Free Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto

that was what was great about America. And after all, he grew up in squalor, in a depressed neighborhood in Pittsburgh. He once said that the house he grew up in “was the worst place I have ever been in my life” (Watson, 5). The “little boxes” of Daly City, California, would have been palaces in comparison to the slum he knew as a child in Pittsburgh. The warm, tasty, nourishing food from the supermarkets was a daily treat.Against the grinding poverty in which he grew up, the storm doors and refrigerators he painted were warmth and satisfaction embodied, just as blankets and fat were the antidotes to cold and hunger in the symbolic system of Josef Beuys. “Ticky-tacky,” applied to the little boxes by those protesting the spiritual poverty of suburban life, betrayed the fact that those who used the expression had lost sight of the fundamental needs that the victims of hunger and cold would give their lives for. “I adore America,” Warhol once said, “and these are some comments on it. My
Storm Door
, 1960, is a statement of the harsh impersonal products and brash material objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us” (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 458). And in an interview on Pop art, he said: “The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second—comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all” (
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 461). But who before the Pop artist would have thought to make sculptures out of grocery boxes?
    In any case, now that we understand why the boxes had to be made of wood joined together by cabinetmakers, let’s return to the factory-like way in which the grocery boxes were made. Once the boxes were delivered, Andy and his assistants began the “arduous task of taping the floors with rolls of brown paper andsetting out each box in a grid-like pattern of eight rows lengthwise.” In fact, the Factory was being decorated in a way that made it as unlike a manufactory as can be imagined. Walls and ceilings were being covered with silver foil or silver paint by Billy Linich, a downtown bohemian who was to play a decisive role in determining the demographics in what came to be referred to as the Silver Factory, with Linich as a kind of factotum and supervisor. Meanwhile, he was pressed into service, along with Malanga, in painting the boxes in white or brown Liquitex, to match the colors of the original cardboard cartons. Malanga, a poet, had been hired early to help Andy make silk-screened paintings at the abandoned Hook and Ladder that had served as a temporary studio.
    Meanwhile, the original cartons were flattened out, and silk-screen stencils were made of them by an expert. Once the underpaint had dried, Warhol and Malanga began silk-screening the painted boxes, ultimately producing replicas of what the eye would see as containers for juice or canned food or, in the most memorable of the boxes, Brillo pads. The “Factory workers” would move from box to box, completing perhaps two sides of a given sort of box in a day. The bottom was left blank, and unsigned. Malanga says that the grocery boxes were “literally three-dimensional photographs of the original products,” which explains why they so looked like the originals. Of course, screens get clogged, and the paint gets splashed or dripped. But Andy never discarded anything. For Warhol, these “blemishes” werepart of the process. So the Factory’s boxes would not have been tolerated in a genuine factory, which would exercise quality control. They look mechanical—in a way, and from a certain distance. For Warhol, the accidents were part of the