Thirty years ago, Pop-Art's bad boy, Andy Warhol, consigned 300,000 of his everyday possessions to sealed cardboard boxes. Now, as the final boxes are opened for the first time, what do they tell us about the man who turned Campbell's soup tins into art?
"...Because this, as a hand-scrawled label announces, is TC 528. It's the last-but-one of 610 mystery parcels or Time Capsules that Andy Warhol sealed up over the course of the last 13 years of his life. They contain hundreds of thousands of objects, artefacts as the curators know them - a Work of Art, according to Warhol...Or rubbish, as you and I would doubtless consider them. Because the 608 Time Capsules that have already divulged their contents and are in the process of being catalogued and preserved by The Warhol's staff include everything from flyers from galleries, junk-mail, fan-letters, gallery-invitation cards, unopened letters, solicitations for work, freebie LPs, a lump of concrete, eccentric pornographic assemblages by Warhol's friends and associates, thousands of used postage stamps that the artist tore from envelopes, packets of sweets and - inevitably - unopened Campbell's soup tins, by now rotting and hard to preserve....And then, in the really unsavoury corner, toenail clippings, dead ants, a mummified foot and used condoms. But there are also strips of photo booth photographs that Warhol took to create his celebrated portraits and some original completed pieces by him that, for whatever reason, he chose not to exhibit."
Reflection
There is something up front about Warhol's Time capsules as he doesn't try to edit himself, instead he scoops all the layers of his personality in to boxes for other people to discuss many years on. What is interesting about using time capsules is that each box has a narrative within it, all the objects converge to reflect a meaning, a time capsule is intimate and generally a edited box of highlights of your life up to the point of burial. By submitting several boxes,a group narrative comes to the surface alongside mini tangential story lines from lone boxes. Although I find the boxes interesting, it feels strange to my process of working that the artist didn't edit the contents of the box down further, by throwing lots of items in haphazardly, he artist is showing that he doesn't care about the individual nature of each box, he isn't taking the time to think about how the objects relate to each other. He is simply boxing up his life to be reopened and examined on a later date, this action is more about his ego then of anything else.
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