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Andy Warhol and the Silver Factory / Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred & The Profane
Andy Warhol and the Silver Factory / Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred & The Profane
Readings on the urban commune and cosmic surrounding of the central divinity
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The Silver Factory
Andy Warhol and the Silver Factory
Abalos Inaki’s ‘the good life’
In Inaki’s the good life, he wrote that within the space of the Warhol’s Silver Factory; one can imagine the blending of the ideas of Freud and Marx which was undertaken by Wilhelm Reich ‘s The Sexual Revolution (1945) which analyzed the problems of everyday life in the communes of revolutionary Russian. It gave rise to a typology of lifestyle in American, which developed a new technique of living by appropriation of industrial spaces. Andy Warhol was not interested in Marx, Freud or Reich as well as the contemporary communeal movement as a whole, but still created The Factory as a lifestyle of seducation and glamour by architectonic terms.
Warhol welcomes his visitors into the space of openness, which translated into a form of domesticity of the enjoyment which minimal initiation is necessary. A place of party and work, a collaboration and production and a space which is its own machinery in the production of art and creativity to museums and masses. Warhol have subconsciously developed and decontextualized the ideas of the European avant-gardes, setting up The Factory as like many others in attempts to set up the urban communes. The Atompshere of constant partying and creative work, Inaki thought that we could recognize the spirit of the Situationist manifestos on the creative construction of the individual.
Warhol uses the loft to give meaning to a new sense of space for accidental collaborative nature, an unintentional creation of the idea of co-living/working within a spatial condition. And a note that although it’s called a co-living space, essentially they do not sleep in there, and Warhol goes back to his Mother’s house to sleep.
A typical party night in Warhol’s Silver Factory
Space of collecive production, The Silver Factory
Influence of the Silver Factory;
Counterculture The communal space was unintendedly developed by Warhol through the usage of The Silver Factory as a collective collaboration for production of the ‘spectacularities’, but not a space for sleep – as discussed in ‘The good life’. In this instance, where the project will counterculture the idea of self-production within the isolated environment like the home; and bring different fields of people together as an collective collaboration entity. This is further engage by bringing the community together to further enhance the collective production of the spectacular space, by involving the community into the production process.
Anti-authoritarianism The spatial development of the project also materialised the anti-authoritarianism process through the building of bottom up process, the construction of the architecture of production from the community up. Similar to what Marx developed where the commune is the logical way of habiting in a state of crisis, the project envision the community taking control of the collective production – separated from the authoritarianism control. The project then becomes the deconstruction of the foundations of classical humanism through community-production analysis.
The tribe In ‘The good life’, the tribe was a form of elective kinship based on mutual aid, hospitality, need, and friendship in protest against a callous society as formulated by Inaki. The project will also bring together like minded people of different fields, or communities that require different collaboration to achieve the final production together, in a singular spatial cosmos where these are celebrated through the continuity process of production and engagement. The group of people or the communities then becomes under one banner as the peg community, through the single specularity space.
The plan of the Silver Factory, drawn by ETH Zurich
Analysing the plan of the Silver Factory;
The silver factory developed from not thinking about acquiring huge spaces in abandoned industrial and commercial buildings but rather to snatch up a space of low rents, and organised themselves in a most unusual way invented in the 20th century. The New York loft now turns to a formula for thinking, building and inhabiting an archetype of the contemporary house. The New York loft selling point is that its rented at very low prices, set up in an industrial space or warehouse in a central but economically depressed location, and in white the private and work environment are in principle combined without any break in continuity. The alluring romanticism of getting a New York loft space depends on the collective or individual income, as well as any kind of creative interests or social commitments of the resident or residents. It is also an affirmation of belonging to a particular community, opening up new social codes of parties and social gathering as a communal aspect within the space. All these came as a result of the ideology on appropriation, which could also be presented as the integration of present and past within the context.
The Warholian in moving his home and studio to buildings and city areas abandoned by the speculative dynamic sees the opportunity to appropriate the city and insists on all the values which is of positivism. This act was seen as a revival of urban memory through the rejection of tabula rasa and the embrace of urban context. While in the house of Arpels, everything was subject to regulation and vigilance, in the Warholian loft there is no order or surveillance. It can be occupied by anyone seen as the tribe, which also does not holds any impositions or habits on others. As Warhol says; “I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things…”, the factory itself could be seen as a castoff, a recycled industrial building that becomes an object through spatial appropriation – to reproduced and recycled into beings.
The mother’s room that Andy Warhol slept in
A day in the Silver Factory
From the bedroom to the New York Loft;
The Warholian in moving his home and studio to buildings and city areas abandoned by the speculative dynamic sees the opportunity to appropriate the city and insists on all the values which is of positivism. This act was seen as a revival of urban memory through the rejection of tabula rasa and the embrace of urban context. While in the house of Arpels, everything was subjected to regulation and vigilance, in the Warholian loft there is no order or surveillance. It can be occupied by anyone part of the tribe, which also does not hold any impositions or habits. The factory itself could be seen as a castoff, a recycled industrial building that becomes an object through spatial appropriation – to reproduce and recycle into beings.
It becomes an alluring romanticism of co-habitation and co-working within the space depends on the collective or individual, as well as any kind of creative interests or social commitments of the resident or residents. It is also an affirmation of belonging to a particular community, opening up new social codes of parties and social gathering as a communal aspect within the space. All these came as a result of the ideology on appropriation, which could also be presented as the integration of present and past within the context.
Rem Koolhaas / Madelon Vriesendorp in The City of the Captive Globe Project, New York, 1972
Rem Koolhaus Delirious in New York, 1972
From Freudo-Marxist communes to the New York Loft
Rem Koolhaas once tried to describe the cosmopolitan New York lifestyle in his Delirious New York (1978), which is based on the surge of more progressive and irrational tendencies in the city. The idea of Manhattanism had already produced the grand residential hotel in the 1930s, a new form of life as avant-grade as it was frivolous. Although he dissected the main properties that made up New York, and have tried to include the fantasies that created the conditions which maps out the cityscape; he woulvd not have known that there is a particular phenomenon being reproduced in the lofts of SoHo, which Andy Warhol became the chief object of desire. The existing city, New York, is the natural environment of the inhabitants of the Warholian loft – yet the maximum expression of the cosmopolitan, New York is built by appropriating everything that seemed attractive and interesting in the modern world. A city that Rem Koolhaas was putting together like a great celebration of the city, and by appropriate them, to be endowed with new beauty.
The streets might be the only thing that modern urbanism wishes to suppress, an experimental drift through the streets so as to constructs a subjective psychogeolograhy of the existing city is another way to appropriate the city through the reverse understand of the urban context as traffic. Warhol did not just wanted to appropriate the SoHo areas, but also wanted to extent its ideology to public space which is the whole city. A perfect consumerist which he appropriates counterculture techniques and aesthetics in return for the perverse and sophisticated decontextualisation of the cosmopolitan.
Simon Sadler The Situationist City, 1998
Guy Debord in TheNaked City, a Psychogeographical map of Paris, 1957
Guy Debord wrote the situationists’ most influential manifesto of ideas under the title Society of the Spectacle (1967). The main concept behind the manifesto is that mass media and advertising create an artificial reality in which true everyday existence is hidden behind. This artificial reality Debord called the Spectacle. As a way of reacting to this dominance over society by the media, the situationists developed methods for everyday experimentation, the most notable being psychogeography. Guy Debord defined the term Psychogeography as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
The Situation derive - an experimental drifting through the streets so as to construct a subjective psychogeography of the existing city - is nothing other than a practice that reclaims the existing city. The practice of reclaims the city of memory and subjective experience, the city devalued and currently nearing extinction, as a revolutionary framework against the determining factors of the objectivist modern city.
The situationists also used maps, making alterations to them in order to help instigate unpredictable trajectories. Debord himself produced a map in 1957 under the title The Naked City. The plan of Paris is cut up and divided into 19 sections that are randomly placed back together. The users of the map choose their own route through the city by using a series of arrows that link parts of the city together. Other experiments with maps existed including one undertaken by a friend of Debord who wandered through a region of Germany whilst following directions from a map of London. The situationists encompassed other intellectual devices into their walks for example, when they were manoeuvring within the landscape they would try to be aware of how their surroundings could be used to draw them toward the past. Cities were seen as historical landscapes, whose structure and appearances were shaped by temporal events that were buried but never completely erased.
Arunta Tribe and the Sacred Totem
Phallic Woship of sacred pillars
Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred & The Profane Sacred Space and making the World Sacred
Consecration of a Place, Repetition of the cosmogony;
Mircea talks about the understanding of cosmicization of unknown territories, to organise a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods. He cited references of nomadic Australians like the Arunta Tribe, the Achill, as groups of people that understand the importance of cosmicized territories through the understanding of axis which dictated the areas surrounding it as habitable, hence transforming into the world. The idea of the axis creating the boundary around a point ties to the idea of imaginary sacred and the creation of the cult around the sacred.
For the pole to be broken denotes catastrophe - this example illustrates both the cosmological function of the axis and its soteriological role. Establishment in a particular place, organising it, inhabiting it, are acts that presuppose an existential choice - the choice of the universe that one is prepared to assume by ‘creating’ it. Until their conversion to Christianity, the Celts and Germans sill maintained their worship of sacred pillars – In the town of Eresburg, it was recorded that Charlemagne destroyed the temple and the sacred wood of the famous Irminsul during the war against the Saxons (772), and adds that this famous pillar is the ‘pillar of the universe which as it were, supports all things”
The analysis of these readings brings the understanding of the urban context surrounding the project, why it should be in a city and not outside, why should it be a tower and not a low building, why should it be seen as a spectacle and not as part of the city skyline. The readings supports on how the tower, a singular entity of collective production acts like the axis of the city or the urban context – informing the areas around as the habitable space of production; but the tower provides the mixture of different disciplines, a vortex of different members of the society to come together and produce the spectacular production as a tribe. As the collective production goes higher in the tower, the amount of spectacular production increases as more different fields of entity get mashed up as an collective collaboration. This becomes a spectacular production itself as the production moves on to the celebration of its final completion.
