[11/15/25] Cunningham, Paul: Brillo

Did Andy Warhol sell his soul to the white cube? Paul Cunningham threshes the rim between Warhol’s shallow surface and Paul Thek’s “viscous interiority.” The brand-names (Thek, Warhol, Brillo) are re-pressed, re-touched, and un-boxed as art history unfolds through the gaze of a “worm-like eye.” Some context —in 1964, Warhol debuted his Brillo boxes at Stable gallery to the stupefied critical response: “Shit.” Warhol appropriated the 1961 commercial design of James Harvey, who was also an Ab-ex painter. Warhol famously stole from art history and commercial media but also, more discreetly, from his fellow artists (borrowing the term “superstar” from Jack Smith). Reversing the exchange, Warhol also let himself be stolen from. In 1965, he lent a silkscreen to Sturtevant for her series of “Warhol Flowers.” In that same year, he donated a Brillo Box to Paul Thek for his “Meat Piece with Warhol’s Brillo Box.” Simultaneously, Donald Judd was exhibiting his minimalist cubes. Judd, Warhol, and Thek seem to stage a contest: who can be the fullest-emptiest? The religious parallel is clear: both plerosis (filling) and kenosis (purging) must be achieved before reaching God. Paul Cunningham decrypts the cubes, only to uncover a “flesh of code” and a “cryptography of open pores” that cannot be wormed through. The cubes align in a cabinet of curiosities that becomes Cunningham’s own memento mori. Will the void made flesh become spirit? Or will we all rot away in self-consumption…

— Felix Bernstein, author of Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry

Paul Cunningham’s Brillo is not unlike the living presence of what is sourced by concrete poetry. Its living energy and visual identity traces back to Apollinare’s Calligrammes and the Brazilian heritage that stems from the modern Manifesto sired by Augusto de Campos.

— Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light

Brillo is a shimmering, disenchanted love letter to surface. Channeling Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, it explores a world where “repetition is not failure—it’s fashion,” and “the surface is where the violence is.” The author “wears language like a suit that no longer fits,” his voice entranced and exhausted. Echoing Jesus—“Eat, this is my body”—the book offers itself as object and offering. In the spirit of Sontag’s Camp—“its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”—Brillo becomes its own spectacle. “The box is blank but branded. Like me.” Beautiful, brutal, and impossible to look away from, it performs its own undoing.

—Valerie Mejer Caso, author of Rain of the Future

Less an ekphrastic exercise than ecstatic experience, Brillo is the transgressive account of one Paul possessing another, as a demon is said to possess a human body. This poem is a panoptical shadowbox, a butcher’s “artifact of / devotion,” in which Cunningham shadowboxes Thek, who’d visited the Palermo catacombs before wadding War-hole’s carton with viscera. Each page is a screen-printed poster, which seems to pair Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial—its cerecloths and sepulchers, the “deformity of death”—with fashion designer Thom Browne’s signature navy, white, and red. The ear here can see, the eyes hear. Fresh is a letter asunder from flesh. Meat has already ingested the verb to eat.

— Andrew Zawacki, author of These Late Eclipses