This week I learned of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules and they’ve been on my mind for days. In 1974, Warhol—something of a hoarder—was in the process of transferring studios. Warhol wanted to save money, so instead of hiring movers, he told his assistants to start sorting and packing. In an effort to avoid cleaning up an endless mess, one of the assistants had a better idea.
"He suggested to Andy that they start putting everything in these boxes, and they could call them 'time capsules' and he could work on them forever. And he did. He thought that was a great idea,"
An incredible rebrand, to aid the very man who reframed branding as a form of art. The Time Capsules looked a lot like cardboard moving boxes, but instead of unpacking them at the new studio, the contents were kept together and preserved. Once sealed, they were shipped to a storage in New Jersey, where they remained untouched.
The accumulation side of the project continued until his death in 1987. Catalogers at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh began unpacking the boxes in 1991, finally unsealing the last one in 2014. Some websites claim there were 610, 612, or 621 boxes, with around 300,000 items. Warhol didn’t just toss stuff together, many boxes were filled with a specific theme, even if some through lines aren’t clear to the public decades later. He created a box for his mother, with Christmas ornaments, a plastic carrot bag (she was known to reuse them), socks, underplants, a single earring, an unused Easter card.
Many of the boxes are filled with correspondence: imagine your email inbox and DMs in physical form. Postcards from Mick Jagger’s wife, overdue dentist bills, letters from Edie Sedgwick, photos from friends in Paris and Italy. Warhol received fan mail too, including a set of anonymous nail clippings.
I can’t stop thinking about these boxes for three main reasons:
We don’t have the same paper trail today. Our ability to open these boxes, to hold a cat shaped postcard or a strip of film, feels remarkable now. Back then, we were a lot more in touch with our imprint on the world: the space we occupy, the materials entangled in our existence. 621 boxes amounted to just 13 years of Warhol’s life. While he maintained an outsized scope of communication for his time, we are now all capable of that reach.