We Watched Porn

Mandy Morbid & Lystra Making A Tentacle Porn Movie (triptych) • Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

On ArtSlant I have a review of sorts of a book about life, and life in “alt-porn” told through engaging paragraph-long sentences and intricate drawings on bits of paper by Zak Smith (aka Zak Sabbath). Although in the book he admits following the porn name game rules it should be "Starchy Third." I’m new to reviewing books, his book is about being new to porn, so it works out well, I think. If you haven’t noticed, the much-derided hipster onslaught has invaded everything, and now hipsters are making their own porn. Vivid, a major pornhouse, has it’s own alternative division, Vivid-ALT (which produced some of the films Sabbath has appeared in) is like the Urban Outfitters of porn. I say that over American Apparel, or Forever 21, which are much pornier, because Urban Outfitters has a better and more varied sense of design and it’s pretty arty, like Vivid-ALT.

How arty is Vivid-ALT? It is lorded over by an art school graduate whose nomme de porn is Eon McKai (you might get the reference.) Looking at any number of videos by people—who are about the same age with the same neo new wave musical tastes—in art galleries and exhibitions that put forth that youthful, ironic, decadent, way-too-skinny, tight-pants-ed, sexy with black and neon squirted on top milleu, it makes sense there is that kind of porn out there. Compare Cody Critchloe’s BOY on view at the Smart Museum’s "Heartland" with McKai’s D<3d i="">. And like everything in the alternative mainstream niche, it might be incredibly radical and feminist or misogynist, or art, or selling out. No one’s sure. What’s nice about porn, though, is there is a certain degree of straightforwardness. When it comes down to it, it’s all about fucking and you can’t deny it. Whether it is better in some way then regular porn, or more alternative, or sexually liberating or art or just like everything else that appeals to a certain audience that’s convinced itself it is somehow different than every other demographic, all that is extraneous.


Pixie Pearl • Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

In this way, McKai’s two features on art school (Art School Sluts, his first porn, and the remake Art School Girls Are Easy, his latest) are amazing and brutal in the way Art School Confidential was: opening up the private workings of a world full of creative dreamers who are all “gonna make it” to the ridicule of a wider audience. Any lingering sincerity you might have had about the romantic academy were young artists mingle and make are skewered with the all-too-true lines that start off the previews for both movies: “My name’s Mia, on days I feel like it, I go to art school.” God damn it, I went to art school every day, because I felt like it. That’s why I have this fucking blog instead of Chlamydia.

But we’re here to talk about the book by Zak Smith, which is about a lot more than porn. Here are some choice excerpts:

So where do you register that complaint, and what do you do with all that wasted experience?
The only place to put wasted experience to use is in art, and the only place to register a complete with the order of existence is art.
You draw it. I saw that. I’m registering my complaint–and I have made it pretty, since all things that are useless had better be pretty.

I think men must seem really like dogs to women—hungry and large, often slobbering—as a species, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous … but as individuals, predictable and clockwork and cute... Some are tiny and harmless, some are harmless and big as bears, but all have predatory, long-boned bodies with teeth and claws essentially made to hunt and hurt smaller things. To deliver yourself sexually to an unknown one must be like putting yourself at the mercy of a strange, large, imprecise, and hairy animal that you can just only hope is well-trained. Straight men should imagine how much differently they’d behave if their lovers were—to scale up—wolves.

On the message of Star Wars (the original three, of course):

[M]aybe you squabble among yourselves, maybe you believe in the Force or maybe you don’t, maybe you worry about the odds or you kiss your sister or maybe you speak in enigmatic noises only your friends can understand, maybe you worry too much or maybe you are inarticulate and hairy, but in the end you all have a role to play in the fall of the empire, which is evil…

Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

And finally, since I’m sure you are curious about what it’s like on the set:

It’s quickly obvious that, from the point of view of Rebecca Black, my job is to be a dildo, and that as long as I behave essentially like a dildo and do only that which dildos do, she is capable of having toward me an y of the surprising and subtle array of emotions a woman might reserve for all the dildos in her life, corrected for style, size, color and consistency.

This is probably the best context I’ll ever have to bring up this final note. Young artists are always knocking boots with pornography. Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie has cited Cosey Fanni Tutti (of Throbbing Gristle) as an inspiration. And has followed in her idol’s footsteps, posing for famous cult fetish photographer and friend of Sonic Youth, Richard Kern.


Both photographs by Richard Kern • left: Lucy McKenzie, 1997 via T. Tex's Hexes • right via Italian Vice
Painting: Lucy McKenzie • untitled • 2005 • courtesy the artist & Metro Pictures, New York • via Tate

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> Tin House
> Eon McKai
> Alt Porn on Wikipedia