“I just happen to like ordinary things,” said Andy Warhol.¹⁸ Moving from Pittsburgh to New York in 1949, Warhol worked for over a decade as a successful commercial artist. The fashionable shoe in the advertisement, he complained “was called a ‘creation’ but the drawing of it was not.”¹⁹ In Water Heater (1961),

he brought the commercial artist out of the shadows of representational invisibility, taking as his subject a boring black and white advertisement from the New York Daily News. Putting it on a canvas, he magnified its ordinariness. More than ordinary, his rendering is incomplete, messy with the paint dripping from the badly executed lettering. The ordinariness of the water heater is accentuated because it is – kind of – worse than ordinary.

Ten years later, the painting ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its insightfully exaggerated ordinariness. Warhol’s interest? It seems, to recover the overlooked work of the ordinary image maker in a world where not all image makers are equal. The so-ordinary advert on which the painting was based, whose artist and artistry – ironically perhaps – remains as invisible today as it was then. And perhaps also the water heater itself, and its user, and the maker of the water heater – to call attention to a network of ordinary things that may otherwise have been overlooked for their ordinariness.

Our grammar of multimodality is a philosophy of ordinary meanings. However, here is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s^§MS2.1.1a challenge for our knowing: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.)”²⁰

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¹⁸ Andy Warhol, 2006, “Giant” Size, London, UK: Phaidon,p. 91.

¹⁹ Carolyn Lanchner, 2008, Andy Warhol, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, p. 5.

²⁰ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953 [2001], Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, §129.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13-14.

Andy Warhol’s "Water Heater" §0a