3D Warhol

Andy Warhol and Sculpture

Thomas Morgan Evans

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780857728746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Rain machines; alarmed kosher pickle jars filled with gemstones; replica corn flakes boxes; 'disco decor'; time capsules; art bombs; birthday presents; perfume bottles and floating silver pillows that are clouds; paintings that are also films; museum interventions; collected and curated projects; expanded performance environments; holograms. This is a book about the vast array of sculptural work made by Andy Warhol between 1954 and 1987 - a period that begins long before the first Pop paintings and ends in the year of his death. In 3D Warhol, Thomas Morgan Evans argues that Warhol's engagement with sculpture, and traditional notions of sculpture, produced 'trespasses', his sculptural work bisected the expectations, allegiances and values within art historical, and ultimately social sites of investitute (or territories). This groundbreaking, original book brings to the forefront a major, but overlooked aspect of Warhol's oeuvre, providing an essential new perspective on the artist's legacy.

1

Locating the Sculptural

The paintings of Campbell’s soup cans brought Warhol his big break. They were his first major multiples and the single subject of his first Pop exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in the summer of 1962. They helped to define, and still define, Warhol as a Pop artist, both in his own right and, crucially at the time, as distinct from Roy Lichtenstein with whom he had previously shared the subject of comic book characters. The paintings were presented either on one canvas, as in 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), or in tight series in which the key variable is the flavour of the soup. In either, there is no other sign of life, no other relationship to the world. They exist in an abstract space, with no shadows and no sense of human scale, thus they speak of a larger condition of alienation from the objects of our experience and hence from the embodied, sensory self. They are signs more than objects: detached, immaterial, ungrounded. And, more than any other images in the history of art, they have become mascots for theories of the post-modern, a theoretical territory in which Warhol’s work more generally has become a touchstone. In these paintings, commodity fetishism powerfully unifies sign and object in a new immaterial hyperreality. But we might also say that this sense of abstraction also suggests a reconfiguration of painting under the serial and uniform order of the mass produced commodity object. Thus, painting too comes to be at a remove from itself, it becomes ‘painting’: a frame within a frame from which the commodity appears.

Yet, in these works that reject painting as a harmonious space of mediation between the subject and the world, there is an uncanny sense of substanceless presence: they are like ghosts. As Benjamin Buchloh writes, ‘these paintings are imbued with an eerie concreteness and corporeality, which in 1961 had distinguished Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista. But Warhol differs here […] in that he transferred the universality of corporeal experience onto the paradoxical level of mass-cultural specificity.¹ This aesthetic—what Roland Barthes calls a ‘residue of a subtraction’ of the individual—stands in contrast to Abstract Expression’s earlier anthropomorphism.² These paintings mark the beginning of a moment of wider resistance to the centring and reflection of the subject that Abstract Expressionism might be seen to stand for. And yet, in Warhol’s early Pop Art, what goes hand in hand with a refusal to situate the subject within the image is the idea that the images, as Emile de Antonio said of Coca-Cola, represent ‘us’: modern subjects of consumerism.

But what of works from the same year such as Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot) (plate 1.1)? In marked contrast to their more famous counterparts Warhol also painted images of soup cans that are recognisably from life, appearing as if happened upon at the kitchen counter, half ultra-modern still life, half dishevelled object of desire. This proximity to life suggests that these cans are not just real things, but that there is, or might be, a subject with whom their reality was interconnected. In one painting from this series, a can opener hovers in position, as if guided by an invisible hand. In another, a pencil and watercolour study, the can is used to house a wodge of dollar bills. If this early series of paintings and drawings of soup cans imply a ready consumer, we, of course, know who that was. According to David Bourdon’s biography of Warhol, ‘Warhol’s mother habitually served Campbell’s soup at home, and Andy grew up on the product.’³

Beneath the labels in a few of the torn soup can paintings (particularly Big Torn Soup Can Pepper Pot and Vegetable Beef, both 1962) the silvery surface of the tin has been rendered by a marbleising technique. It suggests a reflective surface that can carry images by itself like a mirror but its messy, going-no-where grey also provides a striking contrast to the regal red of the label and the bold shapes of its letters. If the side of the can could be considered a mirror surface, one could say that it bears images as a consequence of its materiality, while at the same time the label is just barely material as a consequence of its image needing somewhere to be. There is a state of dissolution and fragility in this painting then, a sense that painting itself is unravelling and rent. Work backwards and re-fuse the two elements that Warhol has drawn apart, and painting as it was to earlier generations of painters is regained: the duality of material self-sameness and cultural signifier in a single whole. But, with the development of his paintings of factory-fresh cans, supermarket shelf cans, and the whole-scale introjection of the commodity sign into the space of painting, there was no going back.

As the torn and used can works were developed in parallel with the ‘supermarket shelf’ images of soup cans, we have to be careful about inferring that the more famous paintings emerged after the traces of thingness, use and the subject had been cast aside. David Joselit’s excellent analysis avoids this kind of storytelling. For him the tearing of the image from the object in Big Torn Campbell’s Soup Can only illustrates the trauma more obliquely inferred by the others: ‘Even in ostensibly straight-forward works like his 1962 series of Campbell’s soup cans,’ he writes, ‘the commodity is divided against itself.’⁴ Joselit sees in both types of painting the same tension between figure and ground, image and object that map on the ‘extra-optical dimensions within a postmodern media-saturated consumer society.’⁵ However, even as equivalent, there is left the question of what to do with what has been left out by the shifting framework that the commodity has brought on representation. If painting as it was is torn apart, what can one say of the scraps? In these less famous works, the shadows, as it were, of the paintings of ‘clean’ soup cans, the capacity of painting to contain and construe aesthetic value seems to have been made vulnerable, in parallel with—perhaps even as a consequence of—the defaced can’s own uncertain status with regard to value.

In these cases it is sculpture that emerges as the conceptual container for this matter, the ravaged paper and the stripped or spent cans. These disassembled components, and what Warhol did with them, become an important counterpoint to Warhol’s painting as it evolved. The paintings of used and abused cans are not sculptures, of course, but if painting becomes something else at this moment, taking on the order of the mass produced commodity image, they are not that. Outside of the perimeters set by the multiple, mechanically reproduced image and the commodity object, these works are defined by a condition of negation that links them to the three-dimensional work that follows in this chapter. If the torn cans have gone through a transformation that, in their depiction, metaphorically can be seen as also between painting and sculpture, what follows is a consideration of sculptures actually produced by similar kinds of transformation. Processes of crushing and crumpling especially are means through which sculpture emerges out of image space in the work that will be featured in this chapter. Yet, in this work, it is not so much the sculpture’s materiality that comes to be emphasised—images also require material supports—but an inability to conform to the conditions of production that define the modern image and the modern commodity. In the example of the paintings of the soup cans, this non-conformity is also the state in which the subject—and traditional ideas about artistic production and expression—reside, while the image becomes a representation of forces which are ostensibly antithetical to these. In this chapter I show that, in examples of Warhol’s sculpture and in a history of significant practices that followed, the analysis of Warhol’s series of Soup Cans helps to reveal something about the condition of sculpture today but only in so far as this stretches our understanding of what the sculptural is ‘after Warhol’.

Fig. 1.1.Vito Giallo, Andy Warhol’s Folded Paper Show, pen and ink on Strathmore paper, 2013. Courtesy of Vito Giallo.

***

In the book Unseen Warhol (1996), Benjamin Liu and John O’Connor, who both worked for Warhol in the 1980s, talk to (among many others) Vito Giallo and Nathan Gluck, two of Warhol’s early associates from the 1950s. In their interviews with Liu and O’Connor (whose combined voice is italicised in the following conversation), both men describe Warhol’s first solo show in 1954 at the Loft Gallery, run by Giallo and Jack Wolfgang Beck. In their accounts of this exhibition, a sense of the young Warhol as radically innovative hinges upon an idea of the sculptural nature of his work. Beginning with Giallo:

[Warhol] would start with a square piece of paper. He would take the paper and he would fold it, and somehow he got a lot of pyramids out of it. Then he would open it up one way or another, and some pyramids would be sticking out. Next, he would do drawings of heads and people on parts of the pyramids, and he did a lot of marbleizing, oil on water. Finally, he’d hang them up so that they were sticking out from the wall. We used pushpins to hang them up, and they kept falling down; I must have picked those pieces up a hundred times.

O’Connor / Lui: What happened to all of them?

I think he threw them all out. He never sold anything at the gallery. Very few of us did. But I know nobody who even looked at this show. I thought it was fascinating. I was so amazed. It was his turn to do a one-man show, and I thought it would be drawings and paintings, something straightforward. And then when these things came in I was just shocked.⁶

Gluck’s account of the same show differs slightly, describing a more forthright artistic statement:

Andy did these strange marbled things, and then he crumpled them up and just left them around on the floor.

They were on the floor? I thought they were pinned to the wall but they kept falling to the floor.

Oh, that’s a theory. But I thought Andy had installed them on the floor. Well, maybe by the time you came to see the show it was all on the floor.⁷

Warhol was a commercial illustrator when he displayed these home-made marbleised patterned papers, approximately 12 in number, to which he had added figures in ink.⁸

I am going to consider Giallo’s as the fuller account here, as he remembers pinning the drawing/sculptures up ‘a hundred times’, but I think it is also important to include that of Gluck (who in the end concedes it might have been the case that the work originated on the wall) because it gives a sense of the impact the work made on the gallery visitor.

According to Giallo, the intention of this exhibition had been to showcase Warhol’s dainty, folded and illustrated papers. However, in the event these intricate wall-mounted drawings, on folded, coloured paper, kept coming unstuck and, after several attempts to re-mount the work, Warhol instructed Giallo to leave them on the floor where they were trampled by visitors who did not realise that they were standing on ‘the work’. The exhibition was thus re-conceptualised and became known, retrospectively, as the Crumpled Paper Show. In a recent correspondence with the Warhol scholar Thomas Kiedrowski, Giallo made a drawing of how he remembered the work on the floor of the Loft Gallery, prior to being stood on (fig. 1.1). The example of the Crumpled Paper Show places some of the tensions between registers of commodity, image and material object, identified in the paintings and drawings of soup cans, in an explicitly sculptural context. In doing so, the work presents sculpture as a category for what begins as image but which cannot be withheld by it. It exists outside of the frameworks of both the image and of traditional sculpture. The expectations of the viewers, the chance event of the work’s falling to the floor and the reimaginging of the work after the event are what truly establish this work as sculpture, I propose, rather than its mere material heaviness and three-dimensional qualities. It is as if the work’s irreconcilability with the condition of the image, rather than the heaviness of the paper, results in the collapse onto the floor, and it is only there that the work is reconceived. The Crumpled Paper Show became the work it did by being made in the moment of its unmaking, the authorial touch so small a thing as to virtually be a nothing, produced by Warhol finally not allowing the work to be restored to the wall and considered a ‘made’ entity. Yet this artistic touch, so different from what distinguished his work as an advertising illustrator, is a crucial part of the picture of sculpture I am presenting. And what it lacks in craft it makes up for as a gesture. Like ‘scrunched’, the term ‘crumpled’ calls to mind rejected bits of paper tossed into wastepaper baskets. It is suggestive of frustration, dismissal and rejection; it is ‘abstract expressionist’ in a very literal sense. If this process of naming and reconstituting the work in retrospect is as determined as I am claiming, Warhol might have had some art-historical inspiration for doing so. In 1953—the year before the Crumpled Paper Show—he is likely to have seen Marcel Duchamp’s “Dada: 1916–1923,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 to May 9, 1953 at the show of the same title (fig. 1.2). This work consisted of the poster for the coming exhibition scrunched tightly into a ball.⁹ Like Crumpled Paper Show Duchamp’s crumpling is equally an abstraction, an act against a previously established legibility that occurs in the poster’s transition from two dimensions to three. Likewise, there is a play with tenses in these works: if Warhol’s is partially a retelling of the story, Duchamp make a gesture of denouncement using the material announcing his exhibition, and does so from a point before the event.

Fig. 1.2.Marcel Duchamp,“Dada: 1916-1923,” Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, April 15 to May 9, 1953, 1953. Letterpress exhibition catalogue and poster designed by Duchamp; crumpled version. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother, Alexina Duchamp, 1998-4-49. Copyright: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

In Warhol’s work more broadly, we are faced with incidences of abstraction where in paintings and prints, for example, images are transferred off-register or else mis-register completely. We might think of the Crumpled Paper Show in these terms, as failing to register both on the wall where they were placed and with the gallery visitors as scrunches of intricately produced waste-paper on the floor. Likewise, in Warhol’s early films, such as Kitchen and Vinyl (both 1965), accidents create dramatic moments of discord, shocking viewers out of their lulled states when carelessly placed bodies and objects interact on the screen. These moments occur, for example, when a drink falls on the floor or a harsh sound interrupts a scene from off-set. In Peter Gidal’s words, in these moments ‘gestural super-reality converges with overtones of dada-absurdity […] overpowering the visual and aural concentration of the viewer.’¹⁰ The sense is that, much like the paper crumples, also a kind of decoration, through accidents and moments of discontinuity props and materials that would otherwise be backdrop insist on their status as contingent, affective and as obje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Portraits
• 1 Locating the Sculptural
• 2 ‘Sublime but compulsive negation’: Brillo Boxes
• 3 Atmosphere
• 4 The Artwork Across the Street
• 5 A Waste of Space
• Conclusion One-Dimensional Man – In 3D!
• Notes
• Bibliography