Pornography:
The scope of this project clearly broaches Porn as well as Dirty Don. But for me here and now, I am most interested in measuring Lil’D and his administration. Pornography, not so much. Yes, I am not a woman, I’m a man. And indisputably, men hold more than equal burden when considering both the obscene and the political. So while I surely tread on much sacred ground here, this project remains purely experimental.
Television is inescapable. Likewise, the world of video pornography is a media culture greater than any of us can imagine. If meaningful comparisons could be made, pornography would be found to be a repository every bit an equal to broadcast TV. An unspeakable number of porn videos of every gyration are uploaded into porn-ether each and every day.
Pornography reaches out to every person everywhere, every second of every day, coursing through every cable, over every atmospheric wavelength, embedding inside every spark of electricity. By every measure, porn is universal and overwhelming. So why does it appear to be so 'invisible' to so many of us? Ha. Maybe by juxtaposing one taboo against another, I intuited, one might neutralize the insidious power of the other, in order to elicit an intellectual exchange of ideas between the two. For instance, we might reply by asking, “What is pornography anymore in the age of Donald John Trump?” Aren’t immigrant children being held in cages at the U.S. border also a kind of pornography?
Regardless, Trump+Porn seemed to proffer a correct comparative to me:
Grammar teaches the mechanics of language to the student. This is the step where the student "comes to terms" defining the objects and information perceived by the five senses. Hence, the Law of Identity: a tree is a tree, and not a cat.
Logic (also dialectic) is the "mechanics" of thought and of analysis, the process of identifying fallacious arguments and statements and systematically removing contradictions, thereby producing factual knowledge that can be trusted.
Rhetoric is the application and performance of language (also production) in order to instruct and to persuade the listener and the reader. It is the knowledge (grammar) now understood (logic) and being transmitted outwards as wisdom (rhetoric).
The porn portion of this project provides surrealist formalism through intellectual juxtaposition, which openly presents underlying specific Critical feminist (#MeToo) threads as well, for instance: Who is holding the camera and why? Who is pushing the buttons? Selfie-porn? Extreme close-ups? Fetishism? Celebrity? Power? Production value? Again, what Realities are being excluded inside pornography? How does its production also produce enabling?
In comparing Trump to porn, I quickly began to see both subjects in a similar pathetic light, and their shock-value soon diminished. Once I appropriated a piece of porn, it degraded to data, like any Trump comment on TV: Fair-Use, malleable, collage-able, empirical data-bits. Any blush of eroticism or anger was drained, negated. Foremost, these much too common representations became equal evidence -- both dehumanized and desexualized media. My shoes no longer stuck to the viewing booth floor in the same way, if you get my picture. For these images are not Life. They represent something much less than Life, no more sacred than we choose to make them.
But there is still a real danger when self-selecting porn material. Have no doubt, every speck of this toxic stuff is misogynous -- 100% of it -- so I purposefully stepped around in it very, very carefully. (Andrea Dworkin tells me so.) The task, however, was to steer these perverted energies back against themselves. Fighting fire with humiliating self-immolation.
Image making is both life-taking and spirit-killing. Watching a salacious close-up of Trump's pink pursed lips is an image as obscene as the glistening shaved vulva of a wrinkled, leathery russian babushka. And that is my point here. For it doesn't really matter HOW you are depicted... it is THAT you are depicted, and then transmitted for further objectification. All image depiction today unless unequivocally vetted is pornographic. “STOP SEEING EVERYTHING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY, YOU'RE KILLING US.” Pointing a camera today is quite like pointing a gun.
As for my brain, a fair question could be whether I am damaged now too. Who can tell? I was often sick to my stomach building these videos. And from the onset, I could never-ever mention this project to strangers. Friends, 100% of the time for an entire year, always had that same look on their face, "You're still doing that? Dude, you need to get out and do some other things...(long pause)." In fact, my wife did keep close tabs on me, so ask her. But most importantly, I glean from this research that the critical practice of potlatch works. With every video, I remembered... and Trump’s power incrementally diminished; it felt like I was truly “resisting.”
Our mediascapes are perverted waste lands, endlessly kissing, groping, fingering, and raping human bodily sense. For our media suck all sacredness out of experience, just like “grabbing pussy.” Our cameras are guns. Our screens are liars. And our normative notions of media are leading us into death. We need robust critical methods of resistance; Trump+Porn was one pathway for me. So who knows? Maybe someday in the future someone will search 'Trump fraudulent presidency' and my videos will appear, archived as an historical record, most likely filed under ‘Graven Images’.
A better bet, ultimately, is that I will be categorized as a pornographer, not that Trump was comparatively pornographic.
“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say,
becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say,
just as the will to live becomes more urgent
when life has lost its meaning.”
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
Click to view main project & 400 videos
Preface Premise Project Potlatch Pornography Politics Postscript Peroration