Today I was thinking, "some famous artist kept cardboard boxes taped up and dated as 'time capsules'...who was that?" So I searched Google for "time capsule cardboard box" and found this site (very fun): Andy Warhol's Time Capsules
...and an article to make sense of it first:
Warhol’s Time Machine
The artist’s 612 cardboard boxes of junk offer a gateway to the past, the present, and maybe even the future.
By Karrie Jacobs
Posted October 17, 2005
Excerpts:
"
It is in fact Warhol who drew me to Pittsburgh. I was lured here by a Web site launched in May by the Andy Warhol Museum. The site (www.warhol.org/tc21) is itself a form of cultural time travel; it makes the contents of one of Warhol’s Time Capsules accessible to Internet users. Largely unknown until the artist’s death in 1987, the Time Capsules were the 612 cardboard boxes that he filled with the stuff that he accumulated—the by-products of art, life, and fame. Warhol used to keep a box by his desk and toss things in: correspondence, receipts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and gifts. Some of the things were so minor that anyone else would have simply thrown them away. One capsule, archivist Matthew Wrbican tells me, contained hunks of insect-infested pizza dough. Why? No one knows. Some things were so significant—letters from Mick Jagger, a paint palette used by Salvador Dalí—that anyone else would have put them carefully away, but Warhol dropped his overflow in cardboard boxes that were each taped shut, dated, and placed in storage by an assistant.
"
....
In The Shock of the New, art critic Robert Hughes argued that the one idea Warhol introduced into the art world was the power of repetition. But it was more than that. To me the most potent thing Warhol did was transform the everyday—the soup can, the receipt, the newspaper photo—into the momentous. It wasn’t just the idea that commercial images have aesthetic value, or that we’ll all be famous for 15 minutes, or that art has been transformed by the age of mechanical reproduction, but that there is limitless elegance and intrigue to be teased out of the minutiae of daily existence.
Warhol trailblazed a twenty-first-century way of seeing, using primitive twentieth-century tools: the lithograph, the photo booth, the Polaroid camera, the movie camera, the cardboard box. The Time Capsules, jammed full of the things that inspired Warhol, that he was obsessed with, can be read as predigital blogs. And the way he lived—immersed in a stew of public and private, art and life—is how more and more people routinely live today. Imagine if Warhol had had a camera-phone or a cable modem or his own Web site.
"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
i have spent a lot of time at the warhol in pittsburgh, where all these time capsules are. they are quite cool - but really banal when you think about it. just average everyday things (although aesthetically pleasingly put together of course), like magazine clippings and the kind of everyday shit that shows up in your mailbox, in your purse or your dining room table. kind of interesting to think about the sort of items we fetishize as valuable or interesting from the past, but we don't in the present, let alone what those would mean to another culture... or planet! could be fun to create some sort of interactive room with various time capsules that you get to open.
Post a Comment