Warhol · Method 9 of 12
Commodity Iconography
1962 onward
The method
The Soup Cans are the work everyone knows and the work it is hardest to see. Too much irony has collected on them. What they actually do, in a room, is treat a mass-produced object with the visual seriousness the still-life tradition reserved for fruit on a table. The soup can is not being mocked. It is being looked at the way an icon is looked at — frontally, repeatedly, at the height of the face, with no modeling shadow to suggest it occupies space in the usual sense. Warhol understood that the religious object and the supermarket object had arrived at the same visual language by different routes, and he declined to choose which one the painting was about. For Vela, the relevance is adjacent: the body, too, is an object that our culture produces in bulk and asks us to look at without seeing. Commodity iconography is the method for seeing again what repetition has worn smooth.
Process
The packaging of a mass-market consumer good — a soup can label, a detergent carton, a glass-bottle silhouette — reproduced with silkscreen or sculpted in painted plywood, at scale, without irony of handling. The commodity is given the compositional weight of a devotional object.
Canonical works
- Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)
- Brillo Boxes (1964)
- Coca-Cola bottles (1962)
- Dollar Signs (1981)
The Vela take
The Vela take: the commodity is not our subject; the body is. We catalog the method descriptively and do not re-enact it on Vela's figures.
Off-brief
Death and Disaster and Commodity Iconography are catalogued here as part of Warhol's full practice but are not reinterpreted by Vela. The first is outside Vela's brief — our subject is the living body, and the method is built on the circulation of images of the dead. The second is adjacent — our subject is the body, not the commodity. Both are described so the essay does not pretend they were not made.
Vela reinterprets ten of Warhol's twelve methods. This one is catalogued for the record and left unreinterpreted. It is not a technical limitation.