Automated Andy's Cybernated Factory

This paper argues that situating Andy Warhol’s work within 1960s debates on automation reveals its queer, utopian, and anti-work dimensions. Period commentators such as Gardner Ackley cast the new technology as both “threat and promise”: while some feared mass unemployment, others envisioned a universal basic income and abundance of supply sufficient to undo capitalism itself. Warhol’s Factory mirrored the packaging factories John Diebold celebrated as the only actually existing instance of the technology circa the late 1950s, churning out Brillo boxes and bottle labels. The photo-timeline at the center of Stanley Lehrer’s 1966 volume Automation, Education, and Human Values parallels the unfolding of Warhol’s iconography with surprising exactness: both begin with early-twentieth-century Bell candlestick telephones and move towards homogenized food products. But beyond allegorizing automation, the Factory functioned as a laboratory for imagining the “promise” of post-work futures. Works such as the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, a proposed “Andy-Mat” automat restaurant, and a 1962 pseudo-interview on automation with Gerard Malanga all probe how mechanized and cybernetically managed production might suspend the work ethic and open space for new, queer modes of being and relating. Via automation, Warhol explored alternatives to both capitalist productivity and heterosexist reproductivity as defining measures of value. Today, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” (to borrow an internet meme) remains unrealized. But Warhol’s engagement with automation discourse serves as a useful reminder of the radical demands that can be made in the face of the collapse of engrained models of human meaningfulness.