Dreaming Systems: Andy

Dreaming Systems is not only about technical systems.

It is also about the emotional landscapes surrounding them: belonging, reinvention, repetition, status, surfaces, and the strange feeling that reality itself has become slightly synthetic.

Which is why we need to talk about Andy Warhol.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: at the beginning of the twentieth century, a center of the American steel industry. Mines and steelworks attract immigrants from all over the world.

In 1928, in a working-class neighborhood, a small boy is born - the third son of Eastern European parents who had arrived in the country only a few years earlier.

His father dies when the boy is fourteen. His mother never properly learns English.

The small boy in Pittsburgh is an outsider at school, but discovers his talent for drawing early on. He is frequently bedridden due to illness and has only his mother for company, who brings him comics and drawing materials.

His mother is artistically gifted as well - she supplements the household income by selling tin flowers, embroidering, and painting Easter eggs with traditional Slavic motifs.

The boy imagines how he will one day become a successful artist.

And under what name: Andy Morningstar.

“I always wanted to change my name,”

he later writes in his diary, in 1984.

“When I was little I was going to take ‘Morningstar,’ Andy Morningstar. I thought it was so beautiful.”

The boy who bore his father’s name - Andrej Warhola - moved from Pittsburgh to New York and spent the rest of his life there. A few years later, his mother followed him.

Andy Warhol did not call himself Andy Morningstar. Only once, in 1954, did he sign a painting with that name.

Contemporaries report that Warhol’s mother Julia, even at an advanced age, still served visitors homemade soups and stews with cabbage and potatoes according to the recipes of her homeland.

These were not the soups he painted.

Instead, he became famous through paintings of an industrial mass-produced product: Campbell’s Condensed Soup. In Andy’s childhood, affordable only to the middle class, not to a working-class family like the Warholas.

A symbol of America, which for Andy and his family was still new territory: they had entered it, but did not truly belong to it.

Instead of standing out through strange soups and strange customs, Andy used technology to reproduce the beautiful, smooth face of the new land again and again, barely altered. Without personal commentary, and seemingly without the artist’s individual hand through which something of the self is always revealed.

Instead, he shifted toward an almost industrial production method for his art: silkscreen printing.

The same applies to his eight-hour film Empire from 1964: a static shot of the Empire State Building, a symbol of American strength and power. No commentary, no plot, no personal story.

Almost obsessively, Andy filmed and photographed people and recorded their voices on tape. Not only for art projects, but also at parties and while spending time with friends. He referred to his portable cassette recorder as his “wife”: he and the device were inseparable, and perhaps it served as a kind of shield for a man who loved men and had grown up in a time when that still meant trouble with the law.

Once, I saw Warhol’s Brillo Boxes in a museum: painted wooden crates deceptively resembling packages of the American detergent Brillo. Hundreds of them exist worldwide, and every now and then a few are loosely stacked in some museum.

The Brillo Boxes date from 1964. By then, Warhol was already commercially successful - consumer products like Campbell’s Soup and Brillo had long since entered his reach in daily life.

Standing before the boxes, I sensed their bewilderment.

As if the artist were saying to me: “I achieved what I wanted. I have money and success, I belong now. And now what?”

The same feeling is conveyed by his work Roll of Bills - a commentless drawing of a bundle of dollar bills.

One has arrived in the new land, even become a respected citizen of it - and now what? What was all of this for?

Roll of Bills looks as though Warhol carefully drew this question across 100 by 70 centimeters and then hung it in the room for the viewer:

What was all of this for?

I saw the same bewilderment in some of the people who became rich very quickly through crypto speculation or other schemes: the money is there, but it arrived so suddenly and from such an unreal source that it does not feel real itself.

And now what?

The technical systems had not warned them that this might happen.

“Machines have less problems,”

Warhol is said to have remarked once.

“I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”