Institute History
Description
The ubiquity of porn, so accessible on DVD and websites, has had the curious effect of making its conventions all too familiar. Liberating screen sex from aesthetic and narrative tropes—not to mention taboo restrictions—Destricted is a spicy compilation of shorts by celebrated visual artists who are reinvigorating erotic film.
In Matthew Barney's audacious Hoist, a man is suspended precariously under a 50-ton truck. As he makes athletic love with the greased-up, rotating driveshaft, human and machine become one system. In his signature sytle, Richard Prince excavates a gold-standard '70s porn flick, complete with big tits, big cock, and cumshot, disintegrating the video to unleash alternative sensual and sexual narratives in House Call. In Balkan Erotic Epic, Marina Abramovic captures sumptuous scenes from Balkan folklore, where the power of phalluses, breasts, and vaginas is enlisted to manipulate the forces of nature. Gaspar Noé pushes boundaries of eroticism in his unabashedly sexual cinematic journey, We Fuck Alone. In Onan: Death Valley, a man masturbates against a vast desert landscape until the ebb and flow of self-pleasuring seem as inevitable as the blowing wind. Sync conceives the ultimate "quickie" by condensing hot moments from scores of porn movies into one pounding, kaleidoscopic sex act. Bad-boy Larry Clark plays sexual matchmaker in Impaled, when he auditions young men, then allows his chosen buck to select his own porn-star mate for the explicit shoot. The interview sessions, where the camera scrutinizes naked nubile hopefuls, speak volumes about how porn has shaped a generation's attitudes about sex and the body. Like the rest of Destricted, Impaled will not only expand your mind; it may get you all hot and bothered, too.