The
producer of the definitive Andy Warhol documentary rightly observes the world
has become vastly more Warholian since his death in 1987. Perhaps none of his
pieces are more fundamentally Warholian than the Brillo Boxes—so-called because
they faithfully copied the design of the Brillo Box cartons you could have
found in the backroom of any supermarket in the 1960s. Warhol made a fair number
of the big white Brillo Boxes, but only seventeen of the smaller, yellow “3¢ off”
version. Lisanne Skyler’s family had one, but they parted with it before the
Warhol market exploded. Skyler traces the box’s journey and explains its
significance in the short (forty-minute) documentary, Brillo Box (3¢ off) (trailer here), which premieres
this Monday on HBO.
The
Skyler Brillo Box is a mysterious object of family lore that appears in their
early photos, like a Rosebud sled for the entire family. To his credit, her
father really got Warhol long before the general art world did. Her mother did
as well, accept maybe even more so. She genuinely enjoyed having it around as
an object in their apartment, but at that time he was constantly trying to flip
his acquisitions or trade up to something with more long-term value. Much to
her mother’s regret, he parted with the Brillo Box to acquire an original Peter
Young.
For
years, this looked like a rather bad trade, but Skyler archly observes the
recent renewal of interest in the rediscovered Young’s work makes it less
cut-and-dried. Still, it would be hard to top the staggering sum the Skyler
family Brillo Box last fetched at auction.
On
one level, 3¢ off is a brisk and
colorful exploration of the intersection of family history and art history.
However, Skyler quite slyly demonstrates the porousness of the boundaries
between art, investment, commodity, and tongue-in-cheek provocation in the
contemporary art world. The case study of the Brillo Box is particularly ironic,
because it involves an artist (Warhol) appropriating a commercial design,
created by abstract expressionist James Harvey as a day gig, to make a
statement on commercialism, but the boxes themselves have become high-priced quest
items for fabulously wealthy collectors. It is like Warhol’s joke continues to
take on new dimensions.
