Warhol’s Problem Project: The Time Capsules

Christopher Schmidt (bio)
LaGuardia Community College

Abstract

This essay examines the split function of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules as both research archive and unrealized art project. It suggests that the Time Capsules epitomize Warhol’s career-long preoccupation with consumption and waste (a concern animating much of his art production), and that the extreme materiality of the 610 Time Capsules is a complicated response to dematerialization in conceptual art practices and the post-war global economy. Finally, the essay reports on his on-site research of the Time Capsules, analyzing contradictions in the Warhol Museum’s maintenance of the project as both art and archive.

Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules (TCs) enjoy a curious dual role in the Warhol catalog, functioning both as an active research archive and as an unrealized art project. Like a hydra pulled in two directions at once, this split purpose compromises the TCs’ ability to succeed at either pursuit. As an archive, they have been rendered too instrumental to maintain their art integrity; yet their artistic disorder and contingency inhibits their usefulness as an archive. In this tension, the TCs epitomize conflicts around waste matter, collection, and preservation that animate much of Warhol’s cultural productions. The TCs also serve as a compelling site to assess Warhol and other artists’ turns toward what Hal Foster has called an “archival impulse” in postwar art. Although Warhol’s TCs are not the first such archival art project, they may well be the most sprawling, and their extreme materiality is striking when considered against the backdrop of conceptual art’s “dematerialization of the art object” (in the words of influential art critic Lucy Lippard) as well as the broader dematerialization of the US economic base in the 1970s, when the TCs were inaugurated. This essay attempts to think through the dialectical relationship between materiality and dematerialization in post-war art practices using the trope of waste, a central concern of Warhol’s. A second interest of the essay is to describe the uncanny ways that Warhol’s TCs, while representing an alternative archive to that of the museum or library, frustrate attempts by later archivists to govern and systematize them. In sketching dual purposes for the TCs as both art and archive, Warhol performs a posthumous institutional critique—not of the art museum per se, but of the museumification of the artist in his relics and after effects.

The TCs consist of approximately 610 boxes full of mostly ephemeral media that Warhol collected periodically throughout his working life and stored on shelves in his studio spaces, before removing them to off-site storage (Fig. 1).¹

Warhol formally inaugurated the project in 1974, when he moved his studio from 33 Union Square West to a larger space nearby, 860 Broadway. According to some sources, it was the boxing up of materials for the office move that gave Warhol the idea for the project (Wrbican, Interview). The construction of the TCs was regular and periodic, with boxes assembled at the rate of one to three per month (Warhol refers to them as his “box-of-the-month” in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [145]). However, several thematic boxes also appear, such as the “party box” and the “Concorde box,” which contains items Warhol retained from his many cross-Atlantic flights on the airline. While the TCs largely contain correspondence, announcements, magazines, books, photographs, and reproductions from Warhol’s desk and studio (Fig. 2), more eccentric objects also can be found in the boxes, such as Warhol’s wigs, a piece of cake wrapped in a napkin, dental equipment, and a mummified human foot (“Andy Warhol Museum Archives”).

The TCs were never exhibited during Warhol’s lifetime and remain largely inaccessible except to a few archivists and researchers in the Archives Study Center of The Warhol Museum, where they are maintained and catalogued. (The last box was only recently opened, in 2014 [Wrbican, Personal Interview].) Interested viewers may see the contents of one TC on display in a gallery vitrine in the Warhol Museum, and there are plans by the Archives Study Center to digitize the entire contents. Yet even describing this much about the boxes is contingent and uncertain. When I made a research trip to view the TCs in 2014, I was provided limited access to only one of the boxes. It would take years of unlimited access for researchers to build up a full sense of the TCs’ contents and contours. Because this is impossible under the TCs’ current administration, much of my analysis here rests on the testimony of John W. Smith and Matt Wrbican, former archivists in the Archives Study Center at the Andy Warhol Museum; various Warhol associates who helped in the organization of the boxes; and Warhol’s own unreliable writings about them. The book Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21 and archivist Matt Wrbican’s recent inventory of TC 51 provide a more penetrating look at the contents of two of the boxes. But as we shall see, these accounts are often inconsistent, and the inaccessibility of the TCs’ contents renders my own analysis more conceptual than detailed. That said, my visit to the Warhol Museum in 2014 to research the TCs did uncover some key information about their design and contents.

I describe the TCs as a “problem project” not because there is something politically problematic about them. Rather, like one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” the TCs resist easy explanation and seem even to have given trouble to the artist. The TCs’ unrealized status as art, as well as their volume and variety, suggests an inability on the part of the artist to control their form. In some ways, Warhol seems more possessed by the TCs than an agent of their making. That Warhol never found a way to publicize or market the TCs creates an additional aura of failure or unrealizability about them. Yet if the TCs are in some sense an artistic failure, it is a failure trumped by their monumental scale and duration, their variety, and their mutability. The TCs are metamorphic, fulfilling different needs depending on the context and the interested party. The ultimate uncategorizability of the TCs—are they art, archive, or junk?—undermines our ability to analyze them fully, not just because of their conceptual recalcitrance but also because of their material inaccessibility. This struggle to describe the TCs is not mere academic concern, but of practical import. How we categorize the boxes informs and determines the conditions of their maintenance. An art piece is maintained differently from a research archive, which is in turn treated more respectfully than a collection of esoterica.

It is increasingly common practice to view the TCs in this latter regard, as the less valuable (and certainly less salable) leftovers of Warhol’s voluminous collections of paintings, decorative arts, books, and mass produced kitsch objects, which were organized and sold at Sotheby’s in 1988, after Warhol’s sudden death. However, to describe the TCs as merely an instance of Warhol’s collecting impulse—a hobby gone haywire, if you will—is an incomplete view. Warhol was first and always an artist, and analyzing the TCs as art allows us to appreciate new aspects of Warhol’s larger art practice and make connections to other object-oriented art practices that similarly engage forms of collecting, archiving, and waste making. Short art historical treatments of the TCs have appeared in Sven Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy, Michael J. Golec’s The Brillo Box Archive, and Ingrid Schaffner’s exhibition catalog, Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art. However, the TCs have been treated more extensively in cultural studies contexts, by Michael Lobel, Jonathan Flatley, and Scott Herring, who consider the TCs one aspect of Warhol’s larger practice as a collector. The Warhol Museum has also contributed to this line of research by publishing an entire book entitled Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting, which includes shorter versions of Lobel’s and Flatley’s articles, and suggests that Warhol’s collecting was a form of artistic practice. None of these studies pathologize Warhol, and indeed these critics all use queer theory to repair the stigma that haunts Warhol’s collecting habits. Yet in Herring’s account, Warhol becomes a case study of the excessive collector—a “hoarder” (however much nuance Herring adds nuance to this designation by analyzing phobic journalism about the TCs). Nudging the TCs out of the realm of cultural case study—a symptom of consumerist acquisition—and closer to the provinces of art analysis will help use see both the TCs and Warhol’s broader art production more clearly. This analysis may also have practical effects, helping us understand how to organize the TCs going forward.

Boxed Waste

While I stress the importance of examining the TCs within a lineage of archival art projects, I want to resist labeling the TCs as art simply because this designation serves the interests of the Warhol Museum. In a recent publication elaborating on the contents of TC 51, Chief Archivist Matt Wrbican writes:

One of the TCs was opened and discussed at a meeting of the tripartite founders of the Warhol Museum, held in New York in October 1992, during which Warhol’s longtime business manager Fred Hughes clearly stated, “He [Warhol] thought of them as sculpture.” This characterization has been variously confirmed and rejected by other former Warhol assistants. Although they are held in our Archives collection, the Warhol Museum considers them to be a work of art. (687)

Even granting the reliability of Hughes and his account, the artist’s intentions are particularly fraught in the case of Warhol, who left us volumes of anecdotes and aphorisms about his social habitus and “philosophy,” but who was notoriously slippery when discussing his art, often refusing interviewers’ attempts to project depth and meaning onto it. Using Warhol’s own statements about the TCs as a warrant for adjudicating them as sculpture is also problematic because Warhol describes them differently depending on the context. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol offers extensive descriptions of the project as a kind of aestheticized storage, a symptom of his conflicts around waste and materiality, informed by a queer lineage of collecting. Meanwhile, in the posthumous Andy Warhol Diaries (itself a riveting archival project that was assembled after Warhol’s death), the artist indicates his use of the TCs as a curated historical archive, rather than as chance-based sculpture.² None of this is to suggest that the TCs cannot function in all these ways at once. I only wish to disentangle my own analysis of TCs’ art function from the Warhol Museum’s more self-interested motivations for describing them as art, and to call into question “the artist’s intentions” as a warrant.

While Warhol considered marketing the TCs as art during his lifetime, he never seemed to land on a satisfactory format for exhibiting or selling them. (Nor, it seems, did Warhol adjudicate how the project should be treated after his death.) Warhol at some point considered selling the TCs to collectors, not as a unified series, but individually, with each collector buying a different box (Smith 12). Warhol even considered inserting a drawing into each of the boxes, to quell the disappointment of a collector who, by the luck of the draw, might end up receiving a box full of unexciting newspapers or Interview magazines (Bourdon 348). On the one hand, this suggests a chance-based element to both the assembling as well as the dispersal of the work; a collector would not be informed of the contents before purchase. On the other hand, the drawing compromises the TCs’ Duchampian conception as an accumulation of readymades. Diluting the integrity of the Time Capsules as a project of pure appropriation, the drawing—and the particular drawing it is alleged to be—takes the project somewhat nearer to another of Duchamp’s works, recalling his Valise-en-Boite, or museum in a box. Matt Wrbican, former Chief Archivist at the Warhol Archives Study Center, suggests that the artist had in mind a specific drawing to supplement the TCs, the same drawing Warhol produced for the 1968 Moon Museum (Personal Interview). The project may be dismissed as “corny” (to borrow a Warholian epithet), but it possesses a Duchampian influence in its self-referentiality, its portability, and its liquidation of the museum frame into other contexts. The Moon Museum was a minuscule ceramic chip containing six miniature drawings by Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, David Novros, Claes Oldenberg, and Forrest Myers that may or may not have been deposited on the lunar surface during the Apollo 12 mission to the moon (Vergano). Warhol’s drawing is a phallic rendering of the artist’s initials, AW, rendered as a playful and pointed phallus (Fig. 3, upper left.) Were one prone to psychoanalytic idées reçues, one could construe the putative inclusion of this drawing in the TCs as a queer joke about the congress of the phallic and the “anal,” the stage in which Freud suggested that repressed homosexual collectors were stalled.

Because the formal link between the Moon Museum and the Time Capsules is weak, it may in the end be best to treat this information about the identity of the drawing (or drawings) with skepticism. Yet even if the connection is unfounded, comparison between the Moon Museum and the TCs allows us to appreciate a few aspects of the latter project more clearly. As with the Moon Museum, the TCs depend on being materially displaced (buried, “lost,” exiled to storage in New Jersey) before being recovered at some later date—a feature shared by all time capsules. Also key to both projects is the notion that Warhol’s signature might literally or figuratively lend “aura” to otherwise banal material or artifacts. That Warhol never successfully marketed the TCs may indicate his insecurity about defining a massive collection of ephemeral media as “art” simply through his association with it. More than Duchamp and the US-based conceptual artists who followed him, Warhol retained a conservative belief in artistic talent, even as he wished for his own talent to be mediated by the machinic or by chance.

Even if it never actually occurred, Warhol’s notion of opening the closed containers of the TCs to insert a drawing suggests that the artist saw the TCs as being more permeable than his previous box art, such as the Brillo Boxes (1964). Indeed, despite their shared serial form, these two box projects could not be more different. The Brillo Boxes are ersatz readymades, and their intervention is entirely on the exterior, with their interiors void. (Or at least we presume the interiors of the boxes to be void; their impermeability prevents us from plumbing them.)³ Where the Brillo Boxes are empty, the TCs are overfull. The former is one of Warhol’s coolest Duchampian thought experiments;⁴ the Time Capsules are hot and inchoate, containing the messy interiors that Warhol insisted were nowhere to be found in his art. The TCs seem to suggest a kind of pop unconscious underlying the cool façade Warhol advanced in the Brillo Boxes and elsewhere. Warhol typically presents himself as a dandy cipher: “Just look at the surface of my paintings, it’s all there” (Berg 90). The interiority that Warhol represses from his Brillo Boxes and gridded paintings finds a home in the TCs, now secreted away in the bowels of the Warhol Museum, in a hometown Warhol similarly wished to repress from memory: Pittsburgh.

One can locate an even more extreme version of containment and impermeability outside of Warhol’s corpus, in the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s notorious Artist’s Shit (1961), a sealed production of 90 labeled tins that supposedly contain Manzoni’s own excrement. The project is an intervention into notions of value and devaluation, as well as the waste that inevitably results from the consumption of commodities. Manzoni unites post-consumerist waste and human waste in a mass-produced form that is canny in more ways than one, preceding Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans by many months. The occlusion of interiority is even more central to Manzoni’s project than to the Brillo Boxes. Their sealed impermeability keeps us forever guessing as to their true contents, and to open the cans would destroy them. In the end, we are left guessing whether the artist put more stock in the conceptual speech act (these cans are full of X) or in the baseness of the material he used. Are the interiors truly full of shit, or is the artist? While Warhol’s notion to sell the TCs shares with the Manzoni sculptures a similar investment in the blind faith of the buyer, the epistemological pressure is quite different. The expectation with the TCs, as with any vernacular form of time capsule, is that the containers eventually would be opened and their contents revealed to view.⁵

Joseph Cornell’s boxes may also be compared to the TCs in their similar framing and repurposing of media detritus for the viewer. While the tableaux of Cornell’s boxed works are carefully composed for the viewer, Warhol’s TCs are relatively random accumulations, at least visually. Indeed, it is not clear that the retinal matters much at all in the case of the TCs. Cornell’s surrealism and outsiderness is also tonally distinct from Warhol’s insiderish cool. (If anything, the works of Warhol that seem closest to Cornell’s boxes are his paintings, with their necrophiliac celebrity avowals.) Other artists in the intertext of the TCs include Joseph Beuys, whose work and reputation were well known to Warhol (the two were photographed together during one of Warhol’s visits to Europe), and whose exhibition of personally sacred objects may have informed the TCs’ reliquary qualities. However, Warhol’s TCs possess neither the totemic ceremony of Beuys’ Stuhl mit Fett (1964), say, or the political message of Economic Values (1980). Meanwhile, the procedural time period of the TCs—their “box-of-the-month” duration—relates them to On Kawara’s Today Series (1966–2013), in which the conceptual artist marked each day with a painting of the date, along with a copy of that day’s newspaper (at least for some of the series). This dual production of an historical archive and a painting makes On Kawara’s series in some ways the opposite of Warhol’s (who, as discussed earlier, may have intended to supplement each box of ephemeral media with a drawing). Mierle Ukeles Laderman’s various Maintenance Art projects and manifestoes (1969–) may have provided Warhol with a conceptual and behavioral model oriented around the revaluation of waste—although the feminist aspects of Laderman’s project are not likely to have influenced Warhol. Finally, Dieter Roth’s Flacher Abfall, or Flat Waste archival project (inaugurated around the same time as Warhol’s TCs, in 1973) bears a remarkable similarity. Over the course of years, Roth compiled more than 600 binders of food packaging, scraps, and other waste, which he then later exhibited on bookshelves. While the notion of influence is not paramount in this discussion, it must be noted that Warhol rarely mentions conceptual artists in his interviews and writing and, except for Beuys, seems to show little awareness of non-American art developments, so it is not clear that Warhol would have known Roth’s project, much less been influenced by it. In the end, the similarity of Roth’s project to Warhol’s shows the extent to which cultural shifts were compelling artists on both sides of the Atlantic to produce material archives in response to accelerated consumption and economic dematerialization.

The artworks most likely to have influenced the actual form of Warhol’s TCs are the refuse containers, accumulations, and poubelles of Arman, who suspended waste and damaged commodities in transparent Plexiglas vitrines, allowing their contents to be visible to the viewer. Warhol was a friend of the artist, and owned two of Arman’s waste-filled vitrines, along with one other Arman sculpture, Amphetamines (Angell 30).⁶ In fact, Warhol collaborated with Arman on two TC-like refuse-portraits. Late in his life, Warhol gave Arman license to peruse his studio and home closets for materials to assemble a “robot portrait” of the artist, as Arman termed it (Marck 4). When Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987, Fred Hughes delivered the items that Arman had chosen for the two sculpture-portraits. It is not known if Arman plumbed the TCs for material. Yet even if he did not, there are clear similarities between the two projects, both of which are boxed sculptures built out of Warhol’s relics. The actual mechanics of how Arman made his selections of Warhol’s effects is uncertain; however, a story circulates that Warhol (or perhaps Hughes, following Warhol’s directions) provided ersatz relics to Arman for his sculptures.⁷ If true, this story may explain the curious lack of charisma in Arman’s resulting robot portrait of Warhol (see Fig. 4).

Regardless of this particular story’s truth, it does point to a chariness and privacy typical of Warhol. It was unusual for the artist to give permission for anyone to access his private collections or even to cross the threshold of his home. Warhol was secretive and self-conscious about the disorder of his living environment, and anxious about his many possessions—an anxiety that extended even to his trash. Consider the following charged example from the Andy Warhol Diaries, dated February 22, 1981, in which the artist reflects nervously on his encounter with an infamous “garbage man”:

When I was on my way home I ran into Alan J. Weberman, the “King of Garbology[,]” who was on the corner making a phone call. I knew who he was because he handed me a resume with all his garbage credits on it. He said he’d just been through Roy Cohn’s garbage and Gloria Vanderbilt’s. I think he began his career with Dylan’s. I was scared that he’d see where I lived so I went in the other direction. (359)

After his shooting by Valerie Solanas, it is understandable that Warhol would be nervous about revealing his address to potential obsessives, particularly a “garbologist” who would delve into the artist’s unmentionables. But there seems to be something particularly symptomatic here about Warhol’s secrecy, an anxiety about controlling his waste that is manifest elsewhere in his writing and in his art. In this sense, might the TCs be viewed as a form of prophylactic through which Warhol could retain his discards rather than release them into the public sphere for a Weberman or an Arman to expose?

The formal similarity of Warhol’s TCs and Arman’s poubelles may be another reason for Warhol’s reluctance to exhibit the TCs, as if they more properly belonged to another artist’s idiom.⁸ By the same token, there are significant formal differences between the two projects. The double hiddenness of the TCs—dumped in opaque cardboard boxes then hidden in storage—renders them notably different from Arman’s transparent poubelles. Arman’s poubelles also operate in a different signifying context from Warhol’s TCs. Both projects address post-war commodity consumption, and the poubelles share with Warhol’s TCs a use of material consumerist waste and ephemera to signify excess, loss, and obsession. However, Benjamin Buchloh suggests that Arman depicts the wages of consumerism in order to implicate European amnesia regarding the horrors of the war years. As Buchloh points out, post-war European art was deeply preoccupied with the ruins of World War II, and Arman’s refuse-based sculptures seem to draw an equivalence between discarded objects and the subaltern persons discarded in the extermination of the Holocaust (“Plenty or Nothing” 274). While the transparency of Arman’s vitrines positions them as a kind of witnessing, the opacity of Warhol’s TCs indicates the subtler ways that waste is purposefully occluded in the capitalist circuit of production, consumption, and circulation. Arman’s materials are clearly degraded—trash by any measure. Warhol’s materials do not inherently qualify as waste, and do so only through the excessive size and indiscriminate nature of the collection as a whole.

In the end, it is the punishing logic of the archive that allows us to view the TCs as a form of waste and waste management. The archive asks us to discriminate and retain only what is representative and valuable, discarding the trivial and historically insignificant. Yet Warhol’s appetite for indiscriminate collection undermines such traditional archival values. The TCs may contain treasures, but on the whole they signify wasted time, wasted effort, and most of all wasted space. If the TCs qualify as waste—especially when seen in the context of Arman’s and Roth’s similar projects—we might ask to what end Warhol collected this media. Was it Warhol’s Rumpelstilskin-like desire to transform waste into something valuable? Did he wish to avoid creating waste by not throwing these items into the garbage, and thus avoid the parasitic recycling of a Weberman or an Arman? Or was Warhol’s goal subversive, to create waste by retaining this unmanageable bulk of ephemeral media?

Time Capsules as Historical Archive

Although Warhol gives us evidence in the Philosophy to consider the TCs an unfinished art project, he is equally prone to discuss them as a practice of historical archiving. In assembling the TCs, Warhol seems to have operated in a middle ground between a chance-based proceduralism and a more selective—and sometimes acquisitive—curation of the boxes’ contents. To what degree do the TCs hew to quasi-Cagean chance operations, as some critics have claimed (Golec 2)? And to what degree should they be viewed as a curated historical archive, with items selected for future importance as a relic or historical artefact?⁹ The balance matters in describing the TCs’ art and archival functions properly. Wrbican claims that the TCs fit with Warhol’s pop manifesto of “liking things” (687).¹⁰ But Warhol’s own attitude toward the contents of the TCs is equivocal at best, and often quite anxious and exasperated. Introducing the project in the Philosophy, Warhol writes, “I want to throw things right out the window as they’re handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month” (145). Here Warhol evinces a disdain for the retention of material objects, one that will continue throughout his discussion of storage and waste themes elsewhere in the Philosophy. Warhol’s comments suggest that the TCs were from their inception informed by hygienic regularity (“box-of-the-month”) and minimal curatorial agency, as material was “handed to” the artist. Former Warhol archivist and museum director John W. Smith follows this line of thinking, arguing that the TCs “functioned less as an edited attempt to capture and convey a specific historical moment, but rather as a memento hominem, a register of the everyday” (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules” 12). Pat Hackett, Warhol’s secretary and collaborating editor on POPism, the Philosophy, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, corroborates this account, while also suggesting that Warhol exercised more evaluative editing in the creation of the TCs. According to Hackett, after Warhol arrived at the office to begin work, he would open the “stacks of mail he got every day, deciding just which letters, invitations, gifts, and magazines to drop into a ‘Time Capsule,’ meaning one of the hundreds of 10” x 18” x 14” brown cardboard boxes, which would be sealed, dated, put into storage, and instantly replaced with an identical empty box” (Diaries xv). In these descriptions of the TCs, they rank just one level above the trash, as retainers of ephemera.

Once the project gained steam, however, Warhol grew emboldened to actively collect and archive objects of historical importance rather than passively accept unwanted matter. In the following passage from the Andy Warhol Diaries, the artist admits actively curating materials for the “box,” as he referred to the TC of the month: “Stevie [Rubell, manager of the nightclub Studio 54] gave me a Quaalude and Halston said, ‘For the box, for the box.’ Victor’s [sic] told him about the system. . . . Victor used to bring me some of Halston’s notes like from Jackie O., but then Halston realized he should start saving them himself” (186). Here we see Warhol soliciting and gladly accepting precious cargo of enhanced historical interest, such as Quaaludes—truly time capsules of the ’70s, in many senses of the phrase. Elsewhere, Warhol shows sticky-fingered acquisitiveness in seeking out items to fill the TCs: “When we sat down to dinner there were packages of Philip Morris cigarettes at each place—they were the sponsor—and when nobody was taking them I took them ‘for the box.’ There was one red one but I couldn’t get it” (82). One box begets another. Affects typical of consumer consumption inflect this passage: a sense of greed (acquiring what he doesn’t need), the thrill of a bargain (in this case gratis), and perhaps even a sense of pity for the unwanted commodity (“when nobody was taking them”). On the one hand, this acquisition of items for the TCs compromises the more procedural dimensions of the project (while also revealing that many of these “historical” items are indeed trivial). It also suggests, to a degree not yet recognized, that Warhol was in his art and publishing projects a variety of queer historian.¹¹

It is now taken for granted that Warhol is a crucial figure in post-war art, in ’60s urban countercultures, in ’70s fashion and celebrity cultures, and as a validating presence in the ’80s downtown inter-arts scene. Yet when considering the TCs as a form of historical archive, it is important to bear in mind how precarious queer histories were during the period, especially in the ’50s when Warhol first emerged as a graphic designer and illustrator. As flaming and camp as many of Warhol’s productions may seem, his homoerotic works were frequently censored.¹² Because queer histories were silenced and erased during Warhol’s era, the archive takes on crucial importance. Ann Cvetkovich has argued how a queer “archive fever” emerged in the twentieth century as an attempt to counteract the neglect and stigmatization of queer histories in normative journalism and publishing. The massive volume of Warhol’s TCs reflects such an imperative, to counteract the neglect and erasure of queer history in official records and archives. This line of thought is even more compelling when we consider that Warhol’s on-record antecedent for the TCs was not one of the heterosexual waste artists mentioned earlier, but another queer luminary, the writer Tennessee Williams. Warhol writes:

Tennessee Williams saves everything up in a trunk and then sends it out to a storage place. I started off myself with trunks and the odd pieces of furniture, but then I went around shopping for something better and now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year. I really hate nostalgia, though, so deep down I hope they all get lost and I never have to look at them again. That’s another conflict. I want to throw things right out the window as they’re handed to me, but instead I say thank you and drop them into the box-of-the-month. But my other outlook is that I really do want to save things so they can be used again someday. (Philosophy 145)

As Reva Wolf has suggested, Warhol was attracted to the literary sphere as a place where homosexual expression could find a better outlet than in the visual arts. Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Proust, Genet, Burroughs, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Williams, and Warhol’s friend Truman Capote were trailblazing queer representations in writing, while the fine arts were in the ’50s and early ’60s dominated by the macho theatrics of Abstract Expressionism, (7).¹³ Indeed, there is something of a literary quality to the TCs: the materials within the TCs are largely text-based, comprised of letters, magazines, books, and announcements. And as is the case with any archive, the TCs generate yet more text in the indexes and finding aids that flourish around them. The TCs’ archival nature also connects them to other literary projects of Warhol’s, such as a: a novel, the Philosophy, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, which were produced from archives of transcribed tape recordings and were influenced by Warhol’s desire to join the queer literary tradition of Burroughs, Capote, and Williams.¹⁴

In the passage from the Philosophy quoted above, Warhol’s dominant affect is anxiety about whether to conserve or abject the material object. Throughout Warhol’s discussion of the TCs in the Philosophy he frets about the status of these and other “things”—including his own art—and the possibility that these things would be considered “waste” or “junk.” Indeed, Warhol’s interest in selling the TCs seems at times to emerge from a need to rid himself of the psychological conflicts generated by his collections. In the passage below, Warhol introduces the TCs amid a broader discussion of possessions and storage, in which he tries to solve the conflicts generated by his collections of material things:

If you live in New York, your closet should be, at the very least, in New Jersey.…

Everything in your closet should have an expiration date on it the way milk and bread and magazines and newspapers do, and once something passes its expiration date, you should throw it out.

What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind. (144–45)

As in much of the Philosophy, Warhol here combines acute cultural criticism—the burdensome obsolescence that follows the excitement of a purchase—with an impossibly utopian and humorous solution: everything in your closet should have an expiration date. Warhol foregrounds his own “conflict” around waste, and indeed, the contradictions surrounding consumption and wasting occur at both the conceptual and personal levels (145). While Warhol’s complaint arises from the problem of too much stuff, the expiration date will only lead to further consumption and waste: the planned obsolescence that causes us to constantly discard and renew our purchases. Even in this conflicted and guilt-ridden meditation on discarding and recycling, shopping yet again enters the frame, in Warhol’s search for the right container for his TCs.

Although Warhol’s frustrations about waste are historically grounded in the exuberance of post-war consumption, he also gives voice in the passage to the fundamental tenets of psychological abjection. According to its theorist Julia Kristeva, abjection is a process that defines the boundaries of the subject who, after a moment of disorienting confusion, identifies that some disgusting matter is not a part of me. Kristeva identifies the “maternal abject” as a foundational source of this abjection.¹⁵ I don’t want psychobiography to be the omphalos of any reading of the TCs; the danger here is that Warhol might be viewed as damaged, or as a psychological case study, as he has sometime appeared in others’ commentaries on his collecting habits.¹⁶ But it is compelling to speculate on how Warhol’s performances of waste management might arise from early encounters with the maternal abject and an intimate relationship with his mother lasting well into middle age. In this sense, the menstrual connotations of Warhol’s name for the TCs, and the waste they index, as “box-of-the-month,” are difficult to overlook. In an earlier article on the Philosophy and Warhol’s tape recording practice, I analyzed the relationship between Warhol’s omnipresent technological prostheses, his mother’s colostomy bag, and scenes of waste management narrated in Warhol’s writing—all of which seem equally pertinent to the TCs (Schmidt). In A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon makes similar connections between anal erotic “screen memories” recounted in the Philosophy, Warhol’s early Pop paintings, and the influence of Warhol’s mother as a kind of tutelary genius who oversaw scenes of bodily debilitation, sexual fantasy, and archiving (namely, the making of childhood scrapbooks while Warhol suffered from St. Vitus Dance).¹⁷

If Warhol’s collecting and archiving practices are governed by the maternal—and Julia Warhola’s personal relics do indeed enter into the TCs, comprising their oldest artifacts, in TC 27 (Kramer 15)—there are economic aspects at play here as well. Warhol, born in Pittsburgh in 1928, was raised in a poor immigrant household during the depression, when austerity, reuse, and thrift were paramount values. Several years after Warhol moved to New York City, his mother followed, cohabitating with him from 1952 until 1971, when she returned to Pittsburgh just before her death. Not only did Warhola oversee the household economy while living with Warhol, she also participated in Warhol’s graphic art productions (Bourdon 58–60). Together, mother and son developed a household economy of thrift, efficiency, and permeability between the personal and the professional. Because of his sustained financial success, however, Warhol was able to consume at a level that far outstripped the thrifty values of his childhood. The TCs and Warhol’s other personal collections can thus be viewed as a result of colliding economic values: a Depression-era economy of reuse and conservation learned from his mother, and a post-war economy of consumerist appetite and disposability. Warhol’s “conflict” about the TCs and his other collections emerges out of the incommensurability of these two economies.

Warhol and Materialism

Warhol’s caginess about the TCs’ ontology—are they archive, disposal system, or art—points us toward a foundational engagement with waste and waste management underlying much of Warhol’s art and life practices. In the Philosophy, Warhol complains that his art making is in some sense a form of waste-making: “I’m still making some art, I’m still making junk for people to put in their spaces that I believe should be empty: i.e., I’m helping people waste their space when what I really want to do is help them empty their space” (144). This conflict between filling and emptying, between producing and clearing, can be seen in both Warhol’s art-making process and in his subject matter. The artist’s most recognizable idiom, his gridded silkscreen canvases, begins with the collection of mass-media detritus, sometimes literally collected from the garbage. Collage artist Ray Johnson recalls that he and Warhol found a box of discarded newspaper clippings on a New York City street, which they intended to share as a source for artworks. Yet after Warhol availed himself of the box, there was little interesting material remaining for Johnson to plumb (365 Takes 34). Warhol excavated these scraps of media ephemera, transferring them to canvases that became memento mori of celebrity loss and ruination. Not unlike Weberman’s excavations of Bob Dylan and Roy Cohn’s garbage, Warhol in his art similarly brings forward the unsavory aspects of celebrity consumption: the waste of Hollywood machinery, and the resulting damage to its subjects. Warhol’s engagement with the star system—both that of Hollywood and his own queer counter-system of Factory superstars—reveals how in late consumer capitalism humans themselves are treated as commodities, taken up by the culture industry and then disposed of when their youth, beauty, and relevance pass. Indeed, the inevitable decay of celebrity is implied in Warhol’s most famous maxim, “Everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” which gestures not only toward the ubiquity of fame, but its half-life. Meanwhile, with the Oxidation paintings (or Piss Paintings), Warhol simultaneously literalized and abstracted waste. The meaning of the enterprise hinges on the use of waste as a material, yet the waste is abstracted, revealed only in the paratextual apparatus surrounding the work. From the gridded boxes of the silkscreen paintings to the archive of screen tests to the exhaustively preserved audio recordings, which formed the basis of several books, it may be productive to consider all of Warhol’s art productions as forms of waste management. As critical biographer Wayne Koestenbaum has suggested, Warhol’s mantra might be: depict waste, but contain it—by placing it (repeatedly, compulsively) inside a series of rectangles: the grid, the box, the film frame, the cassette.

Besides Warhol’s own personal fraught relationship with waste, larger cultural shifts underlie Warhol’s development of a waste management aesthetic. Waste became highly valorized in the 1970s with the prominent rise of the environmental movement. In his uncanny way of cultural perception, Warhol incorporates ecological metaphors into his own aesthetic practice. A favorite Warhol aphorism imagines this ecological body as actualized on the Pop body, which according to Warhol, “took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside” (POPism 3). The ecological version of this pop body appears in the Philosophy, which was published in the middle of the ’70s:

I think about people eating and going to the bathroom all the time, and I wonder why they don’t have a tube up their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it back into their mouth, regenerating it, and then they’d never have to think about buying food or eating it. And they wouldn’t even have to see it—it wouldn’t even be dirty. It they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way back in. Pink. (146)

This metaphor more than succeeds as John Waters–style gross-out. But it can also be read as an allegory for Warhol’s entire aesthetic practice as a form of recycling, with a color overlay, as Koestenbaum suggests (29). It is also an image of ecology in the purest sense of the term: a system consuming its own waste products.

While Warhol avoided and regretted waste as much as any US subject—perhaps more so, because of his outsized shopping habits—he was also drawn to waste for its affective potential. Elsewhere in the Philosophy, Warhol notes, “I always like to work with leftovers, doing the leftover things. Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good. I always thought it had the potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers” (93). In pointing to an error enjoyed against the grain, Warhol describes to an almost perfect degree the camp aesthetic, which Susan Sontag in “Notes on Camp” describes as an instance of failed seriousness enjoyed against the maker’s original intentions. While Sontag argues that camp is associated with a gay aesthetic tradition, Andrew Ross has argued for a more materialist analysis of camp as a mode of economic critique. Ross claims that camp occurs when “history’s waste matter” is taken up and recuperated in ways different from their original use values, and that in particular, camp emerges when modes of production are recognized as endangered or “outmoded” (320).¹⁸ If the TCs are camp, it is not in the homosexual sense of performative parody elaborated by Sontag and others, but in this more materialist sense elaborated by Ross. The TCs recuperate “history’s waste matter” in a very material sense indeed. In fact, they seem to index the outmodedness of materiality itself in an era of increasing dematerialization.

In The Condition of Post-Modernity, David Harvey identifies the year 1973 as the date when the economic paradigm in the US decisively shifted from a Fordist economy of production to postmodern forms of flexible accumulation and labor, which according to Harvey produced the superstructural condition of “postmodernity.”¹⁹ It is curious that at the precise moment when finance should grow more dematerialized and abstract, Warhol would begin to amass boxes of very concrete, material things, resistant to valuation and marketability. While Warhol himself would not have been attuned to economic dematerialization per se, he would likely have been aware of discourse surrounding the “dematerialization of the art object,” which Lucy Lippard describes in her Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Lippard does not herself tie the growth of conceptual art to financial dematerialization, and in some ways posits the opposite superstructural relationship. Borrowing the rhetoric of conceptual artists like Sol Lewitt, Lippard argues that conceptual art emerged in order to resist the marketing and commodification that attended heroic action paintings. (Oscar Masotta advances a similar argument directed at pop art in his manifesto, “After Pop, We Dematerialize,” addressing the efflorescence of the happening in Argentina.) In a “Postface” to Six Years, however, Lippard admits that the attempt to dematerialize the art object, as a strategy to foil commodification, was a failure; the documentation surrounding conceptual art sold just as easily as a painting.²⁰

More recently, Joshua Simon has argued that this discourse about aesthetic dematerialization helps us see more clearly a neomaterialist movement in post-war art, in the sense of being both more material (concrete) and more aware and responsive to materialist conditions behind the artist’s work. Although it would be difficult to ascribe any conscious dialectical materialism to Warhol, the TCs do bear witness to the increasing bureaucratization of Warhol’s work and point as well to the economic forces underpinning his art production. Increasingly in the’70s, and throughout the remainder of his career, Warhol tacked with increasing fluidity between traditionally material art objects and more dematerialized forms of media dissemination. With the TCs, Warhol made his most materially excessive project also his most conceptual—one that is philosophical, procedural, and marks the networks of media circulation that constellate around one notable personage: himself.²¹ Rather than emptying boxes so as to activate the space of the gallery, as minimalist sculptors did, Warhol filled boxes with personal detritus and placed them in the non-space of off-site storage. Warhol continued to produce paintings until the end of his life, but from the 1970s onward, his productions ramified into more easily disseminated, increasingly dematerialized forms: films, books, magazines, advertising, and what he generally terms “business art.” In the Philosophy, Warhol writes, “business is the step that comes after art” and being “good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” (90). As the economy of New York City was shifting from an industrial to a post-industrial finance economy, Warhol’s workspace was casually rechristened from the famous “Factory” to the “office” (Bockris 377). And as part of his business art aesthetic, Warhol became increasingly interested in ways to market his “aura,” even as this dematerialization puzzled him. Warhol writes, “Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura.’ They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, ‘We want your aura.’ I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for it, I should try to figure out what it is” (Philosophy 77). The TCs—while not themselves successfully marketed—can be seen as an attempt to extend this aura over the most ordinary of materials.

Warhol’s dual interest in the material and the dematerial also informs his canny analyses of financial value. According to the “Economics” chapter of the Philosophy, Warhol was a believer not in credit or checks but in “cash”—to the degree that he made silkscreened paintings of dollar bills, a witty play on the old counterfeiter’s ruse of “printing money.” Money is a fitting Warhol subject because it is material as well as abstract, an arbitrary representation of exchange value. (In this sense, it has much in common with Warhol’s art, which comments on commodity culture even as it is itself commodified.) While Warhol kept stacks of money underneath his mattress—a testament to his continued investment in material value—the government dissolved even the alibi of a correspondence between dollars and real-world value when Nixon decisively lifted the dollar off of the gold standard in 1973. The media effect of this action was to render the gridded rows of gold bullion in Fort Knox even more of an obsolete symbol; no longer was there any pretense of exchanging dollars for their equivalent in gold. It is tempting to imagine the gridded boxes of the TCs as an imitation of the now obsolete gold reserves: a material collection backing the pop imagery Warhol was printing and circulating in the marketplace.

Archive of Past, Present, and Future

A factory produces commodities. An office, in developing less tangible forms of value, produces a paper trail of communications, correspondence, and contracts that need organization and storage—in short, a bureaucracy. The more important the office, the more essential and exhaustive the archive. Warhol began tape recording—perhaps his first important archival work—in 1964, and in this activity he was not alone. As the entire world would come to learn in 1974, President Richard Nixon was maintaining an extensive and incriminating archive of tape recordings during the same period. While Nixon was unlikely to have inspired Warhol’s magnetic tape archive, he was indirectly responsible for another of the artist’s archival projects. Warhol was convinced that his annual tax audits, beginning in 1972, were born from Nixon’s vengeance for a campaign poster Warhol created for his rival George McGovern (Bockris 358). One result of these IRS audits was that Warhol kept a more robust archive of his expenses, either calling his editorial assistant Pat Hackett to provide an oral account or creating tape recordings to be redacted by her with daily “expense reports” of his activities. After Warhol’s death, the “leftovers” of this archive were recycled into the gossip-filled Andy Warhol Diaries, one of several book projects that function as “waste books” of pensées, aphorisms, and anecdotes, including the Philosophy and POPism.

In a perverse way, the use of Nixon’s archives to expose and impeach the president may have affected Warhol’s sense of the archive as a significant cultural form, and amplified the artist’s sense that important figures maintain archives, while hiding them for fear of what secrets and illicit activity they may reveal.²² A letter sent to Warhol before he inaugurated the TCs (which is now, aptly enough, contained within them) may also have contributed to his understanding that even everyday materials passing through his hands could accrue value. Howard B. Gotlieb, Chief of Special Collections at Boston University’s library, wrote to Warhol in 1970 asking him to store his archives at the university. (The letter was Gotlieb’s second request to Warhol; the first request apparently went unanswered.) Gotlieb writes, “We are most desirous of establishing the Andy Warhol Collection at this University in this city, and we seek the honor of associating you with Boston University in this manner… it is our feeling that future scholars will be studying your life and work. It is important that your manuscripts, papers, and correspondence be carefully preserved under optimum archival conditions” (TC 61). It takes no great stretch to imagine that this solicitation influenced the development of the TCs. Indeed, why would the secretive Warhol, who frequently fibbed to interviewers about his own birthplace, wish to see his papers and artifacts made accessible within the academy—especially when they could remain firmly within Warhol’s own control?²³

It isn’t secrecy per se that Warhol achieves with the TCs. As Derrida reminds us, the archive needs a putative public to be constituted as an archive (“no archive without outside,” he writes [11]). But restriction and obfuscation of the TCs’ interiors is inevitable, despite the best intentions of administrators to allow access. As erstwhile director of the Warhol Archives Study Center, John W. Smith writes, “The Warhol Museum is an institution committed to research and open access and has worked to make the contents of the inventoried Time Capsules available to all levels of researchers and scholars” (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules” 12). Although the TCs are nominally available for scholarly research, use of them is severely restricted. Only a few select researchers are granted any access at all, and only then for a maximum of one week a year. When I visited the Archives Study Center at the Warhol Museum in January 2014, former Chief Archivist Matt Wrbican allowed me three and a half days to consult the TCs’ contents (reduced from four days by a staff meeting). Most of this research was limited to files containing photocopies of the first ninety boxes opened. Only after much negotiation and cajoling was I allowed to view an actual TC—and only one. (Initially, I was encouraged to look at previously unopened boxes that were believed to contain similar contents but which were in the end judged by the Warhol Foundation not to qualify as TCs, for unknown reasons.) On my last day in the museum, I managed to view the interior of TC 106; however, only the assistant archivist, wearing gloves, could handle its contents. (By contrast, when I reviewed an early sketchbook of Warhol’s travels in Asia, housed within another department in the museum, I was allowed to manipulate the pages with my own hands, unmonitored.) While I was allowed to take pictures of the TC’s contents, when I photographed a card explaining that an item had been removed to another institutional location, I was asked to delete the photograph from my camera. Gaining a sense of the entire collection is no easier. The Archives Study Center sells to potential researchers a partial catalog of the first 90 TCs opened, in the form of a Microsoft Word document. Catalogs of the other 520 TCs exist only in an internal museum database, which external researchers are not allowed to access, even on the premises. The Archives Study Center hopes that a full digital scanning and indexing of the TCs will occur, dependent on external grant funding. Whether this database will be accessible to those outside the Archives Study Center is unknown.

Initiatives to support the cataloguing and digitizing of the TCs return us again to their split function as art and archive. While grants to catalog the TCs presumably argue for the boxes’ potential usefulness to scholars, the logic of housing them intact, in a highly restricted environment at the Warhol Museum (rather than at a more accessible library devoted to such a purpose) rests on their putative art integrity. Digitizing the TCs may allow them to be accessed by more scholars. Another putative advantage is that this digitization may protect the TCs from further disturbance by researchers (a function the photocopies currently fulfill). However this priority—maintaining the physical integrity of the TCs in their original form—has been undone in some instances by the Archives Study Center itself. In my research at the Warhol Museum, I was able to see that in at least one case, the original pell-mell organization of a TC had been compromised by the introduction of standard acid-free archive file folders to organize its contents. Additionally, in examining both the photocopied files and the original TC 106, I saw evidence that some non-perishable materials had been removed from their original location in a TC to be archived elsewhere in the Archives Study Center. (To prevent infestation of the entire collection, some highly perishable materials have been removed entirely, including numerous boxes of cookies sent to Warhol by his Pittsburgh relatives.)

In all these instances, a normative logic of the archive has been imposed on Warhol’s more contingent assembly of the TCs. Some items are judged to belong with others; some items are deemed more valuable; and some items are disposed of entirely, to prevent the degradation of the collection. (Absent Warhol’s word on the matter, who is to say that this degradation would not be a welcome part of the project’s design? Warhol loved accidents and unexpected outcomes.) As a result, Warhol’s original logic, or illogic, of assemblage is compromised, or at least treated inconsistently. While Warhol’s detritus is on the whole accorded a quasi-sacred value as relic, the reliquary itself is being slowly renovated.²⁴ Rather in the manner of the half-completed Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, original plans for constructing a catalog of the archives have been outstripped and thwarted by advances in technology. An ad hoc Microsoft Word document has been superseded by a digital database, which may in turn be superseded by some more thorough digital imaging of the entire TCs. Each digital advance produces confusion and abandonment of the previous form. It is also unclear how the digitization of the archive will alter the original experience of opening and reading a TC. The evolution of digital archiving media will make the TCs more available to scholarly examination, but in a form entirely different from the one Warhol imagined. The TCs will be rendered not as a single monumental accumulation, crushing in its disorder, but as a dispersion of atomized representations of individual items within various boxes. Here again, as in so much of Warhol’s work, a tension arises between the work’s material form and its dematerialization into different media. In this instance, however, the dissemination has not determined or even influenced by Warhol’s hand.

I could end this essay by narrating my examination of TC 106 and describing its contents: piles of correspondence; photographs of Warhol at a book signing for the Philosophy; stacks of Interview magazines; and at the very bottom of the box, a hokey book of erotica unlikely to have aroused the artist. Yet this single shallow foray into the TCs cannot adequately describe the present of the archive in its totality, its massive volume secreted behind institutional restrictions. (Of the approximately 610 TCs supposedly extant, I saw the existence of only 97 or so boxes in the Archives Study Center; the rest were exiled to deep storage elsewhere in the museum.) I had selected TC 106 for review because it contained items related to the Philosophy, a book I knew well. However, very few items in the box were legible to me in a significant way. One item that was—a postcard announcement inviting Warhol to a show by Joe Brainard at the Fischbach Gallery—was meaningful only because of my familiarity with Brainard’s work, and because I had seen other versions of this postcard in the archives of the poets James Schuyler and John Ashbery. Innumerable other scraps of paper were for all purposes illegible and failed to register any meaning in the present whatsoever.

The vast and sublime volume of the TCs is one aspect of the project’s unknowability. Yet there is added to this the obliterating advance of time itself, which renders the past mute and further unknowable. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously describes an “Angel of History” overseeing a growing field of waste and ruin. The larger frustrations of the TCs—to Warhol and to us—mirror the frustrations we must confront when reading any history, which is legible only to the degree to which it resonates in the present. As Benjamin writes, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (255). It is possible to summon the past of the TCs using Warhol’s and his associates’ descriptions of the project. The future of the TCs will likely be digital: an archive for scholars and viewers to consult without disturbing the original boxes’ contents or disorder. But the present of the TCs is a mystery, with the boxes’ vast contents unavailable as research and indescribable as art. When will the present of the TCs arrive? Or will the queer meanings of Warhol’s materials become irretrievable before the administrators allow us access?

Footnotes

1. Wrbican puts the number at 610 (“Time Capsule 51”); John W. Smith, at 612 (“Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules,” 11).

2. Later in the Diaries, Warhol returns to the notion of selling them, suggesting that he saw no incompatibility between the archival and market aspects of the project. In the entry for Tuesday, September 30, 1986, not long before Warhol’s death, he notes: “Took a few time capsule boxes to the office. They are fun—when you go through them there’s things you really don’t want to give up. Some day I’ll sell them for $4000 or $5000 a piece. I used to think $100, but now I think that’s my new price” (762). Note the tension here between retention (“things you really don’t want to give up”) and dispersal into the market.

3. Only Paul Thek, in his 1965 Meat Piece with Brillo Box, took up the challenge to investigate their interiors. Thek set Warhol’s box on its side, opened its bottom, and inserted one of his own wax meat sculptures inside of it—a provocative transgression of Warholian vacuity. It should also be noted that the Brillo Soap Pad boxes exist alongside many less famous box series: Campbell’s Tomato Juice, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Del Monte Peach Halves, Mott’s Apple Juice, Brillo Boxes (3¢ Off), and Campbell’s Soup Box. (Frei and Printz 53–101).

4. The Brillo Box project prompted Arthur Danto to declare Warhol “the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced” (459).

5. The time capsule depends on an interval of enclosure and later disclosure. However, the terms of this interval are open to debate: what is the proper interval for a time capsules to be closed? When is opening it too soon? And who is the right audience to open the time capsule?

6. A little-known photograph by Walter Steding shows Georgia O’Keefe visiting Warhol’s Factory at 860 Broadway, sitting in a conference room with one of Arman’s assemblage sculptures looming behind her.

7. Wrbican, Personal Interview.

8. Benjamin Buchloh asked Warhol point blank whether he was aware of Arman’s work in the early 1960s, when he began using serial repetition similar to Arman’s readymade accumulations. Warhol mostly evaded the question: “No, well, I didn’t think that way. I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was looking for a thing” (“An Interview” 323).

9. In a 1963 interview with Rugh Hirschman, Warhol said, “I would grant him [Cage], you know, a lot on purely experimental intellectual ‘freeing the other artists’ basis” (Hirschman 42).

10. In this Wrbican follows Flatley’s argument in “Like: Liking and Collectivity,” a discussion that links Warhol’s collections and his queerness. Flatley suggests that Warhol’s play with “likeness”—assembling objects that are like one another, substituting one object or person for another like person—is a queer activity not because its attraction to like things mirrors same-sex object choice, but because it unites desire (liking) and identification (likeness), contra Freud’s claims that the two must claim opposite gender positions. Flatley writes, “Warhol’s practice has its own utopian impulse; it is an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms could find a home” (72).

11. Daniel Rosenfeld notes that “so much of [Warhol’s] work seems tied to the social fabric that he helped to define, and chronicled obsessively” (qtd. in Binstock 6). While Warhol’s portraits, films, books, and inter/view magazines are the most obviously public aspects of this chronicling, the TCs also continue it—to wit, in Warhol’s collecting every front page of the New York Post in TC 232 (Colacello 294).

12. In his early years in New York City, Warhol attempted to exhibit a series of drawings of fey male nudes at the Tanager Gallery. Warhol’s erstwhile friend and former classmate, Philip Pearlstein recalls, “He submitted a group of boys kissing boys which the other members of the gallery hated and refused to show” (qtd. in Lobel 44). Even after Warhol began to enjoy enormous success and fame, he recalls resistance to his sexualized subject matter. In 1977, Warhol attempted to mount a show of male nudes in Venice. He recalls, “Doug’s assistant, Hilary, told me the workers were surprised when they saw that my paintings were closeups of naked bodies and I guess they didn’t think that was good art because they started to make jokes and compare the cocks to their own and they didn’t do much work.…If Italians laugh at you and lose respect, you can’t get any work out of them” (Diaries 68).

13. Emilio de Antonio suggested that even later, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were lovers, distanced themselves from Warhol because he was “too swish” (POPism 12–13).

14. Naked Lunch was reputed to be one of Warhol’s favorite books; Warhol reportedly suckled at the novel, reading it “at least forty times” according to Bockris (244). The book was equally influential on Warhol’s writing and life practices: “I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.… I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a sandwich, like that scene in the restaurant in Naked Lunch” (Swenson 18).

15. See Powers of Horror.

16. Herring compiles an archive of such pathologizations in his discussion of Warhol.

17. In the passage in question, Warhol writes: “My mother would read to me in her thick Czechoslovakian accent as best she could and I would always say, ‘Thanks, Mom,’ after she finished with Dick Tracy, even if I hadn’t understood a word. She’d give me a Hershey Bar every time I finished a page in my coloring book” (Philosophy 22).

18. For example, Ross shows how a camp movie like All About Eve emerged from concerns with the obsolescence of studio-era film production, represented in the film via a self-reflexive anxiety about female desirability and the eclipse of Broadway theater by film (a screen for the studio’s obsolescence in the face of television).

19. In this book, Harvey also notes the relationship between the economic base and art production extends to the hyper-valuation of art itself: “Indeed it can be argued that the growth of the art market…and the strong commercialization of cultural production since around the 1970s have a lot to do with the search to find alternative means to store value under conditions where the usual money forms were deficient” (298).

20. There has been interesting work that connects conceptual art to information and systems theory, by Eve Meltzer in particular. However, further discussion about the relationship between economic and artistic dematerialization ought to take place.

21. While clearly material in the sense of being concrete, the TCs also have the potential to reveal, to the patient researcher, the network of contracts, commissions, and support that led to the creation of other artworks and commodities (e.g., I was able to peruse the planning and marketing correspondence for The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in the TCs).

22. In Bourdon’s biography of Warhol, Jed Johnson recalls that the one collection Warhol did send to the trash was—ironically enough—the most obviously valuable and personal: the graphic illustrations that predated his emergence as a fine artist in the early ’60s. Johnson also notes that Warhol carefully instructed him to leave these discarded artworks in other person’s trash cans, so as to not to be subject to garbologists like Weberman (348). Additionally, Warhol’s audio recordings led to legal problems much as Nixon’s did. The Diaries produced from audio recordings resulted in a libel lawsuit from Bianca Jagger that has caused the Warhol Foundation to be highly restrictive in using the tapes for research (Sebag-Montefiore).

23. Warhol’s disregard for the prestige of the University is evident in his decision, in the mid-1960s, to send actor Allen Midgette as a stand-in for himself on the college lecture circuit (POPism 247–48).

24. Aptly enough, considering their reliquary aspects, each opening of the box is treated ceremonially. The process is tape recorded, and the names of the participants present are recorded in the catalog. (Wrbican, Personal Interview.)

Works Cited

• Aaronson, Deborah, ed. Andy Warhol 365 Takes. New York: Abrams, 2004. Print.
• Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson, eds. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Print.
• “The Andy Warhol Museum Archives.” Archives of American Art Journal 33.4 (1993): 32. Print.
• Angell, Callie. Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1. New York: Abrams, 2006. Print.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253–264. Print.
• Berg, Gretchen. “Andy Warhol: My True Story.” Interview with Andy Warhol. Goldsmith. 85-96.
• Binstock, Jonathan, ed. Andy Warhol: Social Observer. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2000. Print.
• Bockris, Victor. Warhol: The Biography. New York: De Capo, 2003. Print.
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