Until today, I never thought Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin would’ve made for much of a porn director. Well, never say never I guess.
The mainstreaming of pornographic film and photography over the last fifteen years has been a distinctly Rococo phenomenon. Of all the mainstreamed Western artforms, porn is easily the most playful, opulent, and tongue-in-cheek. Its love of decadence, robust form and shape, and decorative grace has made pop-pornography a sister to the 18th century style. The only other artform that has even veered close to it in these years has been fashion design, but even the fashion industry has had periods of totally august composure and austerity. During the mid-1990s, new synthetic production materials turned fashion models on the world’s runways into sleek, compact, and serious harbingers of a neoclassical revolution. John Galliano was so Jacques-Louis David it hurt. But the return to neoclassicism was a logical bounceback from the grimy, pallid iconoclism of the grungey early-90s, even if it did smell just as vapid and insincere. After all, this is fashion we’re talking about.
Okay, back on track…
Porn is an art of engagement by way of its exploitation of human voyeurism. It offers viewers an anonymous and inconsequential shared sexual experience. Porn is not simulated, but it would be foolish to call the industry and its product ‘real’ either. It is a hyperreality where humanity and technology intersect on a host of different levels. Whether it’s with the surgical or digital reconstruction, manipulation, or enhancement of the physical form or reality, pop-pornography does allow for real sexual stimulus and has become, as a result, a terribly successful business model whose interactive structure many artists could learn from. Today’s porn directors are the most successful proponents of artistic excess since the Symbolists and Aesthetics of the late 19th century. Of course, the chief knock against those movements was their distance and detachment from reality, while others have argued that those things were their chief virtues.
Having led to much criticism, the depiction of sexual encounters in pornography is almost exclusively specious. For this very reason it, too, has recieved praise and denunciation. The sword by which the industry has lived or died has always been its own constructed worldview. But at least one thing is threatening to change the way porn obscures sexual reality: High Definition TV.
The Times today has a great spot about the effect HD is having on the way the porn industry produces its products: the polycarbonate ones, the plastic ones, the living ones, and the plastic AND living ones. The quality of new visual data storage is making porn too real, some say. HD is exposing cellulite, age wrinkles, veins, and scars to a divided industry audience, half of whom seem frightened by the introduction of Realism into their art of synthetic ornament. The other half, like me, are excited by the prospect of this cohabitation between artificial perfection and human uniqueness, which has the potential to change cultural attitudes about what is physically beautiful for the better. One thing HD seeks to do is expose the glaring aesthetic drawbacks cosmetic surgery can have. According to the article, for instance, porn star Jesse James plans to have breast reduction surgery in the wake of her company’s transition to HD in order to remedy noticable flaws created by her original enhancement procedure.
Let’s take a look at the world’s most famous pornographic model, Jenna Jameson:
Jenna is attractive here because of the repository of fat cells at her armpit, because of the frequent moles that dot her arms and chest, because of the brown freckles that sprinkle her nose, and because of the folds in the skin on her neck. She has subtle, human qualities that are inseparable from her, unlike her breast implants and her streamlined, bottled hair colour. Those artificial aspects also contribute to her physical persona and to her role as an exaggeration of femininity and sexuality, but it’s her real, slender, azure gaze that is inimitable and, thus, sexiest of all. Pop-porn, up until now, has concentrated on idealized forms, on the artificial aspects of Jenna. HD is going to change that. For once, technology is not escalating the distance between the art of porn and the reality it exaggerates, but is, instead, closing the gap. Jenna’s freckles and fat deposits and moles just got a whole lot sexier.
MUSIC FOR THE DAY
I’ve been a huge fan of Momus, aka Nick Currie, for many years now. Momus has always been ahead of the pop culture curve and, in that sense, he reminds me a lot of Grant Morrison. Unfortunately, this has meant that, by the time certain musical styles or conventions have become vogueish, Momus has long since played them to their own untimely death and moved on, leaving him to miss out on the commercial and critical plaudits he deserves.
Momus’ first album, a brilliant collection of biblical stories, is a pastiche affair that predates the cut-and-paste lo-fi singer-songwriter trend that launched Beck into the pop stratosphere by several years.
“Lucky Like Saint Sebastian” from 1986’s Circus Maximus.
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