Filmmaking is a mechanical art, but it can capture real people on the surface and below. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) lived much of his life “on the surface.” He embraced mechanical techniques like screen-printing, photography, and film, but Andy himself was not a machine. Behind the cool, detached persona was the highly personal—and above all queer—perspective of an inveterate experimenter.

This exhibition will explore themes of intimacy and voyeurism, including the depiction of homosexual desire, in Warhol’s early years of filmmaking. In films and footage from 1963-64, we witness the artist beginning to figure out what he could do and say with his newest plaything: the 16mm camera.

More than anything else, Warhol loved repetition: “My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat—or in film’s case “run out”—manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.” To remedy this, Warhol liked to “lengthen” his reels by projecting the film at a slower speed. Nowhere is this preoccupation with looking and long duration more evident than in his first major work Sleep, a 5-hour 21-minute bedside portrait of Warhol’s lover at the time, John Giorno.

In contrast to the handheld camera work and lingering intimacy of Sleep (1963), are instances in which Warhol trained a tripod-mounted camera on pretty, young men and let the film roll run out. This preference for prolonged observation could signal the artist’s affection for a person. It could also blur the line between desire and exploitation.

Preservation of Warhol’s film work is a joint undertaking by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The original film material digitized for this exhibition is courtesy of their ongoing collaboration. Presented alongside Sleep (1963), Blow Job (1964), and Couch (1964), half the titles featured here have never been shown. Unlike the more “produced” later work, all were filmed by Andy Warhol himself.

Warhol once said, “I just want to watch.” This exhibition invites us to take time to look where his gaze lingered.

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Sex in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Andy Warhol, Couch, 1964. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 58 minutes at 16 frames per second. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum.