zaksmith

Contents:
1-Paintings
(AdriaTemperSawaCharlieRavenVoltaireSean)
2-NOTE TO SELF--KEEP BIBLE IN POOL OF BLOOD
3-Frequently Asked Questions
1-- My Paintings



(print available in the SG
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(print available in the SG
store)




2-INTERVIEW (NOTE TO SELF-KEEP BIBLE IN POOL OF BLOOD)
Artnet recently posted a feature by Emily Trice about my show in London based on an interview she did with me. Emily then wrote to me and said how the Artnet people had edited her article a lot and changed some of the things she wrote and probably people would get a better idea of what I'm like by just publishing the interview I did with her in preparation for the article.

>You have a show up at FRED Gallery, what's this new body of work like?

A few portraits, a few abstract paintings, 200-odd drawings. It's the opposite of conceptual art--it sounds boring when you describe it but it's terribly exciting when you actually see it.

>Any new sources of inspiration?

This'll be the first time the stuff I've done since I got into the porn industry will be shown in Europe, so that's new. And overall, there's this sort of atmosphere in America right now--like everyone's finally realized that the country's drowning in morons and we're all fucked forever_and that's made it into the work. Also I have been make things with lots of little dots.

>Any new collaborative efforts? experimental techniques?

There are a bunch of new technical things I did with the paint this year, but there isn't much point in going into detail--the people who don't like my stuff will just glaze over and see more vapid, cluttered Zak Smith-bullshit and the the people who do like it will write me letters asking how I did this or that and then I'll write letters back explaining.

>I know you are addicted to social distortion...any musings on punk
>music and its influence on your aesthetic? Any thoughts on the >current situation of punk in America? NYC post CBGB? the UK? >Elsewhere?

Here is the thing everyone should agree on about punks as of 2007: Clearly, we were right. About everything. It is not altogether pleasant to live in the future you spent your whole life warning everybody about.

>Any thoughts on showing in London in relation to its
>status as a punk haven? Think you'll be at home?

From what I can tell, these days London is pretty much become the capital of the worst kind of music--that whole lineage of Oasis/Blur/Radiohead/Coldplay castrated manboy pop.
For people who have to do business in the art world, it's kind of extra bad because there's a weird reverence for this kind of music. I have almost had to refuse to have shows at certain galleries because the owners kept threatening to introduce me to DJs and guys in crappy bands.
Y'know the way all artists had to like jazz from the turn of the century until the mid-80s? Well it seems like now everybody has to like electronica and keyboardy pop. People make art about Morrissey and New Order and name shows after Depeche Mode songs--it's like why not just buy a kidney-shaped pallette and wear a beret? Just in case there's someone out there who doesn't know you're a sensitive artist?
Meanwhile if there's a piece of art that references something from genuine underground music, everyone just assumes it's ironic, or it's "a detached examination of youth subcultures". It seems to never occur to anybody that when, for example, Slayer says "I keep the bible in a pool of blood so that none of its lies can affect me" that hey, given current conditions, maybe this is not such a bad idea.


>If you landed on some planet that had yet to be claimed, what or
>whose flag would you plant on its surface? Would yours be a peaceful >planet? Or would yours be a death star...and if so, who would you >attack first and why?

Well, y'know, being an anarchist the thing to do would be to not only (italics on this next word) not plant a flag but also to sort of try to infect the planet with some kind of flag-eating bacteria capable of surviving in a harsh alien environment

>How's your second career going?
Porn?

Well Sasha Grey just ate out Mandy Morbid in my bathroom and then bought me lunch at Taco Bell-- it's hard to complain.

>Is it informing your career as an artist? Making you a better artist? A >worse artist? or is it totally independent?

I think it's always good for artists--especially ones who have had some success--to spend time around people who don't give a fuck about their art.
It seems to me a lot of people get a little success and then suddenly
they're in a bubble--people who don't like their work are scared to say anything, and so the only people who are around are people who like whatever they do.

Then you get to this point where you go "Oh, hey, I had this stupid idea!" and all your friends go "Oh awesome, you should totally do that!" and you believe them, and so you think everything you do is great and so you start sucking harder and harder until you die. So it's good when I go "Hey, can I do a painting of you?" and the girl goes "Uh...I guess, can you wipe your cum off that tripod first?" It reminds you what art can and can't do--so you can focus on doing only the stuff that it can do.

>Is there more ass kissing/ dick sucking in the porn world or the art >world?

Well let's see: If you say that you hate "Debbie Does Dallas" you can still have a long and healthy career in porn, if you say that you hate Roy Lichtenstein or Felix Gonzales-Torres then you're a barbaric ape creature who is clearly unable to adapt to the psychoperceptual demands of the postmodern paradigm.

However--lately I've noticed a depressing parallel between the art business and the porn business. Both industries are unbelieveably conservative and appear to outsiders as a carnival of creepy stereotypes, all of which are largely true. (See: "The Big Liebowski") A lot of porn is braindead fake people with enormous hair having lame sex to cheesy music, and a lot of art is gormless academic bullshit and pretentious non-objects with delusions of sociopolitical grandeur.

For example: If I say "It looks like a novel" or "it sounds like music" this conjures almost no image in anyones head--if I say "It looks like porn" or "It looks like contemporary art" then chances are your mind fills with horrific and unwholesome images.

There is a reason for this--and it's an economic reason. Both industries are built around selling to a small audience that wouldn't even be in the store if they didn't like the stuff that the industry put out last year.
Consider some healthier industries: music can be sold and marketed to people who don't like the music they've been hearing--this is where the audience for, say, the Ramones came from. It's simply niche-marketed to all these people who felt left out.

Similarly, regular (non-porn) movies can be sold and marketed to people who don't like the usual Hollywood movies--like for example if you make a movie that targets 60-year old menopausal women then it'll likely be the only one that season and all the 60-year-old menopausal women will go see it and you'll make money. No matter what you think of the music or film industry as a whole, hardly anybody says "I don't like music" or "I don't like movies".

In porn and art, however, the people who don't like the standard product are nowhere near the galleries and porn stores. Unless your work is liked by the exact same rich and powerful art collectors and curators who liked Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons in decades past, you can forget about having an art career. They are the only game in town, because everyone who didn't like Andy got out of the business a long time ago.

So now most of the art sold in galleries hews to the minimal/conceptual/anti-experimental line, because people who like that shit are the only ones still paying any attention.

For slightly different reasons, the same is true in porn--I know a lot of directors who are trying to make different kinds of porn movies--female-friendly movies or over-the-top violent fetish movies or movies with a sort of indie-film vibe--and the problem is that the people who might like those movies don't know that they exist because they gave up on going into the porn store long ago. So they make movies, they don't sell, the studios don't give them budgets to make new movies, and porn, like art, stays pretty much the same year after year.

There's a basic business axiom at work in both industries that keeps them pumping out the same stuff--it's easier to sell 6 widgets to someone who is already buying 5 widgets than it is to sell 1 widget to someone who isn't even in the store.


>If you had to cast a porno with artists/ art world scenesters who
>would you cast?

It would be impossible to cast a porno using art world people--except for a few of the gay guys, art world people all act like they don't have sex_they just "engage in critical dialogues about the nature of intimacy and the disintegration of gender-identity in the face of commercial sexuality" and then hire some assistants to have sex for them while they do coke, watch "America's Next Top Model", and sacrifice children to the ghost of Jacques Derrida.


>Which artists do you respect the most, formally and personally?

I'm just going to list some living artists that everyone should go check out here: Nicholas DiGenova, Phil Frost,
Sean McCarthy.


>If you had to design the album art for any band in history, which band >would you choose, or which album?

There are actually a bunch of bands that have used my stuff, but I guess my dream assignment would be Eyehategod or Leftover Crack or maybe The Distillers. I wonder if that means anything at all to the people reading this interview...[keep in mind this was originally for an article on Artnet -z.]

>What, in your opinion, is the best revenge?


I'm not sure what the best revenge is, but in real life I usually try to
arrange for the offending party to be beaten up by a girl.

>What is your opinion of anime porn?

Y'know, here's an interesting thing I discovered about anime porn you may not know: porn girls LOVE that shit. Nadia Nitro wants me to help her do a half-live/half-animated scene at some point.

Most of the actual anime porn movies that are out don't look that good, but I think the ideas got legs if it's done right--seeing people have sex for 20 minutes six times in a row always gets boring but good drawing never gets boring.

>I know you love Berlin...any particular reason?

Punks, sluts, punk sluts, cheap rent, plus they've already done Fascism and they're over it.

>are there any interesting anecdotes about any of your portrait >subjects?

Well here's one:

Our president actually has his favorite painting up in the Oval Office. He thinks--and has said in print--that it's a painting of a couple of itinterant preachers and calls it "A Charge to Keep". In reality it's a painting of two cowboys that was used whenever the Saturday Evening Post needed an illustration for a cowboy story or a hick story. Before it was called "A Charge To Keep" it was called "Ways that Are Dark" and before that it was originally titled "The Slipper Tongue".

Another one:

He's a convicted felon, and he's also president! Wow!

I think there may be some anecdotes about the porn girls, too, but who really wants to hear about that?

>what attracts you to your subjects besides their general
>sexuality/personality/appearance?

Is that not enough?

It seems like the entire history of portraiture rests on jackasses painting people who don't even have that going for them--like Henry VIII or Andy Warhol. Next to popular reasons artists have used in the past for painting people such as: "he was rich", "I was dumb enough to marry her", "I read somewhere that she gave birth to the Messiah" and "this gay collector told my dealer he wanted a male nude" I feel like "I though that the painting would look better if she was in it" seems like one of the better reasons to paint someone.

>what's the significance of the fan/cat as motif? is that purely visual?

Well you go to someone's apartment and there's all the stuff and if they're a porn girl they live in LA and so they probably have an electric fan sitting there and if they're a fetish model then they probably have a cat.

So then you think: leave them in or leave them out? On the one hand, things like cats and fans aren't rectangles, which is a plus, since most things in people's homes are--dvds, books, cds, tapes, speakers, TVs, cracker boxes.... On the other hand, this cat is hard to paint with the techniques I usually use--you can't really convincingly paint a living, furry animal in flat planes and gradients of oversaturated colors--and an oscillating fan is just a pain in the ass--all those tiny struts forming a cage with curving, offset blades inside.

So then you think--the main reason I would be leaving them out is fear and laziness, so fuck that, I have to do it.

Not that that's the kind of thing most people are worrying about...

Short answer: yes.

>any additional statements you would like to make about your donation >to food not bombs? are you only able to make this donation because >of additional income provided by your second career?

No--saying I have a porn "career" is like saying Ozzy has an acting "career". I can afford it because everybody who is a full-time artist and has shows all the time can afford it. We make enough money. The only trick is spending the money on feeding people or helping them escape arbitrary execution rather than on 8-channel video installations projected on platinum and lucite, legions of student assistants, Prada cufflinks, the complete second season of "Lost", pre-stretched canvases, and truckloads of crack.

>how do you like los angeles?

Very carefully.

>What's the best information you have ever received in relation to
>navigating the art world?

Deuteronomy 7:2:
"thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them"



3--Frequently Asked Questions
spoilerized to save space