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…
HAND TO MOUTH, PATTY CHANG, 2000
“Hand to Mouth”, a video from 2000, was made before Chang extended her vocabulary beyond the performance oriented explorations of her own body. In the video, she appears clad in a simple business suit, cheering encouragingly while simultaneously swallowing water and helium squished into her mouth by an invisible performer outside the picture frame…
BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, 1972
Behind the Green Door is a 1972 American feature-length pornographic film, widely considered one of the genre's "classic" pictures and one of the films that ushered in The Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984). Featuring Marilyn Chambers, who became a mainstream celebrity, it was one of the first hardcore films widely released in the United States and the first feature-length film directed by the Mitchell brothers…