Read Online Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto - Free Book Online

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 shelvesof 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 questionWhat 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