WARHOL’S SOUP CAN paintings differ from Joe Brainard’s quasi-autobiographical literary projects in obvious ways. The former works reproduce an impersonal, reductive, industry-derived iconography. The latter texts depict an idiosyncratic, detail-oriented, homemade subjectivity. Yet the affinities between Pop-painting and Pop-poem quickly manifest once Pop art’s rhetorical processes get surveyed—as with John Coplans’ phenomenological account (in his 1970 essay, “Early Warhol: The Systematic Evolution of the Impersonal Style”) of viewers’ initial response to a characteristic Warhol canvas:
“The imagery that Warhol finally selects is in the range of charged, tough notions that in [Robert] Rauschenberg’s work, for example, become transformed by painterly handling. Warhol’s imagery is transformed … but the crucial issue is that the transformation is not immediately apparent. More immediate to the viewer is that the painting looks as disposable as the original it is modeled from: something to be thrown away, or the cheapest kind of advertising, of no value except as a message to sell.”
