The Rumpus Interview With Zak Smith
Zak Smith qualifies as an Interesting Person in my book. He’s a talented painter/drawer. His magnum opus, at least so far, is called Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow and tempts seven-year-olds away from video games, according to Amazon. He also stars in porn movies. He likes to draw girls and monsters fighting. He has a new book out called We Did Porn, from which there’s a lengthy excerpt here, and he’s currently working on illustrating Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with five other artists. Plus, he says a lot of quote-worthy things. On working in porn:
Nobody ever asks me, “Why make paintings?” Is wanting to spend your time around attractive women who like to have sex much more difficult a desire for journalists to understand than wanting to dip wisps of horsehair into a wet lake of colored goo and smear it all over a piece of paper until it looks pretty?
People say “that thing is a work of art” and they basically just mean it’s really good. Like “that sandwich you made is a work of art, man.” But you would know that the craft of sandwich-making had seriously seen better days when sandwiches were in museums rather than out where people could eat them.
In real life, “art” is a commercial label you put on something when nobody seems to be able to find any other way to sell it. If you made a really nice mug that had a big hole in the bottom but you still wanted to sell it you might be able to sell it by calling it “art.” In my opinion, it’s easier for something to be art than to be anything else. A piece of blank film sort of starts out as “art,” and then if it actually has something on it that somebody’d want to watch then it’s a “movie,” and if it has sex in it then it’s a “porno movie.”
On the art world:
I do think it’s important that people know that the social life of the art world is like living death. It is a lot like living death. Think about living death: Like, if you died and yet also walked the earth, what would that be like? You could do nothing fun, and would be constantly faced with situations which only made you want to do things which you could never actually achieve (like, say, somehow ensure that the assistants who designed and constructed all the art for the artist standing next to you actually got all the money that that artist made just for signing it, or, say, grab the hors d’oeuvres tray and shove it into that artist’s eye socket), and no-one would listen to anything anyone else said or wrote, and no-one would think seriously at all about anything and yet simultaneously no-one seemed to have a sense of humor about anything and you would constantly watch unholy outrages against both reason and your fellow human beings being perpetrated in a thousand ways and you would never see anyone worth having sex with and the only music playing would be Britpop or DJs re-mixing Britpop and the only thing to look at would be Andy Warhol or re-mixes of Andy Warhol and the walls would be white and the food would be vegetarian and in very small portions, and, in short, you would be consigned to never knew beauty, pleasure, intellectual stimulation, or visceral experience in any form forever.
That would be living death, right? That would also be the art world.
1-Drugs are very popular among people who are interested in interesting things but are not themselves very interesting.
2-Drugs make your body do weird things—so they’re interesting if you’re in the performing arts.
3-Drugs make boring things seem interesting, so products created by people while they are on drugs are often really boring.
Glenn Gould is a pretty good example of all three of these propositions—his rendition of Webern’s piano opus—(23 or 28?)—is amazing, but when he sits down and writes his own stuff, he’s terrible and derivative.
What I do—and what most fine artists do—is not a performing art, so drugs just do to you what they do to everyone else: they make you suck and then waste everyone’s time pretending you sucked for some non-drug reason.
I mean, in art school if there was some minimalist who made like a 2 by 4 except it was purposefully off by a quarter-inch and that was their art, you knew that guy was either on speed or a big pothead. When you look at all that crap conceptual art from the sixties and seventies—drugs.
On information culture:
Information is only information if people are not total morons—however, people are total morons. Therefore we do not live in an information-saturated culture, we live in a Brad-Pitt-and-whatshername-just-had-a-baby- saturated-culture where smart people who care can find what they need when they have to if they’re lucky and we always have and we always will.
Here’s his sketchbook/blog. Some of the pictures are a little too abstract for my taste; others are awesome. All have style.
