Zak Smith is a fan of comic books and likes painting pretty girls. But don’t peg him just yet as a hormonally-charged guy secretly sketching half-naked women in his notebook— this is a Cooper Union and Yale-educated artist who creates intricately detailed, erotically-charged portraits of girls in their natural, decadent environments; vivid vignettes of a sub-culture in which the artist himself is immersed. The green-haired artist has made a career of mixing gritty reality (Girls in the Naked Girl Business) and beautiful invention (100 Girls and 100 Octopuses). And his work, represented by Fredericks & Freiser gallery in NYC, has even shown in the Whitney Museum of Art, with permanent works on display in Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as in a book collection titled simply Zak Smith: Pictures of Girls. While his work seemingly borders on OCD— particularly in his laborious 760-page project illustrating Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow— the result is a colorful frenzy reminiscent of Klimt.

With a penchant for girls in the adult-film industry, many of whom appear as subjects in his work, it’s no surprise that after shaking up the fine art world, Smith found himself moving into another expressive format— star of “alternative” porn, under the heavy-metal-inspired name, Zak Sabbath. Having made his debut two years ago, he’s since appeared in several adult films, of which he donates the majority of his proceeds to charities like Food Not Bombs.

psychoPEDIA caught up with the 32-year-old— who made a recent move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to be closer to the porn industry— to find out more about his films and his position on the future of popular art:

How did you get into the industry?
I knew people, because I had been doing portraits of girls in the industry. Soon after I did the Gravity's Rainbow pictures, a director calls to ask if he can use them in a porno movie. I was joking around if I could have sex with all the girls in the film. He said "ok," I sent some pictures, and then I did the movie— Barbed Wire Kiss.

Did you have previous acting experience?
I did some radio. I have no idea if that helped, but it made me used to the fact that everything I said and did was being recorded. You don’t need to act in porn so much. Chances are, if you can forget that you’re “acting,” you’ll probably do a better job than most people who are trying.

Favorite porn moment?
It was one of the strangest scenes in any movie, porn or otherwise: Charlotte Stokely was playing a prostitute, and William Wood was her drug-dealer boyfriend. He was out of it the whole scene, barely paying attention to her. They start having sex, and she says, “I love it when we do things together.”

Is most of it scripted or improv?
Usually they’ll set up a situation and say to the actors, “Pixie’s pregnant, and she’s trying to convince you to give her money to get an abortion— go!”

Do you feel it’s at all problematic to donate your porn earnings to charity?
Half the money from porn is going to some hustler, so with the money I make, at least it can go to something good. I also give away a lot from art. I think artists should do that more, frankly, because we can afford it. Any artist that shows in a gallery makes a lot of money, because paintings are expensive things. A lot of artists feel that whatever message is in their work is benefiting humanity, but what you do in galleries just isn’t that popular— it doesn’t get out to that many people. If you want to change things, change them with money. I try to put my money where my mouth is.

How often do your porn partners show up in your art?
I’ve always made pictures of the people around me. Pretty consistently, the girls in the movies show up in the art and vice versa.

Has being "alternative" made it easier or more difficult to succeed in the art and porn worlds?
n music or regular movies, or TV, you can make a movie, TV show, or record for people who don’t like the things that usually come out, and you’ll get an audience. The Ramones made records for people who hated the music at that time, and people bought it. But in porn and contemporary art, most of the economy is based on selling your product to the same people who bought the last product. If you sell contemporary art, you’re nobody until the people who used to buy Andy Warhols buy your work. You can’t make a big splash in porn unless you sell to the guys who go into porno shops and buy 20 movies at once. It’s harder to break that cycle and create an audience than in other industries.

Have you ever been alienated in the bourgeois art world because of it?
It’s not that people are pushing me out and saying bad things, as much as they seem to be ignoring a lot of artists and concerns I think are important. Whether or not you like them, there’s a future in people like Banksy, Chris Ware, Juxtapoz— if contemporary art has a future at all, not just as things people want to look at, but things people want to make. The art world at large hasn’t realized the Warhol way of things is dead. At some point in the last century, pop culture started being more avant-garde than high art. It’s become a specialized thing like fishing. The future of art is not this conceptual game people have been playing with each other, but making art with your own two hands that people want to look at.

Did you ever use your status as an artist or a porn star to pick up girls? If so, which works more often?
It has less to do with which one works, as opposed to who it works with. You meet somebody you like, tell them everything about you, and they decide to sleep with you. It’s hard to tell why. I lean more toward girls you meet in porn than those in the art world. I don’t like sweaters, and a lot of girls in the contemporary art world wear sweaters. And sandals. Porn girls never wear sandals. I like that– it’s like saying, “Hey, I care.”

Do you have any upcoming exhibitions planned?
I’m working on my next show, in October, in New York. The title I like right now is “Everything Has Already Been Done, Poorly.” Like how people say, “Everything has already been done,” and I think, “but not very well.” The next frontier is doing things with quality and depth, and giving a shit. It’s an unexplored dimension in art, since it’s so easy to make money without it.

Any book projects?
I’m working on a book about my experiences in porn— pictures and stories, called Pornography in the Time of Bad Ideas. I just feel like we’re in a really horrible, almost hopeless time— especially with regards to people who make art and have an ability to talk to the rest of the world. But we keep making these things, and maybe someday, people will pick up what we did and think it’s worth something.

~Leann Peterson


All artwork by Zak Smith