I went to MOMA in NYC last summer. One of their noted exhibits was a comprehensive retrospective of Andy Warhol's work. One in particular left an impression- The Brillo Box. After I left the museum, and even weeks from seeing the installation, moments from experiencing it still haunt me.
The history of Modernism is a history of the dismantling of the concept of art, which had been evolving for over half a millennium. Art need not to be beautiful, it need not to have a pictorial subject, need not to deploy its forms in two-dimesnional space, or it need not to be a product of an artist’s skill or magical touch. All these “subtractions” were actualized over decades, opening up for a liberalized view of art-making and many modes of "liberations" that transpired in the 1960s. As with so many of the upheavals in this time, the avant-garde art movements were interested in obliterating social boundaries- in the case of Pop Art, the boundaries between high art and low art. The Pop artists reproduced as high art what everybody knew- the familiar things of the ordinary person’s world- famous people’s portraits, soup cans, comic strips, shipping cartons, and so forth. Nowhere has such themes been dramatically exemplified than in Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, where not only has art and popular taste been closely intertwined, a good deal less obvious philosophical revolution also transpired.
In April 21, 1964, Warhol had his second show at the Stable Gallery, which consisted entirely of grocery carton sculptures. He had appropriated preexisting imagery of commercial products and advertising design, but here he extended his principle of repetition into three dimensions. He created his grocery-carton sculptures in several stages, first by hiring carpenters to construct hundreds of wooden boxes, all built to the exact dimensions of their cardboard counterparts- the Brillo soap pad containers along with Mott’s apple juice, Kellogg’s cornflakes, and Heinz ketchup, among many others. The boxes were then silk-screened on all five sides (except the bottom), reproducing original graphic designs. The finished sculptures were such accurate facsimiles that they appeared almost indistinguishable from their cardboard prototypes.
With astonishing boldness, Warhol crammed both the front and back rooms of the gallery with hundreds of the brand name cartons, making the place resemble a grocery distributor’s warehouse. About four hundred boxes were regimented in rows on the floor or casually stacked in tiers several feet high, making it awkward for spectators to pass through the crowded exhibition. The installation also implied that collectors could buy as many boxes, or units, as desired and stack them as randomly or as methodologically as they wished. The boxes generated a new wave of controversy and added a layer of notoriety to Warhol’s representation. In addition, albeit the considerable attention that the show attracted, Warhol’s boxes were by no means a commercial success.
But it was the Brillo Boxes that accrued sensationalism to the show when an abstract expressionist painter, James Harvey, surfaced to claim credit for having designed the prototype of the Brillo® carton in 1961. He was chagrined to discover that one of his product designs, which he himself did not take seriously as art, had been turned into a Pop icon, bringing greater fame to Warhol. Eventually, the Brillo Box furor reached Canada when in early 1995, Toronto art dealer Jerrold Morris, who had scheduled to exhibit Warhol’s work, ran into difficulty when he attempted to import eighty of the artist’s Brillo Boxes(Bourdon, 1989) . Canadian law permitted only “original sculpture” to be imported duty-free, and that Canada’s custom officials claimed the pieces were not art but merhcanidise, and therefore subject to a twenty percent duty. The final arbiter on the matter, Dr. Charles Comfort, director of the National Gallery of Canada, further declared that Warhol’s boxes were also not original works of art. While Morris later charged the government with making Canada “the laughing stock of the art world,” the matter also paved the way for more complex questions, at the most philosophical level, of how is it that we can distinguish an artwork from a mere object when the two are perceptually identical.
