NYLON, Feb. 09

"I've always thought of the U.S. as the epitome of disposable culture, so I'm proud to alleviate some of that."
-Interview with Deborah Brosenne, founder of the fashion line, Triple 5 Soul

http://nylonmag.com

Consumerism

Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Boxes, 1964

plywood boxes with serigraph and acrylic
boxes: 43.2 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm each
Purchased 1967
National Gallery of Canada (no. 15298.1-8)

"I want to be a machine."

Fueled by the New York scene and central to Pop art, Warhol generated his own celebrity as well as massive amounts of artwork. Not only did he produce Brillo at his studio, known as The Factory, but also numerous series of prints, films, and music.

Andy Warhol shocked people with his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, coupled with such provocative statements as: "The reason I'm painting this way is because I want to be a machine." By taking his imagery from advertising and the mass media, Warhol attacked the separation of art from mass culture. Unlike the corrugated cardboard originals represented in "Brillo", these sculptures are made of wood. By making the cartons non-functional and uprooting them from their ordinary context, Warhol forces us to look at them freshly. They comment on the way that commercial packaging transforms a mundane, household product into a glamorous, desirable commodity. Warhol also focuses our attention on the significance of these objects as representatives of the impersonal, commercialized consumer society in which we live.

Source: CyberMuse

An Explanation?

"Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn't it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that's the short view. What are roots and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons. Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply. Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings. Only when agriculture came into practice - and that's not very long ago in terms of the whole history - did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else."

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley