Andy Warhol: Time Capsule 21
by John W. Smith, Mario Kramer, and Matt Wrbican
Distributed Art Publishers
304 pages, $35.
BETWEEN September 2003 and February 2004, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, exhibited the carefully selected contents of fifteen of Andy Warhol’s 612 time capsules. Only one-sixth of these cardboard boxes, each containing up to 280 items, has been examined. This handsomely photographed, if cryptically annotated, exhibition catalog is the result, and it is a feast for any Warhol devotee. John W. Smith of the Andy Warhol Museum, who contributed one of the introductory essays, notes that the time capsules were virtually unknown until Warhol’s death in 1987. The first were the result of a 1974 move from Union Square West to Broadway. The contents of just the few boxes catalogued by archivists thus far, which contain everything from source images to business records, have had a dramatic impact on Warhol studies.
At one point shortly before his death, Warhol had thought of selling each time capsule for $5,000. Each was to contain one or more pieces of original art. As Warhol explained in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975), “What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month, lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. … I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes.” A popular website about the time capsules stated that some of the non-print items include a mummified, ancient Egyptian foot, pizza, and a piece of birthday cake from Caroline Kennedy’s sixteenth birthday.
The source material includes photobooth strips of Warhol’s friends, fellow artists, and newsmakers in the arts, such as dancer Edward Villella; scraps of newspaper reports of sordid crimes; scribbles and doodles of all sorts; and the detritus of daily life. Some of these items are a little mundane, such as envelopes and phone messages and a form letter to his mother from the Holy Trinity Monastery asking for a donation, but these are overshadowed by the good stuff. There’s a postcard to his mother from writer and Hollywood personality Mercedes de Acosta (who’d claimed to have had affairs with Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, among others), written in an almost unreadable, flowery script. There are multiple copies of the very first issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which began in 1969 and is still going strong. Matt Wrbican of the Andy Warhol Museum states in his essay that the magazine was first called Inter/View, “possibly meant as an homage to the American magazine of the 1940’s avant-garde, View, edited by Charles Henri Ford.”
Perhaps the most fascinating item in Time Capsule 21 is a hand-written, pen-and-ink illustrated letter from seventeen-year-old Lance Loud inviting Warhol to a party in late December 1968 at his family’s home in Santa Barbara. The self-abnegating letter reads in part, “I know I am a schmuck and a hanger on etc. […] You, to me, are everything I ever want to be […] To establish a link, however weak, would be the greatest thing that could ever happen to me, please, acknowledge me.” It was signed “your ever friend, Lance Loud.” In 1973, Lance and his family made history as the first reality TV stars on public television’s twelve-part series, “An American Family.” Before his death in 2001, Lance Loud went on to pose for Warhol, write for Interview (among many other major magazines), and hang out with Warhol and his crowd. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News (1/3/03), Loud had begun “writing incessantly” to Warhol from the time he was thirteen and had known long before his TV debut that he was gay. There is, not surprisingly, no carbon copy of any correspondence, at least in this time capsule, from Warhol to Loud.
For those of us who remain completely fascinated by the whole Warhol world and who are not satisfied with creating our own personal time capsules, there’s the Andy Warhol Pop Box, a grab-bag of over 20 quality reproductions of postcards, newspaper clippings, letters, photos, and more, along with a booklet putting it all into pop history context (published by Chronicle Books in 2002). Time Capsule 21 will be at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh from October 3, 2004 through January 2, 2005.
