SOPHIA POPPY ERICKSON, GLITCH IN THE SYSTEM
To be trans is to be a glitch—an interruption in the binary, a rupture in the system. But in the fracture, there is also liberation. Glitch in the System explores the beauty that emerges when trans bodies are freed from surveillance, when privacy becomes a sanctuary, and when self-encryption allows for true autonomy…
METTE INGVARTSEN, 21 PORNOGRAPHIES, 2017
Writing a novel about libertinage from his prison cell in 1785, Marquis de Sade declared that the nature of human passions authorizes crime. This moment in Western modernity marks the moral ambivalence in the bind between sexual liberation and power…
LINDER, SELECT COLLAGES, 1976-1979
Linder has worked with the pornographic image for four decades, often montaging the images from pornographic magazines with those that she finds in interior design and fashion publications, the common denominator in all three being the depiction of the female body…
MONA HATOUM, DEEP THROAT, 1996
Mona Hatoum has set the table for us with this artwork, Deep Throat, from 1996. The installation includes a table, roughly 3 feet square and just over 4 feet high, covered in a tablecloth with a single place setting and wooden chair in front of it…
CINDY SHERMAN, SEX PICTURES, 1992
In 1992, Sherman produced a series of sex pictures using artificial body parts purchased from medical supply catalogues and typically employed for educational purposes. In this work, recalling the debased anatomical survey of a pornographic shot, detailed prostheses form a surrogate body…
ANONYMOUS, SEX DOLL POLAROIDS
The photo sets feature commercially-available dolls with added genitalia. The maker has set up tableaus and made photographic series that tell stories of straight, gay, and group scenes. We have not definitively dated them, but they are probably from the 1970s...
NICOLO GENTILE, PUT TO WREST, 2023
Nicolo Gentile’s installations reference motifs of the queer experience including kink and competitive/obsessive physique-building, as seen in material choices ranging from leather and latex to iron and steel...
SHELLY SILVER, WE, 1990
Even as the text instructs us otherwise, it is impossible not to read We's two images - that is, to respond to their symbolic quality, their suggestiveness. In a stream of associations, the rhythmic flow of people on the left becomes an ejaculation while the rhythmic hand on the right marks detachment, self-centeredness...
ASIA STEWART, DREAMGURL
Stewart was inspired to begin this series after a video of her 2020 performance “La Négresse blanche,” which includes nudity, was downloaded by an anonymous Vimeo user named “J” and shared on various pornographic sites without her consent in February 2021…
STORAGE GALLERY, VALUE OF PORN PANEL DISCUSSION
Storage Gallery and artist Barbara Nitke host a roundtable discussing the Value of Porn with panelists…
BRUCE LABRUCE, SUPER 8½, 1994
LaBruce’s quasi-autobiographical sophomore effort tells the story of “Bruce,” a porn auteur with avant-garde ambitions…
CHERYL DONEGAN, HEAD, 1993
With Head, Donegan ushered in a new era of brash, low-tech performance video. Here she confronts sex, fantasy, and voyeurism in an autoerotic work-out performed to pop music…
BARBARA NITKE, RESURRECTION, 1991-1994
By the late eighties, the hardcore porn industry had left New York and moved out to California. People who were serious about their adult film careers moved with the business, but I loved New York too much to leave. I stayed behind and found other things to do…
THOMAS RUFF, NUDES
The nudes series was created by Ruff downloading photographs from online pornographic thumbnail galleries and enlarging and distorting them to varying degrees. Literally and figuratively blurring the boundaries between pornography, formalist nude photography, and the art historical genre of the nude…
BARBARA NITKE, AMERICAN ECSTASY, 1982-1991
American Ecstasy is a memoir in pictures and words of the twelve years photographer Barbara Nitke spent shooting stills on porn movie sets in New York City…
TROY MONTES-MICHIE, SELECTED COLLAGES, 2013/2014
The themes I’m exploring are the intersections of race and gender and the exotification of the black male body. A lot of the more recent works I’ve been doing are images of black men from pornography that are cut up and collaged…
ANNIE SPRINKLE, POST PORN MODERNIST, 1993
Post Porn Modernist chronicles Annie Sprinkle's careers as a sex worker, pro-sex activist, and artist. Sprinkle begins with her transformation from Ellen Steinberg to Annie Sprinkle, an act that prompted her sexual revolution…
MIKE BOUCHET, UNTITLED VIDEO, 2011
It’s the first untitled work I’ve made. It’s composited from 10,000 porno videos that were downloaded off the Internet and 10,000 porno videos playing simultaneously in a big mosaic…
WILLIAM E JONES, THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY, 1988
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) is an important video from a moment in Jones’s career when he was beginning to leave behind the world of independent documentary cinema for a more free-wheeling practice that existed – and continues to exist – at the margins between several disciplines…
LARRY SULTAN, THE VALLEY
The cast and crew have gathered in the front yard of a ranch-style house, a few blocks from where I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley. Women in six-inch heels sink into the lawn; men push around camera equipment, anxious about losing the light…