The Implied Rummager: Reading Intimate Interiors in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules

ABSTRACT

This article takes the form of a speculative reading of a selection of objects and cardboard boxes from Andy Warhol’s monumental artwork, Time Capsules (1974–1984) based on research on the Time Capsules undertaken at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2014. The Time Capsules consists of 612 containers (most of them identical cardboard boxes) filled with objects from Warhol’s life. In this article, I draw on comics studies, queer theory, and the theory of autographics to consider how and why the Time Capsules might be read as an artwork that stages an encounter with intimate interiors. These intimate interiors are multiple: spanning the materiality of the work itself, the enclosure of mementos, objects, and ephemera within the mundane autobiographical technology of the cardboard box, and the reader’s own interior world which they must draw on to find a path through the vast array of objects that make up the work. The reading offered in this article follows the trace of affect and intimate relationality – sexuality, familial relations, friendships and love – across the work. It argues that the Time Capsules powerfully demonstrate the role of objects in the construction, maintenance and memorialisation of intimate connections.

KEYWORDS:

• Andy Warhol
• autographics
• intimacy
• affect

I initially became interested in Andy Warhol’s monumental work Time Capsules (1974–1987) when I was trying to understand why it is that the cardboard box has become a ubiquitous technology of self-documentation. From 1974 until his death, Warhol placed a dizzying array of objects from his life in the 612 containers that make up the work, which is housed in the archives department of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.¹ The contents of the Time Capsules (TC) are exactly like the contents of the box under your bed, or in a cupboard, that you have not looked in for years. You know the one. It holds loose photographs, tickets stubs, postcards, a wedding invitation and possibly a pressed flower from the arrangement on the table at the reception, a tacky souvenir cigarette lighter from a city you visited in your twenties, a half-eaten packet of mints from the flight home from that city when you needed sugar to compensate for lack of sleep. While putting life into a story is the most commonly studied way for people to reflect on their lived experience and relationships, objects also play a vital role in our experience of who we are (Miller 2002; Turkle 2011). They connect us to the past and can provide a powerful sense of the continuity of our experience. We can feel burdened by objects, or bound to and by them when they represent elements of our life we have not come to terms with. We often keep objects in cardboard boxes long after their connection to a place and time has dissolved in our memories.

My interest in cardboard boxes is a continuation of recent life writing scholarship that is interested in autobiography and mediation, what Gillian Whitlock and I have thought of as autographics (Whitlock and Poletti 2008). In a forthcoming book, I develop a theory of the cardboard box as a ubiquitous media for autobiography. In the conclusion to the chapter on cardboard boxes, I suggest that cardboard boxes ‘are a means of forming and reforming sensual assemblages and opportunities for others to come into contact with the material trace of our lives. In this sense, the cardboard box is a medium of inscription that stores the latent potential of the ephemeral objects that populate our lives for others to encounter at some future moment.’ (Poletti 2020, 55). Cardboard boxes favour storing over storying. In this sense, they store material traces of intimacy. When kept and accessed by others, they also function as containers that have intimate interiors some future rummager can animate. But how might we read (or animate) a box of mementos and ‘junk’? And what might Warhol’s Time Capsules tell us about an iconic figure of the twentieth century that we don’t already know?

The display of some of the TCs in The Andy Warhol Museum suggested a possible answer to these questions. Sitting in long lines on shelves behind glass, the identical boxes recall a sequence of comics panels. Could the artwork be read as a kind of three-dimensional autobiographical comic – a form that has been central to expanding our understanding of objects, archives, and images in contemporary life writing (Cvetkovich 2008)? Could we think of the individual boxes as frames and panels, positioned side-by-side to develop non-narrative strategies for reflecting on and documenting lived experience? It could be that Warhol uses the box the way comic artists writing memoirs have used the frame, the panel, the page, the book: to explore the deep resonance of objects or images (as in Bechdel’s remediation of the photograph of her babysitter in Fun Home); to evoke the looping of time across the generations (as in Spiegelman’s drawing of himself drawing amongst the bodies of the murdered mice-Jews in Maus); or to present atmospheres and affective states, as we see in David Small’s depiction of the effects of anesthesia in Stitches.

This association between comics and cardboard boxes is useful as a place to start not just because of the importance of comics for our thinking about autographics, but because scholarship on autobiographical comics has expanded ways of thinking about life writing beyond a focus on linguistic forms and aesthetics (Chaney 2016; Chute 2010; Whitlock and Poletti 2008; Whitlock 2006). However, the presentation of the cardboard boxes behind glass at the archives department also reminds us that the Time Capsules depart from autobiographical comics in an undeniable way. The Time Capsules are, fundamentally, unreadable. Three factors render the work inaccessible to any one reader: the scale of the work, their entanglement with the institutional protocols of The Andy Warhol Museum, and Warhol’s fame.² Indeed, staff at the museum only completed the work of cataloguing the contents of every container in the work in late 2013. Time Capsules is, essentially, made up of hundreds of thousands of ephemeral objects with no real value beyond their tangential relationship to an iconic figure of the twentieth century. For these reasons, it is an artwork about which very little is written.³ Despite Warhol’s canonical status, and perhaps because of his queerness and his queer use of form and scale, the Time Capsules are a marginal work. They are not well integrated into understandings of Warhol’s practice and legacy, nor are they regularly exhibited in their own right.⁴ In this sense, Warhol’s use of cardboard boxes might also be said to resonate with comics as a form of minor literature, an artform that challenges existing investments in hierarchies of aesthetic value, modes of enunciation, strategies for exhibition, and individualism (La Cour 2016).

So my premise in this speculative essay is: what kind of reading occurs if we approach a TC as a three dimensional frame? What might such an approach to reading tell us about how objects evoke intimacy? And does Warhol’s refusal to position the objects within a narrative (of intimacy, of his life, his persona, of anything) invite his implied rummager (for how else can we refer to the implied reader of the cardboard box) to imagine scenes of intimacy?

In what follows I present six glimpses into the interior of six TCs. Each glimpse is an experiment and is speculative, with the aim of offering possible ways of reading the Time Capsules. My approach attempts to apply what Jonathan Flatley has argued is Warhol’s development of liking as praxis. In Flatley’s queer theory account, Warhol’s mode of liking is a process of mimetic relationality (2017, 4–9). Liking is a mode of attunement that heightens our appreciation of the uniqueness of the individual person, or object. This heightened appreciation works against the forces of isolation and alienation that characterise modernity. Yet unlike dominant discourses of modernity, liking does not serve the reifying aims of a logic of difference; it does not colonise, possess or reinforce universal forms. Rather it is a mode of relating that involves taking in what is unique to the thing or person that is liked, and in this process of introjection, being changed by it (Flatley 2017, 1–52).

But in liking the Time Capsules I am also writing them, remediating them, so that they in turn can be read by you. This writing is not biographical or art historical. Rather the focus is on trying to tease out how they might evoke Warhol’s intimate life, or lives. I am interested in what they might tell us about the people, things and practices that bound Warhol to the world, that made up the life of Andy Warhol or Andrew Warhola as it was lived, as well as staged and performed in his persona. This teasing out takes it inspiration from the turn to materialism in recent feminist thinking – the work of Karen Barad, Jane Bennet, and others – who argue for the agency of matter in the making of the world, as well as queer theory’s interest in forms of ‘queer culture building’ (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548) that cohere around forms of intimacy and sexuality that do not adhere to the norms of heterosexual culture. Thus, the readings that follow try to be attentive to how the Time Capsules might present what Gillian Whitlock has called ‘the testimony of things’ (Whitlock 2011) to fragments of Warhol’s queer life in the mid-twentieth century. ‘‘Things’ don’t preexist’, Barad (2007, 150) argues, but produce meaning through their entanglement with other human and nonhuman actors in a specific scene. The scene I report on was a five day visit to the archives at The Andy Warhol Museum in 2014 in which an interior world was animated.

Time Capsule #27: Andy Warhols Mother [sic]

Warhol’s box on his mother is mundane and really touching. A Christmas decoration of pinecones and golden bells. Stuff you can’t bear to throw away, stuff you’re not sure what to do with. The box contains clothes (scarves, hats, blouses, aprons, socks, a pair of underpants) alongside everyday materials from Julia’s life – the plastic bags that the carrots came in, which she would re-use (there’s a film of her, made by Warhol, that includes an example of this). There’s also ‘trash’ in this box: tape that has escaped its cassette, an (unused) sanitary napkin, slips of blank paper, an airmail envelope heavily stained by coffee, its red and blue stripes made brown who knows how long ago. This is not a box that edits out the everyday from the memorial. It picks up the unique (letters in Rusyn from family in Europe, a single gold hoop earring) and the detritus of Julia’s everyday life. These objects, like the TCs themselves, don’t ‘add up’ to anything: they gesture, they point, the fail to signify. The items used to bump up against each other, but now they are individually bagged, slips of paper trying to preserve the glitter on two yellow ducks who adorn an unused Easter greeting card.

Indeed, it is through the museum, and through Warhol’s fame, that this box, and its objects, are even available to be thought about at all. It has travelled a long way from Julia and from Andy. It is a time capsule, in the sense that it travels through time, a collection that outlives them both. One way to understand Warhol’s title for the box, and the decision at The Andy Warhol Museum to treat the Time Capsules as an archive, is to see that this assemblage of objects framed by the cardboard box invites a challenge: the archivists are working to extend the life of the TCs, to give them more time, to allow them to travel further away from their origin. At The Andy Warhol Museum, through the ongoing labour of conservation, the TCs are on life support.

But what to make of the act of narration on the box, in third person: Andy Warhols Mother (without the apostrophe that would designate ownership)? (‘Clothes’ is added in a different hand.) He doesn’t write ‘Julia Warhola.’ He doesn’t write ‘Mother,’ or ‘Mom,’ or ‘My mother.’ (In his diaries (Warhol 1989) and Popism, Warhol always refers to Julia as ‘my mother’.⁵) One of my theories about the work is that Warhol was making them with his legacy in mind, with his own death in mind. (Afraid of hospitals, he very reluctantly went in for gall bladder surgery in 1987 and his fear was confirmed: he died there due to post-operative care that was ‘severely lacking’((Alexander 1994, 87).⁶) Warhol is securing Julia’s place in the story of Andy Warhol with this box. He had already done so artistically by adapting her handwriting in his successful career as a commercial artist, and in their co-written books 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, and Holy Cats by Andy Warhols’ Mother (note the apostrophe).

Warhol and Warhola were both illustrators, as well as award winning commercial artists (Julia Warhola won an award in 1958 for her calligraphy from the American Institute for Graphic Arts.) On the one hand then, the TC is a continuation of their creative collaboration, which was an important mode of attachment and affection for Warhol with friends, lovers, crushes, and his mother – a practice and pedagogy central to Warhol’s work, which Flatley theorises as central to liking as a practice the celebrates commonality (rather than sameness) and plenitude. The TC is also something more personal, and opaque, because what constitutes ‘the personal’ with Warhol is an incredibly difficult question. Vividly and persistently public, shy, cutting, and deeply embedded in his social milieu, Warhol invites and frustrates any attempt to come to grips with his identity, lived experience, and attachments. As Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in the opening of his biography of Warhol: ‘It would be easy to narrate his life without saying much about him at all, for he tried to fade into his entourage’ (2001, 2).⁷

But this box, unlike the other Time Capsules and most of the accounts of Warhol’s life, points us away from Warhol’s social circle, collaborations and friendships, to his family. What kind of entourage is a family for a queer, who defiantly described himself as ‘swish’ (Warhol and Hackett 1981, 11–13)?⁸

When I was visiting the Warhol Museum to research the Time Capsules I attended the monthly floor talk by Warhol’s nephew Donald Warhola. Throughout his talk Warhola constantly refers to Warhol as two people: ‘Andy Warhol’ and ‘Andrew Warhola / Uncle Andy.’ As Donald narrates it, Uncle Andy was interested in the family, attentive. He spoke on the phone with Donald’s Dad every Sunday, and had the nieces and nephews to stay in the house he shared with Julia in New York. When Donald graduated from high school he sent Uncle Andy his yearbook picture (he sent it to a number of members of the family), and asked for a portrait, jokingly adding ‘Who wouldn’t want a portrait by Andy Warhol?!’ Uncle Andy made it – two silkscreens, that took over a year – and Donald claims he is the only family member apart from Julia that Warhol painted. As told by Donald, this anecdote encapsulates Uncle Andy’s generosity to his family. Donald asked for a portrait, Uncle Andy made him one. The way Donald tells it, while standing in the part of the gallery dedicated to Warhol’s family, you can see traces of Andy Warhol in the early life of Andrew Warhola, who was sending away for autographs of movie stars at 11, and was accepted into free art classes as a child. In the Julia Warhola capsule, does it work the other way? Do we see Andrew Warhola (Uncle Andy) making a box about his mother, and using Andy Warhol’s reputation and status to insert his mother in history? There is something about love at work here, maybe. Love can bring with it the desire to enshrine the beloved in history. When someone we love dies, we can look for things to do with the love, to give the love a material form. We have to find somewhere to put it now that the person who used to receive it has gone. This searching is the work of mourning (Derrida 2001, 35).

Maybe the message of TC #27 is ‘I loved her’?

After his talk, I ask Donald Warhola if he could talk about Andy Warhol’s religious practice. Warhol attended church every Sunday with his mother, and fed the poor at Easter and Christmas. Warhola suggests that every day before he went to work, Warhol (or was it Uncle Andy?) would kneel down with his mother and say a prayer. This is what gets me thinking about Uncle Andy as the author of the Julia Warhola TC. Maybe it was Andrew Warhola that wrote ‘Andy Warhols Mother’ on the box to ensure it ended up here in the Museum, to give his mother a place in the history of the persona of Andy Warhol. The TC becomes a means of binding Julia Warhola – using Warhol’s favourite medium, fame – into history. It is a means, like comics and other queer cultural practices, of making ‘public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful’ (Cvetkovich 2008, 111). What meaning comes from registering the relationality between Andrew and Julia Warhola, Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol’s Mother through objects framed by a cardboard box? What kind of history of this intimacy, love, care, shared creativity and religion can be read in the objects in this box?

**

Photographs of Jed Johnson.

Looking for Jed Johnson turns me into a screenwriter. Johnson and Warhol were partners for over a decade, and were co-parents of Dachshunds named Archie and Amos. As I look at pictures of Johnson spread across the Time Capsules boxes, I am sketching the plot points of the bio-pic of the rags-to-riches tale of impossibly handsome twin brothers Jed and Jay arriving at The Factory; Jed and Andy’s slow (or was it fast?) romance; the moving-in together; Jed’s witnessing of Andy’s shooting by Valerie Solanas; and the crucial moments when Jed discovers his eye, his taste, his sense of space and objects by encountering Andy’s (infamous) stuff.⁹ Every photograph I see has Jed with the same beautiful sad, flat look on his face. He never looks at the camera, but always off to the side or just slightly above the photographer’s head. His face is a mask, but it hides nothing. Unlike Jay – standing beside him beaming, looking down the barrel of the camera with all the power of his beauty – Jed looks elsewhere, even when he is wedged between Jerry Hall and Andy Warhol. All of them dressed to the nines, Jerry shining in a long deep emerald green dress, Andy meeting the gaze of the camera without a smile but with the steely confidence he used to overcome his bad skin and receding hairline and scared body. Jed knew that body before and after its scaring: he was present when Warhol was shot, and wrote to Andy while he was in hospital recovering. But in the photographs he looks down, looks away. Where would Jed rather be?

It’s not entirely true to say that Jed never looks at the camera. There is a snapshot where he and Andy are standing in front of a non-descript, single story brick building. The building is vaguely institutional. Andy stands to the far left, his left arm severed by the frame. Under his right arm­ is a large portfolio. He is wearing a dark suit and an awful brown plaid shirt, accompanied by a black tie with brown stripes. Jed stands a significant distance from Andy – his arms hanging long and limp at his front, hands folded. This time Andy looks off camera, his gaze cutting in front of Jed. Jed’s face is partially covered by shadow, but he is clearly looking at the lens. Politely, perhaps. He doesn’t want to ignore the photographer while something more important is happening: Andy’s conversation with whoever is out of frame. Jed meekly validates the moment. In a blue polo shirt and dark blue blazer, a gold watch on his wrist, he makes Warhol look like a dorky old man. But this is an unintended effect of his beauty and style, at least it is in the version of Jed that is developed in my screenplay. Always impeccably dressed and serious, he can’t help but throw an unflattering light.

But what strikes me when I see the photograph for the first time is the space between them. Unlike the photograph with Jerry Hall, where Jed allows himself to be wedged up against the bodies of others, here I wonder whether I am seeing the true, preferred size of his personal space. There is at least a metre between him and Andy. It seems like a gulf, but also a respectable distance. A distance Jed has learned to measure instinctively, to avoid getting caught up in the vortex of attention that surrounds Warhol. But perhaps also because he likes his space. Maybe the neutral face and sad eyes reveal a man who hates parties.

In another TC, full of letters, Jed writes to Andy in his angled cursive writing, full of big loops, while Warhol is in hospital recovering from being shot by Solanas:

Dear Andy,

Thank you so much for calling, it just really made my day. I am sure it wont be too much longer before I can see you, anyway, I hope so. It seems like it’s been so long, it has, but not as long as it seems.

Last night was sort of nice at Mays. After dinner we danced, there was a fairly large crowd and everyone seemed to be having a nice time. Antonio tried to show me how to dance better but I’m afraid he wasn’t successful.

Tonight Jay + I are having dinner at Antonio’s and he’s going to do some more drawings. I guess I’ll play cupid and try to start up a love affair between Jay + Antonio. Thanks for the suggestion.

I have to go now will write tomorrow.

Miss you much.

Love

Jed

**

Dick pics and two people in their sixties

The letter is from B., but who B. is is lost knowledge. B. writes from Paris on 21 November 1977. He is sending Andy some Polaroids and a letter that is written on the back of the photographs in thick black marker. In the first photograph, which has not developed properly, the thin erect penis points upwards, a light-coloured open shirt framing the dark hair on the navel. The angle of the cock aligns with the bend where the hip connects to the thigh in a pleasing symmetry. The second image is even less legible: listed in the finding aid as a Polaroid negative, it is almost pitch black. When I photograph it with my iPad under the fluorescent light of the archive, the digital image I make shows a glossy black surface reflecting the silver body of the device. But in the room, when I put my face close to the paper in front of me, I can just discern the line of the shaft, the curve of the testicles. In the third dick pic the contrast is much better: it is starkly clear. He lies in a bath, white soapy foam lapping at the edge of the torso. The cock and balls bright red against the white soap and the Caucasian skin. Dark hair covers the thighs and the flat stomach of the owner of the cock. The hair on the stomach is long enough to swirl together in the water, producing strong lines that frame the belly button. A cluster of dark hair sits at the base of the shaft, where the cock meets the balls, and there could be something in the hair here … a reason to be in the bath. A hand holds a black, oblong item at the edge of the frame. Something to wash with?

The last dick pic is in profile. The cock sticks out from the thin, toned body, pointing downwards. His hand rests at his hip at the top of the frame, long fingers pointing forward, following the curve of the hip to the flat stomach. We see the same dark hair on his hand and arms as on his thighs. I am not that good at identifying men by their penises, I don’t know if these pictures have the same subject or whether each picture presents Andy with a different body. The white bath in the background of this final shot suggests this is the same body from the previous shot – a loose sequence from open shirt, to pitch black, to bathing, to getting out of the bath. Whoever B. was, they liked Andy enough to shoot these pictures and think of him either during, or after the scene.

Dear A,

Thought you might like to use these. Looks like (1) will be getting the Nobel Prize (he thinks you’re a little late with the [illegible] but lit. has always been more advanced here.) (2) TB had just had a permanent and then the scarf and chair background will give you some nice Matisse material. (3) Isn’t as big as V.H’s but très nice.

As always,

B.

TB is a woman in her late sixties who sits on a lounge upholstered in dark blue fabric that bears a cream floral print. Resting loosely around her neck is a white scarf with black and red geometric lined pattern. She stares into the camera with her dark eyes, a closed-mouth impish grin on her face, framed by her short, freshly permed grey hair. Whoever-might-be-about-to-get-the-Nobel-Prize is a man also in his late sixties. With his white receding hair and open face looking directly into the camera, he resembles every man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the seventies – they are virtually interchangeable – and I cannot identify him with research later. The incongruity of sending two portraits of people in their sixties along with four dick pics (with an assessment that the dick or dicks are indeed nice but not ‘as big as V.H’s’) makes me laugh as I walk back to my hotel over the Andy Warhol bridge in Pittsburgh at the end of my first day in the archives.

Time Capsule #89

TC #89 contains excellent mail art. There is a tin used to store medical tape that has been labelled (handwritten on tape that runs around the circular tin): ‘George Segal and Philip Smith in the nude.’ The archival assistant doesn’t think we can open it, but back in my hotel later I discover that it can be opened and the finding aid for the box informs me it ‘contains photocopied contact sheets, cut and glued to imitate a reel of film, approx 1 × 3.’ Looking at the canister, and thinking about the annotated Polaroids of penises I saw on Monday, suggests there is a great pre-history of sexting and the sharing of nude photographs buried in the Time Capsules. There is certainly evidence that we should be cautious of arguments that claim that ‘[w]ith the ubiquity of digital photography, what has been considered photo worthy has been expanded’ (Paasonen, Light, and Jarrett 2019, 1). Indeed, Warhol is widely recognised for revolutionising what was considered worth looking at, and why, as well as being (in)famous for photographing penises.¹⁰ The Polaroid is an important queer medium here: for it makes photographs that don’t need to be processed, thus shielding the photographer (in this case, B.) from the judgement or censure of an unknown developer. Sitting somewhere between the categories of ‘curated’ and ‘desired’ dick pics (Paasonen, Light, and Jarrett 2019, 4–7) these are photo-objects, shared in the service of B.’s relationship with Warhol, offering a glimpse into the media history of the dick pic and the use of objects in queer world making that ‘indexes a virtual social world’ (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558). The dick pics and nude photo-strips are queered by their placement alongside the vast array of ephemera in the cardboard box. TC #89 also has books (How To Organize and Run A Film Society, by Janet Weiner, Oh, What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Edward Carpenter), and a ceramic salt and pepper shaker set in the form of Chinese chefs (a male and a female), who wear little hats and hold spoons. There are magazines that feature Warhol, an envelope stuffed full of used postage stamps. Further into the box we find a brown paper bag full of porn, which I don’t look at in detail as the archivist assisting me seems disinclined to flick through porn mags (Hard and Able is one title I glimpse).

**

A peeping androgynous figure

The archive assistant is pulling objects out of the Time Capsule and I peak inside the box when she is called over to the Chief Archivist’s desk to answer a question. I am looking at the letters people sent to Warhol while he was in hospital recovering from being shot by Solanas. An androgynous figure peers up at me from inside the box. They are in a magazine. Their expressionless face is framed in a tight headshot. Silver mirrored sunglasses – the lenses perfect circles – obscure their eyes. In the lenses, the headless body of the photographer is twice reflected: the camera on a white tripod stands out against the photographer’s body clothed in black, a red scarf falls over one shoulder. The model has ash blonde hair in a shapeless, mid-length cut. It forms a halo around their round face, ending lightly on their shoulders. A black leather collar sits on their neck, which is covered by a black turtleneck jumper. The silver buckle of the collar rests on their right clavicle. On the left clavicle rests a loop of silver chain, which runs from the collar up to a shining silver pulley that sits to the left of the subject’s head. The chain runs through a ring on the pulley, which is attached to thick silver wire that bisects the photograph in a taught line. The chain loops down, up to the pulley, and falls vertically out of shot. You could pick up the end of the chain and walk – the chain would pull the pulley and the person. When you started walking there would be a lot of slack to be taken up first, on the chain, on the collar. But after a few seconds, the person would face a choice: yield and walk, or stand firm and feel the increasing pressure on the right side of their neck from your strength channelled through the chain. You could be in a battle of wills for a moment. Or for several moments strung together. But the collar marks the subject’s consent to the contest. Or to walk between the two points the thick silver wire connects.

**

Postmarked 9/7/1975

A postcard of the painting The Peaceable Kingdom by Quaker preacher and folk painter Edward Hicks. A dark frame encloses an ensemble of exotic animals who gather on the edge of large lake, or river. On the top of the frame A Gentle Spirit is written in a yellow font, the name of an exhibition of Hicks’s work (and the catalogue) mounted in 1975 at the Andrew Crispo Gallery. Mountains rise out of the light grey water. On the shore, between the animals and the water, stand old trees, their leaves a translucent orange, suggesting an autumn gathering. The animals have two postures: they stand in profile or look directly out of the frame. On the right hand side, a male lion is half present in the scene: his front legs and beautiful mane are deep brown, contrasting with the bright white of his jaw. His hind quarters are cut off by the edge of the card. Behind him, an ox lowers its head in profile a tuft of grass in its mouth. Large curved horns scoop back towards its broad scapula, its neck hidden by the head of the lion. The body of the ox is white with reddish-brown patches. The animals in profile are slotted three deep; lion, ox, black bear. Spread out from this triptych of animals, towards the centre of the image, is a gathering: a red bull, a sheep, a wolf. A yellow leopard with spots lounges gracefully in the foreground. A tiger stands nearby. The proportions of these two big cats is completely off: the leopard’s body preposterously long. Attempting to compensate for its companion’s fantastical length, the tiger is stubby and short. Behind the compact squared-off tiger, a cow in profile is led by an equally out of proportion human figure: either a child, or a shrunken adult, dressed in white and red robes. This person stands out in front of the menagerie, out-numbered and impossible.

Hicks painted many versions of The Peaceable Kingdom in his life. This is the last one he painted before he died in 1849.

On the other side of the postcard, in big child-like writing, a missive from Jay.

Dear Jed,

Met a friend of yours Thomas Ammann, is very nice. Hope you come to paris soon, have so many new friends to show to you for inspection. One is particularly beautiful. Lots of sales, nice clothes, bad wheather, but having fun fun. Tom is working a lot, me a little. At Hotel Crystal 24 Rue Saint-Benoit Paris, 6th. Rm 9.

Love Jay & Tom

Love to Andy, Nana, Archie, Amos.

Ten years after this exhibition, after Jay sent this postcard from Paris, Andrew Crispo was implicated in the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti, ‘a handsome young fashion student from Norway’ (as he was described by the New York Times). This murder was known as the ‘death mask murder’: Vesti was found wearing a leather hood, commonly used in BDSM play. In 1996, a true-crime book was written about the case, titled Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal and the Death Mask Murder. Reviewed in the New York Times it is described as ‘plenty titillating, let the reader beware. It may be a page-turner, but it’s a stomach-turner, too. [The author] doesn’t stint on gruesome detail.’

**

What might this trip through six three-dimensional panels (six cardboard boxes) tell us about objects and intimacy and life writing? If we think of interiorities as inner-worlds, you have probably learnt more about mine than Warhol’s. The path I have traced through the boxes is one that follows my (pre)existing interest in subcultures, queer life writing, and ephemera. We cannot draw any concrete conclusions, should we be so inclined, about Warhol’s psychology, the nature of his relationships, or what meaning these objects and the people who brought them had for him. What we can do is enter an interior – a physical space within the larger institution of The Andy Warhol Museum – that the work creates. In remediating Time Capsules in this essay, I remediate that interior into a different one, one guided by my ‘I’ and one that, in terms of method, tries to render the intra-activity of matter (Barad 2007), and which tries to respond to what Flatley describes as Warhol’s use of material excess to make art that generates ‘a space in which otherwise obscured affects could come into being’ (2017, 140). Thus, ultimately, the Time Capsules create an interior that ‘does not produce specific affective response so much as … clear space for any affect to occur’ (141). Through the motely, seemingly unending framing of objects without narrative, we are invited to become attuned to the non-narrative, ephemeral modes of intimacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia. Their research focus is contemporary forms of life narrative, with a particular interest in youth cultures, ephemera (both digital and analogue) and the role of mediation and materiality in autobiography. Their publications include Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Kate Douglas, 2016), and Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online (co-edited with Julie Rak, 2014). Their next book, Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book, explores autobiography and mediation and is forthcoming from New York University Press in 2020.

Notes

1 569 of the containers are cardboard boxes. Other containers in the work include several two-drawer filing cabinets, and one large steamer trunk.

2 The Archives department at the museum can only support researchers for a maximum of five days, thus there are resource limits on any attempt to read the work, in addition to limits imposed by Warhol’s use of scale and form.

3 See for example, Koestenbaum’s discussion of ‘[T]he unopened time capsule – its stories inaccessible until the seal is violated’ in Andy Warhol (Koestenbaum 2001, 167).

4 While they are referred to in numerous entries as reference material, there is no entry for the Time Capsules in the current volumes of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisoneé (vol. 1–5). The final volume is under preparation.

5 For example: ‘I worked at home in those days. My house was on four floors, including a living area in the basement where the kitchen was and where my mother lived with a lot of cats, all named Sam. (My mother had shown up one night at the apartment where I was living with a few suitcases and shopping bags, and she announced she’d left Pennsylvania for good “to come live with my Andy.” I told her okay, she could stay, but just until I got a burglar alarm’ (Warhol and Hackett 1981, 5)).

6 See also Alexander (1994, 3–11, 85–89, 176–180) for details of Warhol’s death and the subsequent investigations and decisions regarding his post-operative care.

7 See Jonathan Flatley’s discussion of how ‘attempts to find stable ground from which to determine the real Warhol obscure his actual practices, whose queer appeal and queer effects vanish under this identificatory gaze’ (2017, 34).

8 ‘You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish. I certainly wasn’t a butch kind of guy by nature, but I must admit, I went out of my way to play up the other extreme.’ (Warhol and Hackett 1981, 12–13).

9 Jed Johnson met Warhol doing odd-jobs in The Factory and went on to become a renowned interior designer in the United States. Johnson’s development as a designer is described as an act of ‘self-defense’ when, ‘[i]n 1968 he moved in with … Andy Warhol and had to deal with the vast collection of everything acquired by the legendary, compulsive shopper or be buried by it’ in Jed Johnson: Opulent Restraint (Callahan and Cashin 2005, 20).

10 ‘During this period I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who’s let me and who wouldn’t’ (Warhol and Hackett 1981, 294).