Beyond the Brillo Box: The Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola Bottle.
(On Andy Warhol, Oldenburg, and the Pop Art movement...)
"What he (Andy Warhol) loved about American food, he said, was that it was always the same, so that the Queen of England could not get a better hot dog than anyone else. "A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking," he once wrote. "All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it and you know it." So repetition was integral to his vision, soup can after soup can after soup can, Marilyn after Marilyn, until the familiarity dissolves and we sense the miraculousness of the commonplace.
He once said, "The Pop artist did images that anyone walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second...all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all." It would then be the function of the labels he used that they be recognized in split second by everyone who used the supermarket or the hardware store, who lived the culture, something in connection with which not knowing what it was was a mark of total alienation. "Who is that?" asked of a movie actor's face, is the death of fame. "What is that?" asked of the American flag - or the hammer-and-sickle -- betrays the visitor from distant galaxies. Uniqueness is not sought-for attribute, since it entails a form of oblivion and hence non-reality.
The Abstract Expressionists were also sacramentalists, but chiefly as celebrants of paint. Paint symbolized paint for them. The paintiness of paint, its fluidity, its viscosity, the way it forms a skin, the way it wrinkles when it dries too thickly, the way it conceals and reveals, the way it pours, spatters, splashes, holds the hair marks of brushes - and the way it drips. Whatever they could dribble paint over became a work of art, the anything becomes holy when blessed.
Everything was painterly, dripped over, splashed on - as if they could not be considered art unless they were first and last made of paint.
Warhol's own breakthrough is legendary and has often been told. It was filmmaker Emile di Antonio who was the agent of conversion. Here are his won words:
One night [this was summer 1960], I went over and had a bunch of drinks and he put 2 large paintings next to each other against the wall. Usually he showed me his work more casually, so I realized this was a presentation. He had painted two pictures of Coke bottles about six feet tall. One was just a pristine black-and-white Coke bottle. The other had a lot of abstract expressionist marks on it. I said "Come on, Andy, the abstract one is a piece of shit, the other one is remarkable. It's our society, it's who we are, it's absolutely beautiful and naked and you ought to destroy the first one and show the other."
Coca Cola is "who we are": it is impossible not to hear the faint unmistakable Feuerbachian thesis in Di Antonio's spirited words: Man is what Man eats. We are soft drinks, canned soup, hamburgers, potato chips, sweet pickles, ice cream cones. We are Pop. We are not paint. From where the impulse arose, to colossalize the Coke bottle, is one of the deep questions in the social history of modern times. The Coke bottle is one of the classic shapes of modern sensibility, and archeologists of the future will surely see inscribed in its silhouette the narrow-waisted female form, and infer from its form its function, to hold some sweet elixir of arousal and fulfillment.
Warhol's intuition was that nothing an artist could do would give us more of what art sought than reality already gave us. So it was crucial that things be shown as they are, without shadows, perspective, chiaroscuro, touch, paint.
Pop redeemed the world in an intoxicating way. I have the most vivid recollection of standing at an intersection in some American city, waiting to be picked up. There were used-car lots on two corners, with swags of plastic pennants fluttering in the breeze and brash signs proclaiming unbeatable deals, crazy prices, insane bargains. There was a huge self-service gas station on the third corner, and a supermarket on the fourth, with signs in the window announcing sales of Del Monte, Cheerios, Land O Lakes butter, Ling Island ducklings, Velveeta, Sealtest, Chicken of the Sea...Heavy trucks roared past, with logos on their sides. Lights were flashing. The sound of raucous music flashed out of the windows of automobiles. I was educated to hate all this. I would have found it intolerably crass and tacky when I was growing up as aesthete. As late as my own times, beauty was, in the words of George Santayana, "a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night." I think it still is that for someone like Clement Greenberg or Hilton Kramer. But I thought, Good heavens. This is just remarkable!
Herbert Marcuse was my colleague. (...) He hated Garage Sale (by Martha Rossler). For him it celebrated the values of the bourgeoisie, when it ought instead, as he saw it, to be the mission of art to criticize these values. (...) He could not assimilate it (Garage Sale) to his own views on the moral agency of art, which were very largely Ruskinian. And I, on the other hand, was never able to grasp how aesthetic beauty was going to transform society into political utopia in which he believed, For one thing, I knew too many aesthetes who were moral monsters - how much good did beauty do them?
What Pop artists, what Warhol and Oldenburg, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist were saying was what I in effect spontaneously said at that anonymous intersection, wherever it was: This is remarkable. The Abstract Expressionist Coca Cola Bottle was in its own right marvelous emblem of the effort to make art out of ordinary signs, but, as Di Antonio saw, it was something of an artistic monster. Its drips and swipes of expressionistically used paint pointed in one direction, the iconography of the Coke bottle in another. It tried to fuse two artistic imperatives into one when in fact they contradicted each other. One imperative insisted on the difference between art and life and the other imperative insisted on their oneness. "I am for an art...that does something other thansit on its own ass in the museum," Oldenburg wrote, in one of the great manifestos. "I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero. I am for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap & still comes out on tip."
In any case, if these were a single work in the century I would like to own, it would be it, the Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola Bottle, with its visible tension between two philosophies of art, two philosophies of life, a battleground on which a war between the dear commonplace world an some other exalted, idealized world, begun with Plato in the dawn of metaphysics, continues to be waged."
On the 9th of November 2010, the Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby’s in New York sold Andy Warhol's "Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola" (1962), an acrylic, pencil and Letraset on canvas (81 3/4 x 56 3/4 in. 207.6 x 144.1 cm.) for $35,362,500.
Warhol's painting, which was the last of four paintings of individual Coca-Cola bottles executed in 1961 and 1962, and the largest of the group, was disputed by eight bidders.
