the art-reality contrast lies there. The term
installation
as a designation of a distinct genre of art first appears in the
OED
in 1969, but doubtless was in use before then. It is incontestable that Warhol's decision that the boxes had to be made of wood implies the effect he wanted to achieve when they are neatly and carefully piled next to one another, but it would be difficult to claim that his second Stable exhibition consisted of one single work. Most of the critical and philosophical literature on the
Brillo Box
treats the boxes as individual works because of the relationship between
them and the individual cartons of the supermarket. At the same time, it is possible to imagine Andy showing individual boxes on top of pedestals, as if they were portraits of Brillo cartons, or even fastened to the wall in one way or another, or aligned along shelves. He did not want to do that—though one saw them exhibited that way in museums and art galleries. It is really undeniable that he wanted them piled on the floor, and to have a massive presence—maybe like the piles of old automobile tires that Allen Kaprow installed in the courtyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery, just down from the Stable Gallery. Kaprow used the word “environment,” in contrast with the word “ensemble” used by Louise Nevelson to identify her great 1958 exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery. She envisioned the gallery as one gigantic sculpture or “ensemble.” “Everything has to fit together, to flow without effort, and I too must fit,” as she explained to a
New York Times
reporter. Nothing could be further from the concept of ensemble than the gallery full of grocery boxes!