How Andy Warhol Made Blow Jobs Boring

Every party should have Warhol films projected. That’s my conclusion after revisiting some of them for hours at the tiny but warm New York Museum of Sex show “Looking at Andy Looking.” Everyone should fall asleep to Sleep (1964). Every film frame can, if hung over a bed, lull you. The filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once said that he preferred movies that make you sleep—that are “kind enough to allow you a nice nap”—especially against those loud, violence-stuffed movies that take you “hostage.” Well, Warhol’s films are just as kind. In response to the endless, frightening sixties business of assassination, imperial war, and the money drive, Warhol films offered up nice naps.

Now, if you’re having sex, it probably wouldn’t be so nice to nap. There’s a time and place for everything, including sleep. Sleeping during sex, though! During such an act of busy thinking and unthinking, lost and gained positions? Enter Warhol. He saw, cagily and presciently, the flattening of bodies onto screens. Andy turned the camera on a sleeping lover—John Giorno—let him sleep, walked out of the room, walked back in, panned across the body, and filed it away among a proliferating archive. All this sleeping-fucking-eating: this is how someone exists in the raw at this time. Tender and melancholic. Giorno sleeps, but what is he dreaming? Warhol’s art stops at the flesh, just as we cannot penetrate the unconscious of our lovers.

Blow Job (1963), described by the wall text as “arguably Andy Warhol’s most perfect film,” is here, too: 45 minutes of a man making faces of pleasure as something is happening down there. It may or may not depict the titular act—and this inexplicitness was the cause of an infamous near-riot at Columbia University in 1964, when Warhol screened the film there to irony-deficient, horny young rabble. Sleep, too, is here: five hours of Warhol’s Giorno sleeping, with chest, ass, pubes, and unconscious head all neatly cataloged. Blow Job, Sleep, Empire: with help from the Jonas Mekas propaganda wheel, these shifted the definition of beauty in the popular US lexicon: a filmed beauty, a gay beauty, a beauty of an intimate boredom.

Yet the real revelation of the Museum of Sex show is Three (1964), a raucous, gentle silent film that would make Jim Jarmusch weep in ecstasy. The plot is simple: on a work break from, presumably, building Andy’s Brillo Boxes, Gerard Malanga heads to the Factory toilet, where he goes down on Ondine’s heroically flaccid cock, as a third, Walter Dainwood (Ondine’s friend who looks a lot like Andy), makes contorted Jim-from-The-Office faces to the camera, chews an apple, and reads William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. It’s a smegma-caked, magnificently alive slice of 1960s life. Art, industry, sex, money, bound together with more casual lyrical grace than anything we saw in the overhyped Anora of last year. Three was not publicly disseminated during Warhol’s lifetime, shown only among his tight circle of friends: the equivalent of nudes among the homies.

Is it worth the $36 ticket? Maybe, if you also want to pay a visit to the carnival siren whose wheel-shaped clitoris you have to swirl to get a love potion elsewhere in the Museum of Sex. Maybe, too, if you love carnivals and aren’t claustrophobic, and want to ride down the tight asshole and come out the vagina of a fat-bottomed girl-qua-slide. Against this not-uncharming kitsch, Warhol exists in glassy-eyed chic opposition.

The lapsed modernists who burn sage to Annunciation and Abstraction crow incessantly about Andy ending art. I don’t think he did. He just coolly encapsulated an epoch where capitalism, falsely, was perceived as the One True God, the End of It All, the comfortable last grave. He saw the camera as a machine, saw that it does not care about you, saw that pictures signify little. Warhol, that soup-inhaling enthusiast of Marilyn and Mao, reveals those rules. A blow job is not what you immediately pictured, so on-the-nose; instead, it is a face in bored mock-ecstasy, an apple-eating joker. In other words, levity.