One of the most iconic pieces Andy Warhol produced was a sculptural reproduction of the shipping carton for Brillo Soap Pads. The "Brillo Box" was part of an April 1964 solo show at New York's Stable Gallery. The show, an important event in Warhol's career, consisted of similar reproductions--cartons of Brillo pads, Heinz ketchup, Heinz Baked Beans, Del Monte peaches, Mott’s Apple Juice, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes--stacked in clusters around the gallery, effectively giving it the appearance of a warehouse or a supermarket loading dock. Warhol's pieces were not grocery cartons but reproductions of these cartons, hollow boxes made of silk-screened plywood.
Appropriations of commercial art--in other words, the "unauthorized use" of logos, labels, and the other tools of branding--were typical of Warhol throughout his career, and from the beginning they have had a puzzling, equivocal status. Were these celebrations of American consumption, comments on the art market, condemnations of the "culture industry" and the growing commericalization of American culture? Were they sincere or satiric? Because the Brillo Boxes and other pieces in this series were three-dimensional sculptures (most of Warhol's work was painting or silkscreen, in two dimensions) they have often been seen as a forceful statement of this questionable status: because they are hollow, and because they are reproductions of commercial imagery, the boxes seem to emphasize the "emptiness" of commercial culture, or of Pop Art, or of Warhol's art itself.
A number of contemporary writers have embraced Warhol's methods--if not, in most cases, his fascination with commerce--as tools for writing. Examples include Kenny Goldsmith's The Weather, which is a book-lenghth transcription of a year's worth of weather bulletins from 1010 WINS, New York's all-news radio station (and, incidentally, one of my favorite books) and various works by Robert Fitterman, whose Word Shop we discussed in class last semester.
In any case, Print Magazine has a terrific article on the designer of the actual Brillo cartons, James Harvey. Harvey was an Abstract Expressionist painter in the New York art scene, and he worked as a commerical artist to pay the rent. The article tells the story of what happened when Harvey attended Warhol's show and saw the Brillo Boxes, providing a useful glimpse of an important moment in the history of American art. With a little thought, it could yield insight into the questions around appropriation as an artistic strategy and the divisions between "expressive" artists or writers and those who approach their work as a "conceptual" activity.
Read it here: Print Magazine: "Shadow Boxer" by James Gaddy
