Mockery of the Fitness of Things

A response to Raid the Icebox, an exhibition selected by Andy Warhol at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970.

Laden down by a tape recorder, camera and movie magazines, Andy Warhol staggered into the director’s office of the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design. ‘We’re going to have a lot of fun today,’ the director Daniel Robbins told Warhol, ‘What are you doing?’ Andy Warhol wasn’t sure.

In place of the institution’s curator Warhol had been invited by the Museum of Art to enter the storerooms and make a selection of artefacts for exhibition. The exhibition would be called Raid the Icebox, a pun referring to the museum’s storage facilities, kept on ice for its preservative qualities. Retrospectively it seems a rather disingenuous name at odds with Warhol’s performance of identity: his disinterested, detached, style imputes little of the vigour of the raid, with its masculine connotations of irruptive foray.

The exhibition was conceived as a means to open up the museum’s collection. In the exhibition catalogue essays by Dominique de Menil, director of the Institute for the Arts at Rice University, Daniel Robbins, director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and critic David Bourdon tell a fantastically quixotic tale of enthusiastic advocacy and equal measures of befuddlement. At the brink of the institution’s understanding of its growing obsolescence and irrelevance, Raid the Icebox was conceived at a decisive moment. Engage with contemporary art – let the debunkers in, or roll over into catalepsis.

In her cosmic-allegorical foreword de Menil likens Warhol to an oracle or priest. Whilst critics, curators and scholars can open many doors to help the general public see the aesthetic value of artefacts, they can become blind. ‘Only prophets and seers open the royal gates,’ she writes. Whole realms have been unsealed by the likes of Duchamp and Breton, or Picasso who ‘saw’ the ritual sculptures of Africa and Oceania for the first time. Dusty pieces of ethnography were suddenly turned into miraculous art. What has been accomplished by the Pop artists, reckons de Menil, is even greater. They ‘saw’ supermarket wares, highway signs, bathtubs and Coca-Cola bottles and elevated them above their ordinary significance. ‘What is beautiful to the artist, becomes beautiful. What is poetical to the poet, becomes poetical,’ she writes, ‘So let’s visit museums with poets and artists.’

Robbins’ essay Confessions of a Museum Director bristles with nervous neurotic energy. Like a pathological character from a Gogol story, he is harassed by stuff. Racks of paintings hung floor to ceiling and stacked against walls impose themselves in the ‘appalling, stuffed storage’ of the museum. Sand bags to stop the paintings slipping obstruct the walkways. A dark cubicle at the end of the room houses twelve to fifteen thousand prints by Rembrandt, Daumier, Canaletto. There’s not been a curator of prints for twenty years. No one gets to see any of the stuff! There is nowhere to turn without endangering a precious object:

We have so much that is exciting, beautiful, informative, problematic, teasing to our knowledge, and because no one can get at it, no one excepting a very small and overworked staff, sentiments in storage range from wild exhileration to black despair. Furthermore, as the collections grow and storage becomes fuller, the danger of accident increases sharply.

His text is peppered by elipses, commas, brackets, exclamations and question marks. ‘Is it a total waste?’ he asks in existential disarray. Art students at Rhodes Island School of Design have no time for the museum. Inviting a contemporary artist to select from the reserve could be a liberating, if potentially risky venture. He needs Warhol to see his way around things but struggles to shake his anxiety. If the artist who selected the material were strong enough, would he impose his personality on the objects? If he were famous enough, would it not oblige the curious to look? Might his attitude not do violence to the true nature of the objects?

In the exhibition catalogue the Orientalist mystic, the paranoid terrorised by artefacts and the storyteller furnish the narrative field against which Warhol works. It takes an individual liberated from the burden of objects, with a scrupulous non-hierarchical procedure of segmentation and ordering, to ‘see’ the museum.

In the company of Robbins Warhol went underground in Providence, down into the stores. Robbins’ hope was that the artist might bring out some unfamiliar and unsuspected moldering treasures, inaccessible to the public, yet rather than going into the dark places people hadn’t been for years, Warhol began in the first room he came to – the costume collection. Upon discovering racks upon racks of shoes he decides to include the entire lot in the exhibition. Instead of displaying the finest Windsor chairs he selects those kept as salvage for spare parts. Instead of the museum’s richest ecclesiastic vestments, Coptic cloths and African weaves, he plumps for Native American blankets. Faced with a Cézanne still-life he asks ‘Is that a real Cézanne or a fake one? If that’s real, we won’t take it.’ In his essay Robbins lists the ‘fine examples’ Warhol missed and there was considerable surprise at what he didn’t select. There were exasperating moments, Robbins admits, when staff felt Warhol was exhibiting storage rather than works of art. At last he arrives at the realisation that what is being exhibited is Andy Warhol.

Objects in the exhibition are listed in the catalogue beneath two simple categories, singles and series. Drawings and watercolours, paintings and sculpture ranked under the category of single objects, whilst bandboxes and hatboxes, baskets, ceramics, chairs, costume accessories such as footwear, parasols and umbrellas, paintings, sculptures, textiles and wallpaper were categorised in series. Warhol’s indiscrimination, what Arthur C. Danto has called his ‘deep egalitarianism’, amounted to the view that everything was equal: ‘It was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.’ Warhol expressed the zeitgeist of the emerging consumer society, translating its technology into technique in his art practice. The film camera, multiple reproduction of imagery, the cassette tape recorder – techniques of mass reproduction – shared something in kind with production lines of factories that appealed to him. They afforded consistency, a kind of machinic democracy:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

It’s no coincidence that the democratic approach seems resolutely American. Father of modern poetry and champion of democracy Walt Whitman attempted to echo his personal-political ideology in his work, writing rapturously and indiscriminately about everything. Some years later, asked what he had been taking pictures of, the American photographer William Eggleston replies, ‘I’ve been photographing democratically… I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.’

Warhol’s attention to the surfaces and artifices of mass-media and everyday culture disintegrated distinctions between rules of high and low culture, aesthetic categories of European civilization. It’s the same sensibility that ranges across all aspects of his practice at the time: in Raid the Icebox it’s writ large. Pop sensibility as curatorial strategy is brought to bear on those artefacts. With the exception of a few photographs (high-modernist art photography), none of the objects from storage are products of the age of mechanical reproduction. Their value comes from their handicraft and even when presented in a series each artefact exhibits singular qualities. Warhol treats artefacts of an older historical order to his machinic democratic sensibility. Interestingly they succumb with little resistance. Abstracted from their function or utility, in profusion, the artefacts exist as objects without identity. Liberation from the icebox restores identity, transforming it under the aegis of Warhol.

In his films Warhol gives minimal direction, his outward appearance and expression in writing exhibits a kind of performative indecision. It’s a radical indecision but it’s never, nor could it be, absolute. Raiding the icebox Warhol engages in making decisions of value, albeit perverse ones: broken chairs over good ones, Native American smocks over Chinese Emperors’. Whilst it digs behind the institution’s foundations, this gesture isn’t simply destructive. His indecision shares something of the negative capability of irony. In its most common rhetorical use irony is a mode of speech of which the meaning is contrary to the words. A more expansive definition offered by the dictionary is yet more revealing:

Expression of one’s meaning by language of opposite or different tendency, esp. Simulated adoption of another’s point of view or laudatory tone for purpose of ridicule; ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstances in itself desirable, as if in the mockery of the fitness of things; use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed or concerned. Simulated ignorance.

For the critic and poet Friedrich Schlegel writing at the eve of the eighteenth century, irony was the only weapon there was against death, against ossification, against any form of stabilisation and freezing of the life stream. If one reads a poem composed according to formal rules or experiences an institution that protects the lives and property of others, laugh at it, mock at it, be ironical, blow it up, point out that the opposite is equally true. ‘Corresponding to any proposition that anyone may utter,’ Isiah Berlin explains in his study The Roots of Romanticism, ‘there must be at least three other propositions, each of which is contrary to it, and each of which is equally true, all of which must be believed.’ It’s a strategy for escaping the logical straitjacket of physical causality, or of state-created laws, or aesthetic rules about perspective, or historical painting. In short it’s a negation of the idea of a stable structure of anything.

In practice though there are a couple of problems the individual taken to irony will face. When the ironist ceases to be ironic, their sincerity becomes thinly veiled. ‘True it is that once you gain a reputation for the habit,’ writes D.J. Enright in his study of irony, ‘you will barely be able to enter your local baker’s and ask for a loaf without getting a stonily suspicious glare.’ Further, the artist who uses irony is in a fair way to being disliked for setting himself up as being smarter than other people, whereas in reality not only are his intentions inoffensive but, by virtue of their earnestness, more often than not they defer him from being clever at all. Both of these consequences play out in Warhol’s exchanges with the director of the Museum of Art at Rhodes Island School of Design.

In his 1993 collection of essays Raiding the Icebox – a title that acknowledges the Rhodes Island exhibition and modifies it to infer cultural inquiry as process in continuation after its manifestation in writing – cultural critic Peter Wollen observes how strikingly close Warhol’s sensibility coincides with Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as sketched out in Notes on ‘Camp’. ‘Reading Sontag’s essay today,’ Wollen writes, ‘is like reading through a litany of Warhol’s tastes, allusions and affinities.’ Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, bad movies, idolization of Garbo, corny flamboyant femaleness, dresses made of millions of feathers. Like irony, but much younger, camp has an equally potent capacity to usurp. Camp was an attempt at redemption from the banality of life, the unpredictable mixing of sheer frivolity with passionate commitment, the taste for extravagance, ‘dandyism in the age of mass culture’ as Sontag put it. Wollen reminds us though, that camp involved a rejection of the late-modernist aesthetic as espoused by Clememt Greenberg, the New York critic who saw himself as defending the gates against the barbarians of kitsch. Camp taste, with its hyperbolic aestheticization, its playful connoisseurship of kitsch, played a decisive part in the demise of Modernism. It also helped alter the self-image of a museum of modern art in Rhode Island.