Zak Smith is a young, hard-working star of the fine art world, porn actor and published author.  It's goes without saying that this is one busy guy.  A good friend and talented young artist by the name of Marissa Olney recently introduced me to Zak and I found him to be a very funny and genuine person.  So much so, in fact, that I wanted to learn more about this talented and intriguing individual.  Therefore, I asked Marissa if she would be interested in sitting down with me and Zak for a few questions about his artwork, porn career, published writings and anything else that might come up in such a conversation.  And, with the recent publication of his new book, "We Did Porn", I figured it was a good time to find out what else he has been up to and what the future holds for this very unique individual.

A&M: In an interview in one of your previous books, "Pictures of Girls", you said art making is 1000 choices per minute.  From reading "We Did Porn" it seems as though porn making is the direct antithesis (look here, cum there, stop, start, go, etc).  What are your feelings on this dichotomy?
Z: Having sex is always better than making art--or anything else--but having sex however you want is usually better than having sex with eight bored people staring at you and a stubbly guy with a steadycam telling you how that was great but can we get another insert shot?

I feel like maybe this is not something Juxtapoz readers will be surprised to hear.

 

A&M: You seem to be quite the modern renaissance man in your way; artist, pornstar and now published author.  Has writing always been part of your artistic practice?

Z: I've always written things down, I just don't like putting the writing anywhere near the art.

I think it's kind of cheating.  There are a lot of people in the art audience who don't actually like art, but have some sort of class- or status- or based feeling like they SHOULD like art.  So, in order to cater to these jackasses, people who sell art usually prepackage it with writing which tells them why they should like the art and what they should see in it.

You can't pick up a book about Leonardo Da Vinci without a chunk of it being devoted to some academic rambling on about what the art means or where it came from, and you can't have a show in a gallery without writing up some press release alleging that you "deconstruct normalizing assumptions about the interpenetration of gender roles" or whatever.  It's like saying, "Here's my art, but, if you don't like it, well, here's a bunch of reasons you really should."  Can you imagine, say, a chef doing that?  You don't like those sausages?  But the oven was hand-fired in the desert by Hopi Indians and the pig won the Iowa State Swine Show three years running!

Which is all to say, I want people to feel like they can just look at the art and look at the writing and decide whether they like both or either or neither, rather than having one provide "context" for the other.

Z: Everybody makes art when they're a little kid--then at some point they stop.  I just didn't stop.Z: Unicron, mostly--that scene in Transformers the Movie where he shows up and eats that planet full of robots.Z: No, I was in porn before Mandy.  I became a porn actor because somebody gave me the opportunity to, basically.  Call me crazy, but when someone walks up to my front door and says "Hey, I got all this pussy here, do you want it?"  I'm generally gonna say "Yes".Z: She is inifinitely inspiring and the work that I've done since I met her is infused with a quality...a kind of spirit...that I never managed to achieve in anything before.  Actually, no.  I just figured she'd like it if I said that.  Actually, not even--she's not that stupid.Z: My collection's pretty small, actually--I just buy ones with good art.  I think, basically, a lot of the best art that's been made since mid-century has been made by comic book artists.  The contemporary art world ignores them because if they admitted that, say, Jack Kirby was a Real Artist, then that would mean that somebody like Roy Lichtenstein was just copying a fellow Real Artist rather than Cleverly Appropriating Elements of Pop Culture for Alternative (and Higher) Purposes.  And they can't admit that because then a lot of rich collectors would have these Roy Lichtenstein paintings that're just really big Jack Kirby panels that are suddenly worthless.  So comic book artists are a bunch of guys (and a few girls) making art on tight deadlines and getting ignored and underpaid in order to keep the fiction that they're just Anonymous Agents of Pop culture alive.Z: Nicholas DiGenova, Sean McCarthy, Phil Frost, Shawn Cheng, Nick Waplington, Tim Hawkinson, Alexandros Vasmoulakis, Gordon Terry, Anthony Lister, Jacob Hashimoto, Ian Miller...you realize we could be here all day, right?


A&M: Have you ever painted or written something and thought, "This might be one of the most important things I will ever create."?  Or do you find whatever you are working on currently to hold the most value for you?
Z: I am usually trying to make the new thing work, whatever that is.  Then it's finished and I forget about it and do the next thing.  Then maybe I look at it a year later and go--Hey, look at that, that's not so bad...Z: No, but I will say this: religion is dumb.Z: All the reviews have been good, though most of them--especially the ones in art and literary magazines--start with "I expected this book to be terrible, but...".  So if you think you might like the book, read it, and if you don't think you'll like it, then you should definitely read it.  As far as next?  Well, I've got a lot of paintings to do.  There's some stuff coming up, but nothing I can talk about.Samael "Ceremony of Opposites", The Sword "Gods Of The Earth", Neurosis "Souls At Zero", Screeching Weasel "Anthem For A New Tomorrow" and an audiobook of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace.  On shuffle.