Trash collection. O kolekcjonerstwie Andy’ego Warhola (1928–1987)

• Authors: Ewa Letkiewicz
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

Brak streszczenia w języku polskim.

EN

Andy Warhol is fi rst of all known as an artist: the painter of products of mass culture and the author of mass-produced art, as the director of controversial underground fi lms verging on ambiguous morality and pornography, a graphic artist in women’s magazines: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life, a designer of clothes, shoes, jewelry, record covers, book covers and illustrations, as well as a sculptor, photographer, performer, creator of popular TV programs, and a writer. His artistic activity and private life aroused extreme emotions: from obsessive hatred to idolatrous adoration. Tens of studies and monographs closely followed his development and successive stages of the international career of a superstar. Widely commented on was the breakthrough he made in the landscape of contemporary art and in morals; there were discussions on his impact on the generations of young people in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.In the context of his gigantic amount of works and accomplishments in numerous disciplines there is negligible mention of Warhol’s collecting, which fi rst started in 1956 and to which he devoted himself passionately until his death. It should be added that we are not speaking of the collections of works by Warhol, but of the objects that he gathered, bought for .years at auctions, fl ea markets, galleries, at sales and sheriff’s auctions, among which there were works of”high art”, art works of famous masters, but also the works of “low art” - trash – shoddy objects, market rubbish, kitschy accessories, plastic products of mass culture. The latter, “duds’ “trash”, because they are untypical as object of the collection, are an interesting problem to get to know better.It is not the whole legacy of Warhol’s collecting. At his home, especially in the Manhattan studio known as the Factory, he deposited 610 cardboard boxes with unusual contents. He started fi lling them with diverse objects from 1974 on. Among several dozenthousand artifacts collected in the boxes there are, inter alia, his laundry bills, letters from admirers, from the then celebrities and politicians, postcards from his journeys, air tickets, invitations, pieces of half-eaten pizza, dry pieces of cake, cut off nails, dried ants and bees, used wrappings, unopened Campbell soup cans, drawings, designs, paper cuttings, an Egyptian mummifi ed human foot - 2000 years old, and thousands of other objects. Can the cardboard boxes with their content be also called a collection? Is this another of the artist’s creative processes or merely a garbage heap?

Keywords

PL

EN

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej
• Journal: Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, sectio L – Artes
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1

Dates

published

2015

online

2015-09-14

Contributors

author

Ewa Letkiewicz

Identifiers

DOI

10.17951/l.2015.13.1.7