SELF PORTRAIT

So, it was not surprising when the woman who introduced us, designer/smut peddler/diva Bella Vendetta, mentioned that Zak is alt porn’s new IT boy. His first adult film, VCA/Hustler’s Barbed Wire Kiss released this past June immediately caught the attention of punk porn’s auteurs, including Bella, Joanna Angel, and Eon Mckai who directed him in Girls Lie, just out this month.

But Zak Sabbath is not just some new cock on the block. He’s the accomplished painter Zak Smith, best known for illustrating every page of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, shown in the Whitney Museum’s 2004 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art and now in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His paintings, including his series Girls in the Naked Girl Business, have shown in galleries and museums throughout the US and Europe, and his art book Pictures of Girls, should be on the coffee table of every person who idealizes the modified woman.

For those who idealize the naked modified man, let’s get back to Zak the porn star. Meeting Zak was an opportunity to ask all the stupid questions I ever had about the adult industry, like sex tricks learned, whether it’s fun and lucrative. He kindly obliged.

Let’s start by talking about your first adult film, Barbed Wire Kiss. On the BWK site, it says that you were on set helping with art direction and then offered to help with the sex as well; they accepted, thus, marking your start in porn. What was in your mind at the time — were you just horny or did you see porn as some artistic project?

Horny, yes. I mean, when someone asks if you want to fuck Dominica Leoni you say “Yes”.

I do not see porn as one of my art projects. Not at all. If Barbed Wire Kiss is art, then it’s Benny’s [Benny Profane, writer & director] art and not mine. Porn can be good and creative and all that stuff, but I never saw my involvement in it as an extension of my own work, that would be a real cop out. I mean, I drew a bunch of pictures of my socks, too, does that mean my socks are my art? No. I am not a hippy conceptual artist.

I thought about the possibility of being in porn on occasion the same way you might think about the possibility of your breakfast cereal spontaneously transforming into solid gold on occasion — like, Gee, that’d be great, but it didn’t seem like the sort of goal you could sit down and work toward.

Keeping hard and getting the girl off are sort of weirdly connected. The thing is, what gets me hot is knowing I’m fucking someone who wants to get fucked, but on the other hand, the girl’s job is to act like she likes me no matter what so that I’ll relax. So, imagine, for the first time in your life you have absolutely no idea if the person you’re fucking actually wants to be fucking you. That made it hard to focus in the beginning. After a while though, you get into it.

Another thing you notice is how freedom is actually a really big element in the normal sexual experience. In real life, when you go from talking in the kitchen into having sex, it’s like, hey, suddenly there are no rules! You want to touch that — you can! You want to bite that, go ahead, buddy! Porno sex is like, well, okay you’re suddenly getting a blowjob, but you can’t move your head, you can’t move your arm, you have to keep pretending to drive this car, you can’t kiss her and you have no idea if you’re playing with her clit right or not because either way she’ll make the same noise, you can’t switch positions if you feel like it and you can’t look left because then you’ll see a six foot tall Swedish guy with a camera.

ZAK SABBATH AND PIXIE PEARL

Yes, but afterwards I really wanted to fuck again — only this time without rules. It’s like that every time.

My type is like...I guess I like girls who are attractive. I like attractive women. And gophers. Pretty much any kind of gopher.

I like women whose hotness is really really obvious. I have no interest in subtle, coy, or mysterious women. The answer to the mystery woman’s mystery always ends up being the same: She’s not very good in bed. I’ll take quality over mystery any day. I like a woman who introduces herself by saying “Hi, let’s have sex a lot.”

More. Part of it is just, if you’re a guy, no matter what kind of guy you are, there will be girls who are into that type. So if twenty girls know who you are, you might get to fuck one; if forty girls know who you are, you get to fuck two; if eighty girls know who you are... you get the point.

Dude, I have no idea, I just put it where they tell me to. I’m like a vegetarian working at a steakhouse: I don’t watch porn and I don’t feel like I care enough to be able to judge what’s what. The alt-porn directors on the other hand — Benny Profane, Bella Vendetta, Eon Mckai, Audacia Ray — I have spent enough downtime with them to know that these people watch mainstream porn and then get disappointed and pissed off and want to remake porn to their own weird, exacting specifications.

I suppose one day there might be independent, less greedy companies regularly funding porno movies but I have no idea if that’ll ever happen.

Not nearly as good as painting, but better than every other job I’ve ever had. It’s like a lot of show-biz jobs I guess, you get a few hundred for a couple hours work — so if you work every day it pays great, if you work once a month you’ll starve. Girls get about twice as much.

ART BY ZAK SMITH (100 GIRLS AND 100 OCTOPUSES)

I’m living off my paintings and have been for years. I’m involved in porn mostly because the social life of the art world is like living death.

Well, in both of them I get paid to fly out to Hollywood and have anal sex with hot chicks while people film it. No, wait, that’s just porn. I guess no.

People say “that thing is a work of art” and they basically just mean it’s really good. Like “that sandwich you made is a work of art, man.” But you would know that the craft of sandwich-making had seriously seen better days when sandwiches were in museums rather than out where people could eat them.

In real life, “art” is a commercial label you put on something when nobody seems to be able to find any other way to sell it. If you made a really nice mug that had a big hole in the bottom but you still wanted to sell it you might be able to sell it by calling it “art.” In my opinion, it’s easier for something to be art than to be anything else. A piece of blank film sort of starts out as “art,” and then if it actually has something on it that somebody’d want to watch then it’s a “movie,” and if it has sex in it then it’s a “porno movie.”

I did a Burning Angel scene, and I’m shooting a bunch of stuff for Bella Vendetta. According to Google I’m also in House of Ass and Barely Legal 56, which is news to me.

The alt-porn scene is very very small, so when Benny used me for Barbed Wire Kiss, Eon and Joanna Angel basically knew later that day there was a new piece of male talent available. A few months later he called. I had just installed my show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I was walking around the deserted museum and I got a call from Eon that he wanted me in LA in 4 days. So, yeah, I didn’t have sex for a few days, I got my AIM test [adult industry medical health test], and I prayed that Pixie Pearl would make her plane.

I didn’t see any script or anything, and I still have absolutely no idea what the movie is actually like. Eon shot the whole movie sort of loose; he’d tell us “Ok, Pixie wants to convince you about blahblahblah — Go!” and we’d improvise. So you could interpret that as being sort of shoestring-budget-porno-movie-half-assedness or as new-wave/Cassavetes-alternative-acting-method. Basically, I meet Pixie at a hardcore show, I fuck the shit out of her, and then horrible things happen.

Well, you can squirt your cum way further if you squeeze just behind the tip — like a garden hose.

The thing that stands out most I guess is this, which I learned from talking to Bella, Joanna Angel and Dana Dearmond and stuff: for nearly every single porn thing that people assume is some fucked-up misogynistic fantasy that some lonely guy came up with, there’s tons of girls who think it’s way hot and desperately want to make or see a movie featuring it. Tentacle rape, gagging on cum, girls getting the shit beat out of them, whatever it is, there is some girl somewhere who is way into it and just wants to be able to get her hands on it without a bunch of porn-store guys looking at her funny.

I presume that includes all documentaries on the history of the monarchy? When you don’t have a First Amendment, I guess this shit’s pretty easy to get away with, nobody in Parliament’s gonna stand up and go “I love violent pornography, feel my fucking pain!” But if you’re Tony Blair’s labor party and the war’s left you with all the credibility of an unsolicited e-mail from Nigeria, you haven’t got much choice but to pass laws that affect almost no-one and try to look like a good guy to the soggy right wing crumpetmunchers who are the only people gullible enough to believe anything you say.

- MD
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Zak’s book, Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated will be released in December but can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. To read a Q&A with Zak on his painting, check out Charlie Suicide’s interview.

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M.DiMattia is the author of the tattoo blog, Needled.com. You can also read her weekly column Tattoo Revue as well as artist interviews on Suicide Girls. Article copyright © 2006 M.DiMattia and BMEZINE.COM. Permission is granted to reprint this article in its entirety as long as credit is retained and usage is non-commercial. Requests to publish edited or shortened versions must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published September 20, 2006 by BMEZINE.COM in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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