Debbie Does Moma
Blackbook, Fall 2004
Last summer, Ashkan Sahihi had a relatively unusual problem for an artist. He was wondering whether people would jerk off to his new gallery show.
"I was struggling with this for a while," he says of the series, Cum Shots, which features nine photographs of everyday people, their faces spackled with real sperm. "Will it be used as another tool to satisfy yourself, to jerk off to?" The idea, he says, was to highlight-or may be subvert-the "pornification" of mainstream culture. The idea was not for people to jack off. "I didn't want to give people that back door."
So he shot his subjects clothed, with neutral expressions, against a cheap marbleized backdrop time-warped in from a 1980s corporate video. "I wanted people who were very normal-looking," he says. "I didn't want hot babes."
Well, it's pretty much guaranteed that people masturbated anyway. The series was posted across the Internet. The operator of a site called "Downloading Porn with Davo" linked to it and asked Sahihi how he could buy a photo of one particularly, er, comely woman. Others e-mailed to figure out where they could find shots of actual hardcore penetration. Sahihi says he was getting 84,000 daily visitors to his site at one point; it's still in the top ten Google results for the query "cum shots."
"I want it to be clear that I'm looking to force a discussion," Sahihi told me at his gallery in April, happy for the exposure, but a little uneasy about the reception.
The discussion isn't precisely about porn, echoes John d'Addario, editor of Fleshbot, a blog that tracks porn in the popular consciousness. "The most interesting artists are making art about looking at porn," he says.
The context is clear: We live in a world where Jenna Jameson's new house can (and did) appear in the New York Times's "Home" section, where Terry Richardson commands a fortune to shoot major ad campaigns, where the porn industry outsells mainstream movie tickets, and where a blind alliance of irony and facile empowerment has rendered a Hustler T-shirt about as shocking (and arousing) as a "Baby on Board" window sticker. "The art world," d'Addario continues, "is certainly in step with the rest of media and culture."
Some other artists joining the orgy include Whitney Lee, who makes latch-hook rugs that depict the faces and sometimes naked bodies of porn stars, repurposing an arts 'n' crafts medium usually reserved for portraits of, say, puppy dogs or Winnie the Pooh. Chicago-based digital artist Jason Salavon has written software that creates visual averages of hundreds of images; one of his recent works aggregates every Playboy centerfold of the last 40 years into four decade-long panels. Adam Connelly paints lush canvases of very low-resolution porn pics downloaded off the Web.
Even Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a mainstay of the New York art scene, is turning his gaze toward the porn world. His newest project features dual portraits of 30 porn stars—everyone from Jenna Jameson to gay porn star Michael Lucas shot in both everyday clothes and in their porn uniform (i.e., nude and heavy on the makeup). HBO is bankrolling a making-of documentary and the centerpiece has become the book, which features essays from folks like John Waters, Gore Vidal, and Salman Rushdie.
In the early '90s, the artists who engaged porn operated a little differently: Reganitis was a disease and they were the shock therapists. Robert Mapplethorpe explicitly sampled the visual vocabulary of hardcore porn, Karen Finley brandished pussy in pursuit of her politics, and Jeff Koons even produced some real cum of his own in a series of hardcore shots with his then wife, a former porn star.
These days, conservatives have better ways to raise money than by crusading against artists. In any case, the porn art in question seems far tamer. "Art is always reflecting greater cultural trends," d'Addario says. "And porn is not this really transgressive thing that has the capacity to shock anymore." That leaves artists to find other approaches to the material.
Take Adam Connelly's low-res porn portraits. "My work tries to tie the mass consumption of pornography back to the tradition of the painted nude," he says. But his method leaves viewers to squint, supplying any actual porn from their own imaginations. "They're sort of re-inputting the information that is compressed in the pixels on the canvas," he explains. "By removing the specifics you allow people to inject what they want to see into the image."
With Whitney Lee's porno rugs, the 25-year-old art school grad is trying to play with porn without practicing it. "It's taking an image made by and for men but putting it in a medium that's associated with women," she explains. And it draws in a large audience—"grandmotherly-type women like it, and younger children," she says, sounding a little surprised. Far from being pilloried, Lee's been invited to show her rugs across the continent; they'll be on display this September in Toronto.
In all, the new art may be marked most of all by a studied ambiguity in its message. Playboy Enterprises Inc. actually bought a copy of Salavon's The Decades, for example, and displayed it proudly at corporate HQ in Chicago. "Many people see them as critiques," he says, avoiding any single analysis. "They took it as an homage."
Lee likewise shies away from being explicitly political. Although she agrees that there's a feminist angle to the work, she'd rather not repeat the example of the firebrands who went before. "The best kind of art is something that walks the line," she says. "You look at it and wonder if it's supposed to be a critique or not."
If Karen Finley and her contemporaries were advancing a specific politics, today's porn artists are content to let the viewers inject whatever they want into the work. Regardless of your ideology, this art goes down easy.
So while Koons's porn series was a critical disaster and sold terribly, Salavon and the other porn artists say their work has sold surprisingly well, to a broad cross-section of art buyers. "Only so many people can have a swine cut in half in their apartment, while hundreds can have a white canvas with colorful dots in their living room," Sahihi says, just back from a Mexican vacation paid for, in part, with Cum Shots money. "With this, it seems to not be a problem. And it throws a bit of art wisdom off the pedestal."
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's porn star portraits contain the most explicit nudity of all these artists' work. But, despite the shaved pussy and semi-hard cock, you can imagine the book on almost any coffee table. "It's very smart of him," says Michael Lucas, the Russian émigré turned gay porn producer and star, over a lunch in Chelsea. "The man who photographed all these celebrities and politicians suddenly coming up with a book like that? He chose the right time and the right situation."
The approach is a full-frontal, mainstream assault. The photographs lend the stars a grace more at home in Romantic portraiture than in the San Fernando Valley. At his studio, in Manhattan's East Village, Greenfield-Sanders said he'd been inspired by Goya's dual portraits of the nude and clothed maja, and he even showed the porn stars celebrated paintings to help them nail their poses; Briana Banks, for example, mimicked the stance from Cezanne's The Bather. It's a similar process to the one he has used to photograph luminaries of the caliber you might meet at a party at Diane von Furstenberg's apartment (where, incidentally, he ran into John Malkovitch and convinced him to contribute a porn essay).
"Timothy is the most high-stature artist to turn his vision in our direction," explains porn legend Nina Hartley, who's as comfortable tossing around terms like "the male gaze" as she is appearing in bondage videos. "His connection with the intelligentsia is priceless. To have porn as a subject addressed by such big minds is a sort of validation that many in porn seek from the greater society." Greenfield-Sanders is likewise aware that he is, in a sense, a colonizing agent. "I am in the mainstream," he says. "I imagine, as someone who's photographed presidents, I represent one thing the porn stars all want: mainstream acknowledgment."
But it goes further than that. The art, especially Greenfield-Sanders's, confers a cultural legitimacy, too. "I don't know if art affects what's acceptable in the mainstream," says Adam Connelly, "but it has a major impact on how people see the art world and how people see the adult industry.
"It may be the popularity of my paintings is just a reflection of the popularity of Internet porn," he says. "But porn in the art world is more publicly consumable. When you're seeing it in a gallery, it's sort of publicly sanctioned."
Still, there's the jerk-off problem: You never know quite whom or what you're sanctioning. On one hand, you attract an audience that might not otherwise frequent art galleries. Latch-hookers might not catch the sarcasm in Lee's work, but they e-mail her to say how much they enjoy it anyway. Then, on the other hand, there are the creeps.
"One guy asked me if I would latch-hook his cock," Lee remembers. "And it became apparent after a little bit of the conversation that he was just excited to talk to me about his cock."
"So that's uncomfortable," she says, "but it goes with the territory, I guess."