by MARK SLUTSKY

Sex and art have always been intertwined, but the mainstreaming of pornography in our culture over the last couple of decades has changed the dynamic somewhat. You know something’s up when a moralizing detective on CSI: Miami, on an episode about a murdered adult entertainer, remarks that “porn is the new martini.”

While that may rank as perhaps the worst artistic treatment of pornography on record, and perhaps the worst sentence ever uttered in any medium, a far more interesting take on the matter can be found in Destricted, a new anthology of sexually explicit art films directed by a coterie of name-brand art stars. Matthew Barney, Larry Clark and Gaspar Noé are among the seven filmmakers contributing to the project.

“The only thing in the contract that it stated, when we were all approached to do this, was that it had to have hardcore content and it had to be under 20 minutes long,” says Marco Brambilla, whose short Sync, composed of hundreds of shots of sex scenes woven together into one bewildering super-love-scene, may be the wittiest entry in the project. “So there was no sort of requirement for what we should do, other than to comment on pornography, to comment on the media and the way pornography has kind of entered into the mainstream. It was kind of a personal interpretation for each artist, to reflect the way they feel pornography either affects them, or the way it slots into the general culture itself.”

Sex with machines

What producers/curators Mel Agace, Andrew Hale and Neville Wakefield ended up with was a wide variety of shorts, spanning genres and media. Barney’s Hoist, with its hypnotic pace, depicts a love act between a sexed-up forest man and a gigantic tree-felling device. The enormous machine is sort of a central character in the drama that plays out as the branch-and leaf-strewn man rubs his penis against its lubed-up driveshaft.

Larry Clark’s entry, Impaled, is at 37 minutes the longest film in Destricted (presumably he didn’t worry too much about the 20-minute limit). It’s the only straight-up documentary in the project. Clark interviews several young men about their experiences growing up with pornography: how it affects their sex lives and their relationship with women. Then he picks one of them, a soft-spoken emo kid who definitely has a MySpace page, to interview a few porn stars and choose one to have sex with. Then the kid has sex and they make a little porno movie together. That Larry Clark!

Noé’s film, with the warm title We Fuck Alone, is a 24-minute stroboscopic masturbation fantasy involving blow-up dolls, teddy bears, sex in alleyways and another young man with an emo haircut.

Fertily and friskiness

Somewhat on the other end of the spectrum is Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Erotic Epic, which is actually laugh-out-loud funny. Abramovic herself straight-facedly introduces each segment, which purport to illustrate the erotic fertility rites of the Balkans: men have sex with the ground to promote good crop growth, women keep fish in their vaginas overnight and brew up coffee with them later, so as to preserve their husbands’ affections, and the film mixes hand-drawn animation and Busby Berkeley-style semi-nude dance sequences charmingly.

Sex and the earth is definitely a theme in Sam Taylor-Wood’s Death Valley, which features a porn actor strolling into the valley of the title and masturbating to the music of Matmos and Andrew Hale. Finally, Richard Prince’s House Call draws on vintage ’70s porn, setting old footage to dreamy, disorienting music.

“I think each one has its own perspective,” Bambilla says. “I think the Larry Clark film, to me, is incredibly insightful, it’s very documentarian but it really focuses you on exactly what the issues are. You’re seeing real kids, and I found that very disturbing the first time I saw it. Marina Abramovic’s is a little bit more lyrical, the Gaspar Noé one is definitely bleak, meant to provoke, meant to be a provocation. The Richard Prince film is very much like his work, using appropriation, but in a more romantic sense, I guess. And the Matthew Barney obviously relates to his work very strongly—the idea of man and machine, androgyny, hermetics. A lot of his work is about hermetically sealing your body so that nothing can come in or out of the body, and that’s certainly true with his piece as well. I think each artist took a very different approach and I think that’s why the collection is so interesting to look at, because it’s so different.”

Destricted opens Resfest this Friday, Nov. 24, 7 p.m., at Ex-Centris. The festival runs through Nov. 26. for more info, see www.resfest.ca

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