andy warhol

Andy Warhol: Invisible Sculpture

In The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol mentions that his Invisible Sculpture was on display at the New York club, Area, on Wednesday, May 8, 1985. (AWD648) However, according to Ronnie Cutrone, an Invisible Sculpture had earlier been done by himself and Warhol as an installation at the Factory during the years that Cutrone worked for Warhol as his painting assistant (1972 - 1983).

Ronnie Cutrone :

"Andy wanted to make the Invisible Sculpture. I don't know what the inspiration for that was. He may have watched 'The Invisible Man' one night on television. So, again, we got out the Yellow Pages and found burglar alarms, different systems. Some with sound, some with light beams. They were all different looking and sculptural because they had different shapes and different systems. We mounted these burglar alarms on brackets all around the perimeter of the big room in the middle of the Factory, which was by then referred to not as the Factory but as Andy Warhol Studios. And we aimed them all at the center of the room where nothing existed.

If you walked into the room and you hit this center point, all of these alarms would go off. You'd have every different kind of sound; chirping, booming, buzzing. It was funny. But it was also a kind of existential abstract question: If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?... It was a brilliant conceptual work but also very physical because we actually had the mechanical alarms. It was like a kinetic sculpture in some way: a sound sculpture, a light sculpture. But there was nothing there; it was totally invisible...

The Invisible Sculpture stayed up for a long time, but it was experimental really. We only had it activated for maybe a month. It used to drive Fred crazy; it was almost like a practical joke. Andy and I would drag somebody in and say, 'This is the new art; go stand in the middle of the room.' And they would, and all the sirens would go off. Then Fred would come and say, 'Andy, I'm on the phone.' Or Brigid would yell. Everybody would yell because Andy and I were constantly having people walk into this imaginary space." (UW66)
Andy Warhol

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