Kiss, his anthological gallery of kisses—Hollywood, marathonian, ethereal, mechanical, animal—, challenged good taste and provoked the law. Manifest physical pleasure, no longer a mere declaration of love, these photobooths in motion deconstruct the kiss on the basis of its own normativity: sexual diversity, ambiguous identities, interraciality, reversal of positions of submission, occasional implausibility. Warhol’s mute, impassive camera uses repetition, variation and serialization, using 30m reels with their scratches and perforations. So when Kiss leans towards materiality (exposure, blur, grain), all that remains of the kiss is its representation.
In Haircut (No. 1), Warhol turns a home haircut into a choreographed peepshow. In a dark, tiny room, time is drawn out to eroticize the everyday gestures of a group of men. A kind of enthralled disinhibition draws them into the sexual fluidity potentially revealed by social games like strip poker. Warhol’s cinema turns the screen into a blank slate for the subconscious, opening up the box of our most hidden fantasies. Between the unreal closeness of the camera and the ambivalent distance, no spectator can escape the fanatical scrutiny, the delight and the frustration of the compulsive voyeur.
Andy Warhol: Kiss, 1963, 48 min; Haircut (No. 1), 1963, 24 min.
16mm screening. Copies provided by UCLA.
Thanks to the Andy Warhol Museum.
