Wood pretending to be cardboard

Here is the misconception, and it runs deep. People assume the Brillo boxes are cardboard cartons Warhol found and signed, the way Marcel Duchamp had taken a factory-made urinal in 1917, set it on a plinth, and called it art (the readymade, an ordinary manufactured object presented unchanged as a work). That is not what these are. Warhol’s boxes are not cardboard, and they are not readymades.

Each one is a box of solid wood, plywood, built by a carpenter to the size of a real Brillo shipping carton. It was then painted, the ground laid in white house paint, and silkscreened with the Brillo graphics to imitate the look of the printed cardboard original. So the object is not a piece of grocery packaging promoted into art. It is a piece of sculpture, hand-fabricated in the studio, painstakingly disguised as grocery packaging. The work is the disguise. Duchamp took a real object and said it was art; Warhol built a fake object that looks like a real one, which is a different and stranger move, closer to simulation than to a found thing.

Now the irony that sits at the heart of the work. The famous Brillo design, that red-white-and-blue label with the swooping wave, was not invented by Warhol. It was designed, as ordinary commercial work, by a man named James Harvey (1929–1965). And Harvey was not just a packaging man. He was a working Abstract Expressionist painter, shown by a New York gallery, who paid the bills with a day job in commercial design, the way many painters did. He drew the Brillo carton in 1961(he had joined the design firm Stuart and Gunn, formed in 1959; some accounts round the design to “around 1960”).

The commercial graphic Warhol “appropriated” as a deadpan found image had itself been made by an artist, a painter working in exactly the heroic, hand-made tradition Pop was reacting against. So when a Pop artist got the gallery show, the credit, and the money for reproducing Harvey’s box, the art world noticed the irony. Harvey himself reportedly took it with good humor; the famous protest, “Andy is running away with my box,” came from a tongue-in-cheek press release his gallery put out, not from Harvey nursing a grudge. (He died of cancer the next year, in 1965, at thirty-five.) But the tangle the release pointed at is exactly what the whole work is secretly about: who made this image, and which version of it counts as art, the painter’s design for a soap company, or the soap company’s carton remade by a painter?

The contradiction runs right down into the labor. Warhol’s whole pose was to be a machine, to make art the impersonal way a factory makes cans, so the boxes were produced on something like an assembly line, in quantity, by assistants. And yet each one was built and printed by hand. The result is an object caught between two states: it is mass-production as performance, handwork pretending to be machine-work. Look closely at two boxes and you can find the small slips that prove a person did this, no two exactly alike. The boxes are hand-made objects whose entire subject is the look of not being hand-made. That is the engine of everything they go on to do.