Working out with Warhol... sort of: negotiating the semiotics of the swish and the clone in ‘Andy Warhol’s T.V.’

Abstract

Abstract

Despite a lifelong fascination with bodies, Andy Warhol (1928–87) rarely put his own on display. Yet, on Andy Warhol’s T.V., he draws attention to his own physicality by variously working out and refusing to work out. In these extraordinary moments, Warhol interrogates two post-Stonewall archetypes of the gay male body: the swish and the clone. This article posits that as a queer figure a generation older than the clones, Warhol deliberately undermines the dialectical opposition between the two in these televisual performances. He exhibits a different gay male body: one without bulging pectorals, but with concealed strength and physical proficiency beneath his ‘clone drag’ attire: Levi 501s, trainers and a button-down shirt. This article further contextualises Warhol’s performances within the popularisation of bodybuilding, the proliferation of the Nautilus machine, the volatile gender performativity of gay male bodies in the years following Stonewall, and the cruising possibilities of television.

Introduction

Despite a lifelong fascination with bodies, Andy Warhol (1928–87) rarely put his own on display. The most notable exception to this was when he exposed his scarred and corseted abdomen to such artists as Richard Avedon (1923–2004) and Alice Neel (1900–98) following an assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas in 1968. As the art historian James Boaden has observed, ‘Andy Warhol was a mirror, a shadow, a figment: almost anything but a body. Through leather jackets, fine tailoring, or baggy clothes, at various points he armoured, reshaped, or deflected attention from the body beneath’.¹ Warhol used clothing and accessories to not only hide his body, but also to cultivate a paradoxical public persona that interrogated gender and social norms, which, according to Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘brought into the open and encouraged a larger repertoire of masculinities than was common at the time’.² For example, the black leather jacket and dark glasses of the 1960s presented a butch, hypermasculine façade that Warhol simultaneously upheld with his affected apathy and undermined with what he called his ‘swish’ thing.³

Yet, what of the body beneath – one that continued to age, solicited unkind commentary in the press, and found itself negotiating new politics of the gay male physique in the post-Stonewall era as bulging, hypermasculine frames marked a new period of outward and unapologetic gay life? This article explores the interplay of Warhol’s body, his sartorial style and his sexuality through a reading of his performance on his second television show Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83), which followed Fashion (1979–80). This article focuses on two episodes from the first series, in which Warhol appears to respectively fail and excel at physical exercise. The present author argues that in these rare examples of Warhol drawing attention to his own physicality, the artist variously interrogates two post-Stonewall archetypes of the gay male body: the swish and the clone.

The clone – with its scientific etymology referring to copies of biologically identical organisms that reproduce asexually – was identifiable by bulging biceps and pectoral muscles, Levi’s 501 Jeans, facial hair and close-cropped haircuts that achieved what one writer called ‘clone drag’.⁴ The swish, by contrast, was associated with lean bodies and camp, effeminate mannerisms. As a queer figure a generation older than the clones, Warhol deliberately undermines the dialectical opposition between the two in these televisual performances. He exhibits a different gay male body: one without bulging pectorals, but with concealed strength and physical proficiency hidden beneath his decidedly clone attire. The article concludes with a reading of Warhol’s allusions to gym culture and cruising in his negotiation of the semiotics of the clone and the swish as an exploration of the cruising possibilities of television.

Warhol TV

Warhol barely appeared onscreen in Fashion. As the title suggests, it centred on makeup, models and fashion designers, including Halston, Kansai Yamamoto and Betsey Johnson. Viewers glimpsed Warhol briefly when he introduced each episode with a deadpan delivery of the show’s title FIG. 1. In the second half of the series, he lingered a few seconds longer to raise a Polaroid camera and take a photograph FIG. 2. In so doing, he obscured his face, concealing himself from the camera as he did for Duane Michals (b.1932) in 1958 FIG. 3. In Fashion, he refused to be seen by deflecting the gaze of the camera, and the viewer, back onto them.

Unsurprisingly, Warhol is conspicuously absent on a show about fashion, style and attractive people given his deep-seated insecurities about his appearance. Warhol was fully aware of how he was described in the press, and recounted some of these offensive descriptions to Brigid Berlin (1939–2020), as transcribed in his Philosophy:

The albino-chalk skin. Parchmentlike. Reptilian. Almost blue […] The knobby knees […] The long bony arms, so white they look bleached. The arresting hands. The pinhead eyes. The banana ears […] The graying lips […] The cords of the neck standing out around the big Adam’s apple. It’s all there […] I’m everything my scrapbook says I am.⁵

In Fashion he concealed his body and presence behind a parade of makeup, clothes and friends who became glamorous stand-ins or representatives for him. As his one-time boyfriend John Giorno writes, ‘Andy saw in the people around him a reflection of his own beautiful body. What he didn’t see in himself, he saw in everybody else’.⁶

His second television show debuted in the autumn of 1980. Airing on Manhattan Cable TV, and comprising twenty-seven episodes across two series, Andy Warhol’s T.V. served as an extension of Interview, dedicated to the fit, fabulous and famous, such as Debbie Harry, Paloma Picasso and Mariel Hemingway. The highly edited show mirrored the magazine’s format, with each episode revolving around a sequence of short segments that transported the viewer to clubs, fashion shows, artist studios or exhibition openings. In the majority of episodes, Warhol’s on-screen presence operates as a table of contents FIG. 4, utilising a talking-head format to run through a list of his recent activities that precedes footage of such events. Following his absence on Fashion, Warhol defined and declared an embodied presence on Andy Warhol’s T.V. Yet, two episodes are anomalous in their allusions to fitness television shows and their explicit attention to Warhol’s physical proficiency and strength (or lack thereof). However, unlike shows by such fitness gurus as Jack LaLanne and Debbie Drake, these segments were not instructional. There are no words of encouragement, instructions, corrections or modifications. Indeed, they are closer to Eadweard Muybridge’s formal studies of the human body than Jane Fonda’s Workout, which was released in 1982.

The thirteenth episode opens with Warhol astride a seated leg press wearing a beige shirt, Levi’s 501 Jeans and trainers FIG. 5. Beside him, his personal trainer Lidija Cengic performs reverse crunches on a slanted bench, wearing a high-cut, pale blue leotard. Warhol begins his introduction to the episode by noting ‘We’re in the gym and I’m not doing all the work’. This statement is followed by an inventory of all the things he did that week, including watching E.T. (1982), dining at Horn of Plenty and interviewing the ballet dancers Susan Jaffe and Robert La Fosse. Notably, it is not that Warhol’s not doing all the work, but that he is doing none of the work. Rather, the ‘work’ he describes is going to the cinema and eating and watching Jaffe’s and La Fosse’s bodies dance, while Cengic exerts her body beside his stationary one.

The gym scene intercuts the episode’s segments, returning the viewer again and again to Cengic’s labouring body and Warhol’s running monologue FIG. 6. She next performs back-strengthening exercises, her repetitive motions and heavy breathing underscore Warhol’s determined stillness. Then, straddling the bench, Cengic lifts dumbbells into overhead presses, while Warhol counts her progress out loud. Finally, the episode concludes with Cengic and Warhol, who is still wearing his distinctly non-gym attire, before a blue backdrop. Warhol proceeds to do two push-ups FIG. 7, before imploring Cengic to demonstrate the ‘right’ way to do them. To the soundtrack of Laura Branigan’s ‘Gloria’ (1982), the trainer executes perfect form push-ups; her long limbs emerge out of a sea of blue as her leotard dissolves into the matching background. The formal components of the labouring body engender a visual push and pull between foreground and background that is reminiscent of Warhol’s silkscreens FIG. 8 and Polaroids FIG. 9. Warhol has left Cengic behind to do the work, refusing to ‘be a somebody with a body’, to borrow a phrase from one of his paintings.

Just five episodes later, Warhol contradicts his puny performance. It begins with a tuxedo-clad Warhol sitting alone before the camera delivering another rambling monologue, which concludes: ‘Then my exercise instructor came down and I did fifty-three push-ups. I don’t know how, but I did. Actually, I did […] like two hundred that day […] I went to see Cat People twice […] and I went to a new club called the Red Bar’. The episode culminates in a segment titled ‘Exercise with Lidija and Andy’. Cengic, wearing a silver-grey leotard with red shorts, performs a sequence of stretches and exercises in the wood-panelled boardroom at the Factory FIG. 10, while explaining how she trains her clients. Her long limbs form oblique angles, like changing letters in the alphabet. Warhol eventually joins Cengic on-screen, asking if she wants him to do push-ups. Wearing a yellow shirt, jeans and brown boots, he impressively executes more than forty while the credits roll – a significant increase from his last performance. Warhol has not only found his body, but confidently demonstrates its strength in the control centre of the Factory’s operations.

Clone culture

To understand Warhol’s contradictory and anomalous physical performances on Andy Warhol’s T.V. is to consider the politics and semiotics of the gay male body and its vestments throughout the 1970s and 1980s – particularly the discourse of the clone. The clone is a uniform, a masquerade, an exaggerated performance of a decidedly macho form of masculinity FIG. 11. The aesthetic is not an act of direct mimesis, but a schematised adaption of straight masculinity’s otherwise nonchalant approach to male norms.⁷

The clone became the latest embodiment of decades-long debates about masculinity in gay male culture.⁸ The years of Warhol’s youth were marked by questions regarding the social and political ramifications of the ‘swishes’, ‘fairies’, ‘nellies’ and ‘queens’ in the growing homophile movement. Such obvious effeminacy proved not only dangerous in 1940–60s, when homophobia was rife, but it also, according to the historian Craig M. Loftin, seemed to reinforce gay stereotypes and their ‘negative associations in the popular imagination such as weakness, moral turpitude and mental illness’.⁹ Thus, homophiles eventually distanced themselves from outward expressions of effeminacy and embraced more traditional masculine characteristics and mannerisms that, as Loftin writes, used ‘gender conformity as a “front” for their sexual non-conformity’.¹⁰

The Gay liberation movement sparked by the 1969 Stonewall rebellion fought to destigmatise and decriminalise homosexuality by promoting pride, self-love and self-expression. In doing so, some factions sought to discredit swish, camp and effeminate mannerisms, which were seen as internalisations of homophobia and served as fodder for the belief that homosexuality was a psychological pathology, moral failing and a failed gender identity. As Martin Levine has shown in his ethnography of the gay clone, part of the rationale was the belief that

gay men were real men, and their sense of themselves as gay was shaped by the same forces by which they experienced themselves as men: traditional masculinity […] Since American culture devalued male effeminacy, they adopted manly demeanour and attire as a means of expressing a more valued identity.¹¹

Advocates for the swish, such as the editors of Double-F magazine (founded in 1973), argued that the clone figure perpetuated misogynist ideologies and was, in effect, imitating the gay community’s hetero, patriarchal, sexist oppressors. While projects such as Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men (1977) and Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979) point towards the multiplicity of gender and sexual expression after Stonewall, the era witnessed two dominating, warring factions over the gay male body, mannerisms and fashion: the feminised swish and the masculine gym-built clone.

The properties of the clone find equivalency in Warhol’s work. The art historian Richard Meyer has anachronistically likened Warhol’s 1960s silkscreens to the 1970s clones in their repetition and presentation of homosexual desire. Yet, such correspondences with the clone can be seen not only in Warhol’s silkscreen practice, but also in his later television performances, as the volatile gender performativity of the decade unfolded. Clones, much like Warhol, were critiqued for their sameness and lack of originality. The writer Andrew Holleran’s description of the clone as a gay man with ‘no individuality, no imagination, and no heart’ mirrors the derisive language aimed repeatedly at Warhol himself, which was only encouraged by the artist’s seemingly passive persona.

Opinion pieces in gay newspapers with such titles as ‘Clone culture is peer oppression’ and ‘Stone the Clones!’ evidence the fraught discourse and polarisation that the increasingly dominant aesthetic and, thereby, the politics, of the clone engendered.¹² The homogeneity bored some men and thrilled others like Warhol. The actor Taylor Mead argued in 1978 that it was ‘much sexier’ before Stonewall. ‘At least there were different types of people’, he observed. ‘A lot of tension there, but it was good tension, interesting. You never knew if the person was gay or receptive or what – whether you were going to get bopped or not’.¹³ The clone aesthetic broadcast one’s sexuality and one’s sexual preferences in ways that Mead – of the same generation as Warhol – found uninspiring and even unattractive. Warhol, on the other hand, found repetition compelling. He famously doubled, or cloned, with Edie Sedgwick in the 1960s and Jed Johnson in the 1970s. He even went so far as to have Allen Midgette impersonate him on a nation-wide lecture tour. With Midgette serving as Warhol’s bodily surrogate, Warhol rendered his own body extraneous and effectively invisible. For Warhol, to clone with another was to deflect attention, liken oneself to a more attractive body or even to disappear.

In episodes thirteen and eighteen of Andy Warhol’s T.V., the artist dons the button-down shirt and the trainers and boots, respectively, associated with clone style. Perhaps most significantly, he wears his signature Levi’s 501 Jeans. His allegiance to the brand in the 1970s and 1980s was so well-known that the company commissioned a poster, and he even graced the cover of a special issue of L’Uomo Vogue dedicated to denim. Yet, his choice of brand and style (the straight leg) clearly signals to clone culture and its attendant allusions to a particular macho masculinity. By the end of the 1970s, Levi’s were so ubiquitous among gay men that the company struggled to meet demand, which led them to embark on a price-fixing scheme for several years.¹⁴ Robert Julian in the San Francisco Sentinel described the sexual appeal and function of the jeans: ‘The 501s had been worn for decades in the West and Midwest, but they had never before been applied to the male body in such a sexual fashion. A new science arose around selecting the perfect size jean that would shrink to a skintight fit, accentuating bulges and contours both fore and aft’.¹⁵ Indeed, Warhol studiously captures the shapely outlines of the body parts beneath the denim in a series of 1984 Polaroids FIG. 12.

By working out in these clothes, Warhol covers his body while simultaneously coding it with clone style. In her book Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander argues that ‘the most general perception of bodies is filtered through clothing. When, after such conditioning, nudity is confronted directly, the observing eye may tend to idealize it automatically – to edit the visual evidence’.¹⁶ Warhol’s close-up Polaroids operate similarly – we do not see the actual flesh, but the jeans hint at something sexual and appealing beneath. His donning of clone clothes in these segments affiliates his body with its idealised form and its sexual possibilities. Although he does not show us his body with gym shorts or tank tops, he relies on the visual coding and semiotics of clone drag to eroticise and fetishise his body beneath. The clone clothes encourage viewers to imaginatively replace Warhol’s lithe frame with the beefy musculature and robust masculinity associated with the garments. The clone body is there, they suggest, we just cannot see it.

Building clones

One of the most obvious signs of the clone, and perhaps the most visible from a distance, is a well-defined gym-constructed body acquired through strict, regular workouts. The writer Edmund White recalls in his memoir:

When I started lifting weights, it was still an unusual activity for a gay man. In the fifties and sixties gays wanted to be as thin as possible but it never occurred to them to be – well, not boys but men. In the seventies, however, we […] began to add muscles – a well-defined chest, a firm, prominent butt, massive legs, baby biceps, more muscled shoulders.¹⁷

Likewise, Warhol had been working out since at least the 1950s, joining a growing number of gay men attending gyms across the country.¹⁸ Yet, Warhol also publicly flaunted his physical ineptitude. In 1965 Steve Schapiro (1934–2022) captured Warhol lifting barbells in his Breton striped shirt at the Silver Factory FIG. 13. Behind him on the floor sit what appear to be shadow boxes filled with toy rabbits and dolls that undermine his manly efforts and equate the weights with mere toys. Similarly, in Piero Heliczer’s film Joan of Arc (1966), Warhol cavalierly holds two dumbbells at shoulder height, apparently more interested in the conversation taking place in front of him than exerting any effort to lift the weights above his head.

In 1970 the invention of the Nautilus machine contributed to the sense that bodies could be put together, piece-by-piece and shaped the body aesthetic of the clone. The machine offered an alternative to spending hours in the gym to acquire a bodybuilder physique FIG. 14. It allowed one to focus on individual muscle groups, resulting in disproportionate body parts that looked particularly spectacular in clone attire. The art critic Douglas Crimp recalled the phenomenon and semiotic signalling of the bulging pectorals and biceps, tight asses and washboard abs at the time:

I was astonished by the change I was witnessing in the bodies of gay men, the gym bodies that later came to be associated with Chelsea boys. It was just around that time (1975) that lots of gay men, including me, began going to gyms and using bodybuilding equipment to pump up our muscles. It seemed like all of a sudden there was a definably ‘gay body’.¹⁹

In the 1970s the physique of the archetypical gay man – from what had previously, in pop culture, been associated with ‘sissies’ and limp-wristed swishes – transformed into an exaggeratedly masculinised, gym-built clone. For Crimp, ‘these people have identical bodies, and these bodies are also strikingly different from other bodies. They seem as if honed for a particular activity, maybe a fairly athletic form of sex’.²⁰

Warhol also increased his workout efforts throughout the decade to help combat various health-related anxieties that arose after the 1968 Solanas shooting, as he, like the rest of the country, became infatuated with bodybuilding.²¹ Arnold Schwarzenegger’s six-year reign as Mr Olympia helped popularise the sport and the publication of Charles Gaines’s Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding (1974), one of the first books dedicated to the rise of bodybuilding culture, became a New York Times bestseller.²² Despite its declaration of exaggerated hetero-masculinity, bodybuilding is a decidedly queer practice, as put forth by many scholars, including Broderick D.V. Chow, Novid Parsi and Niall Richardson.²³ Sam Fussell argues that bodybuilding is ‘unnerving because it’s so deeply androgynous. It’s somehow simultaneously bully and sissy, butch and femme’.²⁴ Not only are the bodybuilders turning the body into object – a traditionally feminine role – but the muscles themselves are without purpose and entirely for spectacle. Citing Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on camp’, Fussell identifies this artifice and exaggeration as a form of camp, and even genderbending. He argues, ‘Truth to tell, every king is a bit of a queen. Schwarzenegger with his dyed hair and bulging breasts, his shaved legs and sly smile is the latest in a time-honoured tradition’.²⁵ Warhol’s close-up photographs of bodybuilders likewise emphasise their curvaceous topography and hairless flesh FIG. 15. The conflicting visual referents of engorged muscular masculinity and voluptuously smooth femininity would have long been familiar to Warhol from the physique magazines he consumed and collected throughout his life.

For Warhol, clones, bodybuilders, muscles and pumping iron are intimately tied to sex and sexual selection. During a conversation with the artist Larry Rivers (1923–2002) in the ninth episode of Andy Warhol’s T.V., Rivers asks, ‘Does it reduce penis size to lose weight?’ to which Warhol replies, ‘I had a long talk with my gym teacher today […] I asked her about cocks and, that’s a muscle, so you don’t get a smaller cock by losing weight’. Warhol’s cock-as-muscle formulation mirrors Schwarzenegger’s language in Pumping Iron, in which he acknowledges the onanistic sexual foreplay and release when exercising:

Your muscles get a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode any minute […] it feels fantastic. It’s as satisfying to me as […] having sex with a woman and coming. So can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am like getting the feeling of coming in the gym; I’m getting the feeling of coming at home; I’m getting the feeling of coming backstage; when I pump up, when I pose out in front of 5,000 people I get the same feeling, so I am coming day and night.

Schwarzenegger’s thrill comes not only from auto-objectification, but from also being objectified by others gazing upon his oiled, hairless body. Warhol, too, finds pleasure in the public display of muscles. In his 1985 book America, he muses, ‘Muscles are great; everybody should have at least one that they can show off. I work out every day, and for a while at the beginning I tried to get “definition”, but it didn’t come off that way on me. Now I do have one muscle that appears, then it seems to go away, but it comes back after a while’.²⁶ The sexual innuendo of a rising and falling singular muscle eroticises his own bodybuilding practice and that of others. His failure to perform push-ups in the thirteenth episode is therefore the failure of the muscle-cock to get pumped (hard) in front of spectators. In the later episode, his muscles are tight, powerful, and ready to explode.

Warhol’s deliberate physical failure in the thirteenth episode of Andy Warhol’s T.V. reprises his swish performances of the 1960s and revels in impotency rather than excessive virility. In the earlier episode he lets Cengic workout, while he watches and gossips about his week. The scene recalls a 1964 photograph by Eve Arnold (1912–2012) that captures Warhol mid-bicep curl sitting on a toilet facing a torso-less female mannequin FIG. 16. With his chin tilted down, he appears to gaze through his dark glasses at the stagnant limbless form. On Andy Warhol’s T.V., the dynamic is reversed: Warhol is the mannequin, the stationary body, contrasted with the effort and labour of the female one in front of him. The twinning of the male and female body and the interplay of stasis and motion in both Arnold’s photograph and the episode point towards a playfully performative anti-essentialist interrogation of embodied gendered norms.²⁷ When Warhol inverts this twinning in the show’s eighteenth episode, he shifts from object to subject as Cengic stands motionless behind his pumping body. The scene imbues his embodied flesh with self-assured strength, sex appeal and authority that is largely absent in his otherwise affected aloof and swish manner.

When Warhol does work out on Andy Warhol’s T.V., he leaves aside the gym equipment and machines in favour of push-ups – an exercise that targets the pectorals. As Claudia Schippert has argued, the pectorals are a site of gender transgression. Female bodybuilders typically had implants to feminise their muscular form and men, in their pursuit of massive cleavage, were in danger of developing ‘bitch tits’ from anabolic steroid use. ²⁸ For clones, the muscle group is proudly overbuilt to bulge beneath tight t-shirts. The exaggerated, voluptuous pectorals on a hypermasculine clone body or bodybuilder can be read paradoxically as both masculine and feminine. Although neither Warhol nor Cengic are in danger of growing to the size of bodybuilders, their choice to perform push-ups emphasise the breakdown of the gendered binary of strength, aesthetics and embodiment in the clone era.

Cruising clones

Warhol’s probing of clone culture on Andy Warhol’s T.V. is also an exploration of television as a site for cruising. Clone bodies and their attendant style function to cruise other clones, whether in locker rooms, parks, alleys or bars. The activist and film historian Vito Russo writes, ‘The clone look is a cruising image that has proven to work and you can’t argue with results…clones who wear the outfit all the time are constantly cruising (or, at the very least, setting themselves up as objects to be cruised)’.²⁹ Levine has shown that their looks were deliberately constructed to be like the type to which they were attracted. The clone look thus operates as a mirror, in which one wants to both be and possess at the same time.

Because these bodies were built in gyms, weightrooms, bathrooms and locker rooms became well-known cruising sites. Such sexual possibilities led to a clash between bodybuilding and gay culture. In Pumping Iron, Gaines was careful to distinguish serious, straight weightlifting from the dangers of cruising that could happen in the locker rooms with a homophobic warning: ‘Almost every YMCA in America has a weight room, and all of the ones I know about (with a few exceptions, like the big Y on Central Park West where the faggots will track you to the shower with their heads down like they were following a spoor) are wonderful places to train’.³⁰ The fraught spaces of the gym contained all forms of reluctant, reticent and eager gazes and bodily desires. Clones cruise and are cruised in such sites; their recognisable sartorial and corporeal display outwardly broadcast erotic desire to consume and be consumed in their masquerade of straight male culture.

Although exercising continued to be central to Warhol’s regime, from 1982 he began to train mostly in his 860 Broadway studio, where he installed a suite of equipment. He purchased the weightlifting machines after the socialite Sharon Hammond dumped him ‘out on the street’ after her downstairs neighbours purportedly complained about their regular workout sessions in her apartment.³¹ Photographs taken by Warhol show the gym equipment in his studio used for not only exercising, but also for social and homoerotic play. Shirtless men, including Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) and Keith Haring (1958–90) FIG. 17, play on the equipment for Warhol’s voyeuristic camera, as do Diana Vreeland and Paloma Picasso. By installing a gym in his workspace, the exercise machines become socially productive sites – professionally, artistically and sexually – as he cruises bodies with his camera in hand.

On Andy Warhol’s T.V., the artist navigates the risky promiscuity of anonymous televisual viewership – with its prospects of opportunity and pleasure, rejection and disappointment – by oscillating between the swish and the clone. He offers something for everyone and refuses to conform to the era’s singular dominant expression of masculinity. In the two Andy Warhol’s T.V. episodes, the artist permits the video camera to capture him on the gym equipment, a place where one might wait to be cruised or from where one might do the cruising. Warhol is no longer behind the safety of a camera lens probing, looking and desiring, as he did in the Fashion episode about male models, for which he recorded shirtless men primping in a bathroom.

On Andy Warhol’s T.V., it is Warhol’s body on display for the desiring eye of the camera and, in turn, the viewers at home. Many scholars have rightly argued that cruising is more than just a visual phenomenon – it is an affective, embodied experience.³² However, following R. Bruce Brasell’s argument of gay spectatorship as cruising in Warhol’s film My Hustler (1965), one might posit that the circuitry of desiring gazes and signals taking place within these episodes and across the televisual space engages in the cruising process. As Randy Alfred wrote in the Advocate of clones, ‘wearing the costumes that experience has taught them will attract the very men they find sexually attractive. It gets them what they want’.³³ Warhol presents himself as both subject and object – to cruise and be cruised, albeit from the safety of the screen – by the very nature of his sartorial choices and gym-related activities. The camera is now turned on him, not Factory visitors, for the prurient pleasure of the camera and audience.

Warhol’s clone aesthetic in these episodes is a doubling of being and having, identity and desire. To support such a claim, one can turn to the end of the episode in which the artist performs forty push-ups. The television crew have travelled to the Columbia University Boathouse to interview Stephen Kiesling, the author of The Shell Game: Reflections on Rowing and the Pursuit of Excellence (1982).³⁴ The camera is less interested in Kiesling as an author than it is in the young, handsome athlete on a rowing machine, clad only in a singlet. His muscular build repeatedly shifts back and forth on the machine, his muscles tensing and relaxing at the effort FIG. 18. Concluding this episode with an impressive number of push-ups, Warhol draws an oblique parallel between his body and the athlete’s, as well as his desire to like, be like and be liked by such bodies.³⁵

Somebody with a body

Having not only witnessed but participated in shifting gender and sexual mores of the previous decades in his life and work, Warhol critically interrogates the increasingly divisive and uncompromising factions that were forming around expressions of masculinity in the 1970s and 1980s on Andy Warhol’s T.V. In so doing, he playfully fails and succeeds at confusing the feminine–masculine dichotomy. As someone who had long contended with bodily and sexual anxieties, Warhol found in the fraught space of the gym and the performative possibilities of exercise, a space to negotiate the semiotics of the swish and the clone, the undesirable and the desirable. Richard Meyer concludes his article ‘Warhol’s clones’ by arguing that the significant difference between the clone and Warhol was that ‘the clone was able, as Warhol was not, to see himself as the object, as the very image, of other men’s desires’.³⁶ However, we see on Andy Warhol’s T.V. that Warhol, by cloning the clone, can indeed become the object of others’ desires.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback on this article.