The Implied Rummager: Reading Intimate Interiors in Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules

Abstract

This article takes the form of a speculative reading of a selection of objects and cardboard boxes from Andy Warhol’s monumental artwork, Time Capsules (1974–1984) based on research on the Time Capsules undertaken at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2014. The Time Capsules consists of 612 containers (most of them identical cardboard boxes) filled with objects from Warhol’s life. In this article, I draw on comics studies, queer theory, and the theory of autographics to consider how and why the Time Capsules might be read as an artwork that stages an encounter with intimate interiors. These intimate interiors are multiple: spanning the materiality of the work itself, the enclosure of mementos, objects, and ephemera within the mundane autobiographical technology of the cardboard box, and the reader’s own interior world which they must draw on to find a path through the vast array of objects that make up the work. The reading offered in this article follows the trace of affect and intimate relationality – sexuality, familial relations, friendships and love – across the work. It argues that the Time Capsules powerfully demonstrate the role of objects in the construction, maintenance and memorialisation of intimate connections.