All posts by Zak Smith

October 7th, 2009

Zak Smith in Conversation With Alexandros Vasmoulakis

90% of my street work has been made in Athens/Greece. The political and social situation there is pretty loose and that gives room for anomie of all sorts. It is not necessary to get a permission to paint in the public domain. …more

July 27th, 2009

Zak Smith in Conversation with Anthony Lister

Anthony Lister’s paintings are hard to describe–mostly because they’re so easy to describe. You could say Lister is a graffiti-artist who does paintings of comic book characters and other pop-culture icons in spray-paint, but that doesn’t explain why they look fantastic. It’s probably faster just to look at the pictures.

…more

June 29th, 2009

Zak Smith: The Shorty Q&A with Dennis McGrath (NSFW)

Shot on the sets of pornographic films, Dennis McGrath’s photographs are eerie, funny, down-to-earth, poignant, and gorgeous all at the same time. …more

June 26th, 2009

Barely Legal Whores Get Gang-F***ed

f22(Editor’s Note, if you came here looking for porn you’ll probably prefer Sex and Submission to this essay. Or you could stick around; it’s a very good essay.) Sometimes, in the Industry, you see things that you really wish you hadn’t. If it’s a certain kind of very independent girl, she’ll shrug it off, like “Hey, it didn’t turn out that well—but I have no regrets, and it’s good for business.” …more

June 22nd, 2009

Zak Smith in Conversation with Gordon Terry

“…Beauty is often considered suspect based on the lingering premise that it is radically conservative and reactionary, and that the strategies of visual appeal used by the mass media can be seen as one of the ways that authentic experience is transformed into mediated experience and false consciousness.” …more

June 15th, 2009

Zak Smith in Conversation with Sean McCarthy

void

Zak Smith: There’s a lot of “stoner” art being made these days–like some half-assed faux-naive drawing of a yeti riding a bicycle into a bee’s butt or something. Your work isn’t like that–yet it does seem to have something to do with the kind of doom/stoner metal being put out by like Sleep or Electric Wizard or Monster Magnet back when they were good–can you talk about this stoner aesthetic or mood?  About paranoia?  About hallucination, paranoia, altered perceptions of time–anything like that? …more

March 12th, 2009

Zak Smith: The Last Book I Loved, Viriconium

imagedb-21M. John Harrison is doomed.

Here is what is going to happen to him: in ten or twelve years, after the Hollywood development people have clawed past the Dunes and Narnias and Spider-Men and have begun to see the bottom of the complexly-constructed-fictional-realities-that-can-be-plausibly-turned-into-mammoth-SFX-epics barrel, Harrison’s work will be discovered and turned into films. …more

About

Zak Smith is an artist who first came to prominence with his mammoth work Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow. Smith's paintings and drawings are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. We Did Porn— a book includng drawings and stories about his experiences working in the adult film industry— his third book and his first to include writing— will be published in July 2009 from Tin House Books. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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