Brillo

Brillo

“Brillo-shaped / block / fragment / of life / locked behind / a window / artifact of devotion” What does it mean to “see the old face in the altered one”? Taking his cues from Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing-in,’ Paul Cunningham’s Brillo is more than a poet’s meditation on Paul Thek’s 1965 “Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box,” it’s a perception-expanding experiment that challenges readers to become spectators—to visualize poet as painter. Just as Thek signed his letters to his friend Susan Sontag as “Vincent” (after Van Gogh), Cunningham, navigating the psychology of advertising, leaves a different kind of signature on a box of—a book of—questions concerning the art market, the meatpacking industry, mechanical reproduction, visual modernity, and Catholicism. Brillo might not be the answer to the (sin)ewy riddle oozing inside Thek’s pop art reliquary, but, like the knife-sharp clouds of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, this box/book might force you to look in directions you’ve never dared to before. As Andy Warhol once said: “Art is what you can get away with.”