Raiding the Icebox

©Lisa Barnard

Two things caught my eye today. A great post by my friend Professor Skip Rizzo from The Institute of creative Technologies in Los Angeles, and Peter Wollen's great book called 'Raiding the Lightbox', which I was reading as part of my research into an Andy Warhol project I am working on with the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. The article that Skip posted was written by Robert Reich and called 'Safety on the Cheap'. A familiar yet important rant from Reich on the relation between large corporation, profiteering and safety. The quality of the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan have been questioned and are the concern for Reich and indeed for all of us interested in the connection between politics, capitalism and everyday life. Quite rightly, he ends up drawing comparisons between the Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Hallibuton's involvement with that disaster and the quality of the cement used in the wells that prevent blow outs.

On reflection, what came to mind was Deck Cheney. On further reflection I remembered Naomi Klein's brilliant and distressing book 'The Shock Doctrine' and the rest is history or is it?!

'Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol' was an exhibition held by Warhol in 1969 at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Arts' after he was invited to raid/research the permanent collection and arrange/or not, the eclectic mix of items in various installations around the space. To create, in fact, a new archive or new display of those items that he was drawn to. Of particular interest to him were a collection of Windsor Chairs which he stacked in a corner, the result of which can be seen below.


Installation of Windsor chairs, from "Raid the Icebox With Andy Warhol," exhibition at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, April 23 - June 30, 1970

In Wollen's 'Raiding the Icebox' the connection is drawn between Henry Ford's production line of 1908, the avant-gardists and radical subcultures of the 20th-century, consumerism and how the most powerful artists of the 20th century endeavored to redraw the line between high and low art. The period he reflects on is the time when capitalism was at its most fervent prior to the Great Depression starting in 1928 on Black Tuesday, through to Andy Warhol and Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'.

The connections are there, I promise. Capitalism is the key and innovation and catastrophe is part of the answer.

This is an exciting time for photography - new technology, revolution, financial and political crisis..... The early 20th century was the most important time for creativity - failed and successful revolutions, fordism, mass production, the great depression of 1928, new technology..... Artists sort new ways to be activists and developed different ideas to experience and produce art. New technology allowed the blurring of high and low art. We are there again, the creative revolution and photography as at the forefront....bring it on!

On even further reflection, I though of two great photographers featuring an Icebox -of sorts- in their work.



(Freezer) Memphis, Tennessee, early 70's by William Eggleston



Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mario, 1978