Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
reading of them, but there is no reason I know of to think that Warhol was particularly
interested in the question “What is art?” to which Danto believes his
work provides an answer. Some artists of the mid-1960s were interested in such
theoretical issues—Robert Morris and Joseph Kosuth come to mind—but
Warhol was not among them. Or, rather, what remarks he made on the matter
lead in the other direction, toward a questioning of the difference between art
and “real things” so important to the philosopher.
What actually were the appearances Warhol offered the visitor to the Stable
Gallery? There were stacks of plywood boxes, with designs taken from supermarket
packing cartons indicating various household items. These things drew,
first of all, on the basic Pop art iconography of consumer items. They had ancestors
in Oldenburg’s 1961 exhibition, The Store, which displayed plaster versions
of various goods, mostly edible ones, in a mock bodega and, more directly, in
Jasper Johns’s bronze Ale Cans of 1960. They clearly followed in Warhol’s oeuvre
from his Campbell’s soup can paintings and other pictures of packagings, like
Coke bottles. In fact, this was the origin of Brillo Boxes, as Warhol once
explained:
I did all the [Campbell’s soup] cans on a row on a canvas, and then I
got a box made to do them on a box, and then it looked funny because
it didn’t look real . . . I did the cans on the box, but it came out looking
funny. I had the boxes already made up. They were brown and looked
just like boxes, so I thought it would be so great just to do an ordinary
box. 10
Why did the cans look “funny” and not “real” on a box, while they (apparently)
looked “real” enough silk-screened singly or in grids on canvas? It is certainly
not trompe l’oeil similitude that is at issue here. A key lies in the fact that the
subject in all the examples of Warhol’s art I have mentioned—and many more
besides—is not an actual product or substance but its packaging or, specifically,
its label. As Lawrence Alloway observed about Pop art more generally, “it is,
essentially, an art about signs and sign-systems.” 11 In the case of the Campbell’s
soup can box, Warhol’s original idea produced a discord between the box shape
and the image of a cylindrical can, a funniness that does not arise with the application
of designs from actual cartons to boxlike structures. 12 We can now see also
why the visible difference from storeroom reality is important: both the difference
in material and the inferred emptiness of Warhol’s boxes play roles in
emphasizing their character as 3-D signs.
10 Glenn O’Brien, interview with Andy Warhol, High Times 24 (1977), p. 34.
11 Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York, 1974), p. 7.
12 See the photograph in Kynaston McShine (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1989), p. 197, pl. 181.
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