Saving Time: Andy Warhol's Time Capsules Author(s): John W.

Smith Source: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 8-10 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North
America

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FEATURE Saving Time: Andy Warhol's Time Capsules

W. Smith,The Andy WarholMuseum by John

In his 1975 book, The Philosophy ofAndy Warhol, the artist wrote, "I'm so sick of theway I live, of all this junk, and always dragging home more."1 Despite this frustrated confession of a compulsive collector, throughout his lifeAndy Warhol was an avid and knowledgeable collector of fine art, furniture, jewelry, and decorative objects. Buying expeditions to antique and junk shops, auction houses, and flea markets, were daily rituals for many years. In his own words, Warhol was "always looking for that five-dollar object that's reallyworth millions."2 Over time,
his

Warhol's studio at 33 boxes were used to simplify a move from Union Square West to a new location at 860 Broadway. Once relocated, Warhol began to use these boxes to store the bewil dering quantity of material that routinely passed through his life.Photographs, newspapers and magazines, fan letters,busi ness and personal correspondence, artwork, source images for artwork, books, exhibition catalogs, and telephone messages, ments forpoetry readings and dinner invitations,were placed, on an almost daily basis, into a box kept conveniently next to his desk. In The Philosophy ofAndy Warhol, the artist provides step-by-step instruction for creating Time Capsules: What you should do is get a box fora month, and drop month lock itup. Then everything in itand at the end of the date itand send itover to Jersey. You should trytokeep track
of it, but one less if you thing then can't and you lose it, that's load fine, because off your mind. it's I to think about, Iwent around another along with countless examples of ephemera, such as announce

folk art, Navajo furniture, American ing with Art Deco blankets, and empire sofas. After his death, Sotheby's auction house was given the task of inventorying the contents of the townhouse and selling them during a series of now legendary auctions in the spring of 1988. Following the Sotheby's auctions, as archivists and cura tors began tomake theirway through the remaining contents of his home and studio on East 33rd Street, itbecame clear that his collecting extended farbeyond art and antiques, cookie jars, and costume jewelry. A staggering accumulation of boxes, shopping bags, trunks, and filing cabinets was evidence that life. It is collecting had permeated every aspect of Warhol's that form the core of the Andy Warhol these materials
Museum's archive.

twenty-seven-room

Manhattan

townhouse

was

overflow

started off myself with trunksand the odd pieces of furni

ture, but and now cardboard I just drop boxes...3 shopping into everything for something the same-size better brown

Ironically, he soon began

Capsules.

referring to these boxes

as Time

The Collection
The collection currently consists of over 8,000 cubic feet of material, and functions as an integral part of theAndy Warhol Museum, along with his paintings, film and video work, sculp ture, and graphic art. The collection includes scrapbooks of press clippings related toWarhol's work and his private and public life, art supplies and materials used byWarhol, posters publicizing his exhibitions and films, over 3,000 audio tapes featuring interviews and conversations between Warhol and his friends and associates, and thousands of documentary pho run of a tographs. In addition, the collection features complete Interviewmagazine which Warhol founded in 1969, his exten sive library of books and periodicals, hundreds of decorative art objects, many personal items such as clothing, and over thir ty of the silver-white wigs that became one of Warhol's defining physical features. At the heart of this vast collection are the Time Capsules: 610 standard-sized cardboard boxes which Warhol, beginning in 1974, filled, sealed and sent to storage. Originally, these

memorate

Time capsules
events

of

are normally used by institutions to com

a special significance. By placing a

few

carefully selected items in a container, sealing it,and specifying a date when it should be opened, the creator of a time capsule means to capture a sense of the current Zeitgeist for future gen erations. For Warhol, however, the Time Capsules functioned less as an edited attempt to capture and convey an historical moment than as a register of his everyday life. In documenting themost insignificant details of his existence, Warhol created a complete, though often cryptic, diary of his life and theworlds of art, fashion, society, and the New York underground in which he moved.

Time Cataloging Capsules

The staff of the Archives is currently working to catalog thesematerials and to make them available to researchers. Our has and detailed. Before a box is been meticulous approach it is and any distinguishing marks are opened, photographed noted. Once the inventory process begins, each item, regardless of how insignificant it might seem, is fully described and cata

Art Documentotion ? Volume 20, Number 1 ? 2001

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confronted with the blurred line between documentation and art. In Time Capsule 44, opened in February 1992, several dozen drawings from the 1950s were found. It is important to ask why theywere placed in these boxes rather than preserved byWarhol as works of art. Similarly, we have recently discov ered in a Time Capsule, a rare, very early silkscreen painting by Warhol. The painting dates from around 1960 and was created byWarhol for an advertisement for the Container Corporation earliest uses of the of America. It marks one of Warhol's silkscreen process, and stylistically forms an important link between Warhol's graphic art and his fine art.What role was it there?censor, Warhol critic, assuming when placing archivist, or artist?

loged.4 Additionally, many items are photographed and many more are photocopied which ultimately provides easier access to the materials by researchers. Eventually, a computer data base will be available, allowing patrons to conduct searches through descriptive texts and images of the Time Capsule inventories, as well as providing a link to objects in themuse um's art collection. After six years of processing, theArchives staffhas inventoried over one hundred of these boxes! As we inventory the Time Capsules, we are continually

Wayne displaysphotoboothstrips Kathryn Figure 2. ARLIS/NA President Martha Childers. TimeCapsule. Photo by fromthecontents of the

the World Containing

Given his interests in collecting and commerce, perhaps it is not surprising thatWarhol owned several works by Marcel a Duchamp, including two copies of the Boite en Valise, firstedi tion from 19416 and a later edition from the 1950s. This piece had an enormous influence onWarhol, and may well have been the inspiration for theReversals and Retrospectives series done in 1979. In these paintings, Warhol plundered his own artistic past to present a reworking of some of his most memorable images, including portraits ofMarilyn Monroe and Chairman Mao, the electric chair, and theCampbell Soup Cans. This inter est in capturing and controlling the past is apparent in theTime Capsules as well. The Time Capsules also share a distant kinship with the German Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These precursors to today's encyclope ideas of the dic museums grew out of the humanist that during the course of one's life Renaissance?specifically, time, one could "know theworld" through the acquisition of objects and information. This thirst forknowledge ledmany to assemble huge collections of artistic and ethnographic objects,
travel

Figure 1. Author JohnSmith openinga Time Capsule at thePittsburgh Martha Childers. Photo by WolfgangFreitagassisting. The Time Capsules also offerus many items thatwere not considered art at the time they were stored, but have since assumed that stature. For example, the Time Capsules contain hundreds of photo booth stripsmade under Warhol's direction in the 1960s and used as sources for his portraits. Since Warhol's death, these photographs have been collected, exhib ited and written about as art. Despite the pragmatic origins of Warhol grew to think of the boxes themselves, it is certain that these containers as works of art.He frequently considered sell ing the Time Capsules, but was perplexed on how best to market them. Shortly before his death, he recorded in his diary that he "took a few time capsule boxes tomy office. They are fun?when you go through them there's things you really don't want to give up. Some day I'll sell them for $4000 or $5000. I used to think $100, but now that'smy new price."5
conference, March 20, 2000 with audience participants Genie Candan and

abundance, and a mixture of the common and the singular are also traits of the Time Capsules, inwhich one finds a mummi fied foot, silverware from an Air France flight, a dress worn by shoes. actress Jean Harlow, and a pair of Clark Gable's Although Warhol's desire was not necessarily to know the world, the Time Capsules serve as clear evidence of his belief that he could contain it.

souvenirs,

and

bizarre

specimens

of nature.

Diversity,

Researchers' Treasure
Warhol and postwar American popular cul For scholars of offer a treasure trove of new and ture, the Time Capsules important information. Through invoices, bank statements and other financial information, researchers are beginning tounrav el the complexities ofWarhol's business practices. Scripts, cast lists, and reels of previously undocumented motion picture film work film have provided historians studying Warhol's with a wealth of new information. Rare exhibition catalogs and

9 Volume 20, Number 1 ? 2001 ? Art Documentation

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Notes
1.Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to and Back Again. (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 145. Despite Warhol's advice about sending one's he kept his own much closer to home. boxes toNew Jersey, Some were stored at his studio but many more were kept at his home on East 65thStreet. 4. Originally, the inventory process was tape recorded in order to compile as much documentation as possible on the was found. Time Capsules are often opened with material that the participation of various Warhol scholars. The tapes were
intended as a means to record their comments and reactions

with the Moderators Ted Goodman and ClaytonKirking Figure 3. Session Anita Vriend, Tom Sokolowski, Kirking, JohnSmith, Wolfgang Freitag, Martha Childers. Genie Candau, andKathryn Wayne. Photo by
announcements, panelists and audience participants. Left to right: Goodman, Dr. Kirk Savage,

to

tion photographs have allowed historians tomore fully study the critical and public reception ofWarhol's art and to sort out the difficult questions of exhibition history and provenance. Scholars working in the area of sexuality and gender, seeking to establish links between Warhol's homosexuality and his art, have made great use of these materials, even advancing a the ory that the Time Capsules are a metaphor for his sometimes closeted sexuality. Warhol Museum, archival material is For the visitor to the fully integrated with the art collections in the galleries, offering a broad social and historical context for interpreting Warhol's work. The contents of a newly opened Time Capsule are put on exhibition in theArchives Study Center galleries approximate ly every twomonths, providing visitors with a furtherglimpse into Warhol's lifeand underscoring the enormity of the task the staff faces in processing these rich and various materials.

press

releases,

correspondence,

and

installa

thematerial. More recently,however, we have stopped taping these sessions in an effort to streamline our work and avoid cre ating another layer of information in addition to the documentation and theCapsules themselves. 5. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries. (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1989). 6. The edition owned byWarhol was number V/XX and Reis." See The Andy Warhol Collection: inscribed "Bernard J. Americana and European and American Paintings, Drawings, and Prints. (New York, NY: Sotheby's, 1988). The Boite-en-Valise is listed as item number 2847.

10

Art Documentation ? Volume 20, Number 1 ? 2001

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