‘I just want to watch’: These films cast Warhol’s voyeurism in a new light

In many ways, Andy Warhol is the art world’s ultimate voyeur: obsessive and fetishistic, transfixed by beauty and celebrity while so often cast as remote, cold and dispassionate. The portrait that often emerges from his diaries is of a frigid hypochondriac, chronically lonely and isolated even as he moved as a star among the luminaries of late-20th century New York’s most effervescent cultural milieu. We often think of his work as somewhat impersonal – it bears the hallmarks of the mechanical production process and we know he revered mechanisation – so much so that he famously once said he “wanted to be a machine”. He “wants to watch”, but he doesn’t necessarily want to touch.

A new exhibition Looking at Andy Looking: The Intimate Early Film Work of Andy Warhol (presented at the Museum of Sex in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum) invites us to reconsider this caricature of Warhol. Focusing on the artist’s early films and footage, the show features 16 works (over half of which have never before gone on public display). 

(above) Andy Warhol, Sleep (excerpt), 1963. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film clip courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum.

“Throughout his career as an artist we can see that Andy liked to watch people who were beautiful and interesting,” explains the exhibition’s curator and director of film and video at The Warhol, Greg Pierce. “With this exhibition, I want to recast that obsession in a more intimate, human light. Together, we get to share in that curiosity and desire.” 

Three films from the early 1960s – Sleep, Blow Job, and Couch – are the focus point of the exhibition. Predating Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2004 installation featuring a looped film of sleeping David Beckham by nearly four decades, Warhol’s film Sleep (1963), above, is a recording of his sleeping lover, John Giorno, shot at close range. This bedside vigil is filmed in grainy black and white 16mm and lasts almost five and a half hours. Voyeuristic and obsessive, yes. But also, a loving meditation of a vulnerable, mortal being rather than the detached recording of a machine.

(above) Andy Warhol, Blow Job (excerpt), 1964. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 41 minutes at 16 frames per second © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film clip courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum.

As Warhol moves between handheld and tripod footage shot with a 16mm Bolex camera, Blow Job (above) and Couch (both shot in 1964) are less lovelorn and more pornographic. While  Warhol’s gaze feels both unequivocally voyeuristic and queer, Looking at Andy Looking shows a more tender and intimate perspective than he is often given credit for. As the Museum of Sex’s chief curator Ariel Plotek puts it, “60 years later and these silent films still feel edgy. They’re tough. They’re not nice. But they’re also extremely personal.”

Take a look through the gallery above for a closer look.

Looking at Andy Looking: The Intimate Early Film Work of Andy Warhol (presented at the Museum of Sex in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum) opens on September 6, 2024, and runs until March 9, 2025.