![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In 2014, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University received 3600 contact sheets from Andy Warhol’s Minox 35EL camera, charting the full range of his black-and-white photography from 1976 until his death in 1987. A remarkable subset of the sheets capture explicit gay sexual activity, most shot for Warhol’s late-1970s Torsos and Sex Parts series. I provide a history and visual analysis of these pornographic images, many of which star Warhol’s friend, artist Victor Hugo. Warhol had been interested in ‘sex parts’ since the 1950s, but in Hugo he found his ideal muse and sexual performer. As Warhol’s paid collaborator, Hugo procured men whom Warhol and his studio assistants photographed nude and engaged in sex with Hugo. Scrutinizing gestures visible in the contact sheets, I argue that Hugo was engaged in a competition for artistic authorship and control in these photo shoots: the ‘art’ of gay sex was where Hugo could outshine Warhol.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
2 For the drawings, see Hermann (Citation2020); for in-depth essays on the films, see Osterweil (Citation2013, Citation2015). Printz and King-Nero explain: ‘Hugo’s influence upon the Torso series may have been instrumental, but Warhol himself was utterly predisposed. […] The idea of sex and the representation of cocks and feet as fetishized body parts was, in fact, central to his early work’ (2018, 5B:10). For Warhol’s relationship to gay erotica, see Thomas Waugh’s ‘Cockteaser’ in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz (Citation1996, 51–77). For further reading on queer Warhol beyond the indispensable Pop Out, see Crimp (Citation1999) and Meyer (Citation2002).
3 This is from a 1970 interview with Leticia Kent from Vogue quoted and analyzed by Jennifer Doyle in ‘Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/Pop Sex’ in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz (Citation1996, 196–197).
4 Andrew Scott reviewed the Vancouver exhibition of Warhol’s Torsos in Vanguard (June/July 1979): ‘The Torsos extend the detached, seemingly indifferent attitude to content we find in Warhol’s earlier work. There, suspended around the gallery, like so much meat in a butcher shop, are the supposed objects of our desire’ (quoted in Printz and King-Nero Citation2018, 5B:37–38). Instead, he saw in their fragmentation only dehumanization and depersonalization.
5 ‘Business art is the step that comes after Art. … Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. … Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art’ (Warhol Citation1975, 92).
6 Hugo’s occupation is noteworthy because during Warhol’s successful commercial art career of the 1950s–mid-1960s he was also a celebrated designer of window displays for Bonwit Teller and other stores.
7 Fred Hughes apparently was the one to declare ‘No more raunch here, Victor’, relegating future shoots to Hugo’s loft (see Colacello Citation1990, 343).
8 A seventh print is titled Fellatio (1978). For all, see Feldman and Schellman (Citation2003, 100). Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:33) note that most of the Sex Parts images ended up coming from Warhol’s studio sessions, not those in Hugo’s loft, making the latter even less ‘productive’. One Sex Parts print – seen on the wall of a Los Angeles gay bar – inspired Jennifer Doyle’s vital essay ‘Queer Wallpaper’, which critiques the downplaying of Warhol’s sexuality (Doyle Citation2006).
9 For the reception history, see Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:35–40).
10 ‘Oxidation’ refers to the painting process: canvases were coated with copper or gold metallic pigment that would oxidize and change colour when they were urinated upon, creating remarkable visual effects. For more on these paintings, see Loiacono (Citation2019).
11 Printz and King-Nero write: ‘The massive number of photographs that Warhol shot for the substantially less extensive body of paintings indicates that the sessions should be considered exploratory rather than strictly preparatory. […] The photographs frame a program of performances starring Hugo that recalls Warhol’s underground movies of the sixties […]. They run parallel to the paintings, reach beyond them, and sometimes pit themselves against them.’ They also identify ‘a certain duplicity intrinsic to the project, the tension between Warhol’s fascination with illicit performance and his professional standing as a painter’ (2018, 5B:14).
12 To further complicate matters, the Cantor has been permitted by the Warhol Foundation to create prints of contact sheet exposures that Warhol or his affiliates had not selected or printed during the artist’s lifetime.
13 Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:17) note that Hugo, too, shot some Polaroids with Warhol’s camera.
14 Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:15) distinguish between Hugo’s different modes in the photographs, noting that he moves between simple ‘posing’ and more elaborate ‘performing’.
15 Photographer Christopher Makos also procured ‘landscapes’ for Warhol (Hackett Citation1989, 49).
16 The entry is dated 18 June 1977. Suddenly, Last Summer was a 1959 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play; poet Sebastian forces his white bathing suit-clad companion Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) to procure males for him on foreign beaches. Hugo and Warhol returned to Greenwich Village to cruise the next day, and the diaries explain the post-Stonewall changes to the neighbourhood: ‘In the old days you could go over there on a Sunday and nobody would be around, but now it’s gay gay gay as far as the eye can see … ’.
17 The entry is dated 3 July 1977. Warhol saw a lack of ambition on Hugo’s part to ‘fuck his way to the top’.
18 Linda Nochlin remarks of a pair of Torso paintings presenting splayed male buttocks: ‘It is hard to think of a single instance in the history of art that attempts to present the male body from the point of view of the person on the brink of anal penetration’ (Citation1995).
19 This despite superstar Ultra Violet’s claim that ‘[Warhol] delighted in the fact that every organ of the body varies in shape, form and color from one individual to the next. Just as one torso or one face tells a different story from another, so to Andy one penis or one ass told a different story from another’ (Bockris Citation1989, 418).
22 This might be related to Warhol’s 29 June 1977 diary entry: ‘Victor came by after his trip to Fire Island. He had some come samples with him and I told him to start coming on the sheets and bring them in and we’d have an exhibit together in Victor’s loft – his Come paintings and my Piss.’ Knowing what we do about Victor’s loft, it is safe to assume the offer of a two-person show was a joke (see Hackett Citation1989, 56). Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:308) date this unidentified model’s appearance to August 1977 at Hugo’s loft.
23 Warhol notes on 5 July 1977 that Halston threw Hugo out of his house for stealing his cocaine: ‘He also detected that Victor had had a gang bang because there were greasy handprints on the walls and come on the Ultrasuede’ (Hackett Citation1989, 58).
24 The diaries began as a way of keeping track of Warhol’s business expenses for tax purposes so it is humorous that mention of the photography sessions with Hugo disappear from them when the artistic (therefore business) pretext does.
26 This ‘landscape’ is recognizable from a suite of four blow job Polaroids from the Jablonka Galerie catalogue, likely shot during this same session (see Heymer and Garnatz Citation2003, images 198–201). Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:308) date this unidentified model’s appearance to December 1977 at Hugo’s loft.
27 A number of Polaroids in the Jablonka Galerie catalogue capture Hugo’s bust isolated against a white wall, including two from this very photography session (see Heymer and Garnatz Citation2003, images 172–173).
28 For more on this relationship, see Doyle’s ‘Tricks’ in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz (Citation1996, 191–209).
29 Warhol once referred to Hugo as ‘the greatest artist in the world’, but this was likely a dig; he claimed Hugo was ‘always making art everywhere’ rather than crafting a real art career (see Gopnik Citation2020, locs. 17760–17763). Colacello writes:, ‘Andy saw Victor as the perfect source for ideas: someone with a fertile imagination who didn’t know what to do with it. … The Venezuelan’s own art was going nowhere: He signed rat traps and handed them out at parties; he dipped chickens’ feet in red paint and called their footprints drawings’ (1990, 342).
31 Printz and King-Nero discuss this contact sheet (2018, 5B:24) – noting that the shoot resulted in four of the Sex Parts prints – identify the model as Scott Daley and date the shoot to October 1977 at Warhol’s studio (2018, 5B:308).
32 One example would be Millet (Citation2003).
33 Halston and Hugo suggested that Warhol would get very nervous and sweaty during the sessions, and run into the bathroom in order to masturbate before returning to the shoot.
34 Casting the backroom of their office as the backroom of a sex club draws attention to the fact that this ‘office’ – no longer called the Factory – on Broadway was intended to represent the height of professionalism in contrast to the wild libertinage of the ‘silver Factory’ at 231 East 47th Street, where films like Couch were shot, for example. Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:111) note that piss was ‘in’ at this time, quoting Colacello to link the works to fetish practices at gay sex clubs like the Toilet. More broadly, they persuasively suggest that ‘the patterns of behavior involved in producing the Torsos and Sex Parts – the nudity, sex play, and sex acts – seem to have enabled a matrix of transgression and secrecy in the studio in which the Piss, Oxidation, and Cum paintings could unfold’ (2018, 5B:111).
36 Polaroids of the boot scene are reproduced in Heymer and Garnatz (Citation2003, images 180–183).
37 Printz and King-Nero discuss this contact sheet (Citation2018, 5B:128) and date this unidentified model’s appearance to early July 1977 at Warhol’s studio (Citation2018, 5B:308).
38 This entry is dated 24 December 1978. Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, 5B:128–129) discuss this episode.
39 Of course, some of these contact sheets may date from this later period, when the alibi of generating artworks from the sexual escapades was abandoned.
40 There were actually three portraits of Hugo, works #3649–3651 in Printz and King-Nero (Citation2018, vol. 5A), the last destroyed.
41 This entry is dated 24 January 1978.
42 The video is accessible online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbV0vUSUjcE (accessed 26 November 2023).
43 He describes the upload as ‘An early pioneer of performance art, Victor Hugo Rojas destroys a Warhol painting, as a sacrifice. NYC 1978.’ Clips are featured in Andrew Rossi’s Netflix limited series The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022).
44 Getty Images gives Hugo’s death year as 1993, but this does not align with the timeline in Haden-Guest (Citation2014), which includes a final Christmas dinner and months of convalescence spanning into 1994.