Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits

From the Inside Out

By Amber Whiteside (Jan 28, 2005 )

It's more than likely you've heard something of XXX, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders recent series of 30 porn star portraits. Beyond an exhibition (that opened at the Mary Boone Gallery in October and is currently at John Berggruen), the project entails a hardbound book, in which contributors' pontifications on porn (Gore Vidal, Lou Reed, Karen Finley, and Salman Rushdie among them) are interspersed through the pages of portraits. The project is also the subject of 2 behind-the-scenes documentaries (one by HBO, the other 60 Minutes), and an audio track to boot.

A long-established portraitist, primarily of the cultural elite, Greenfield-Sanders has turned his camera to a divergent demographic, and in doing so, revealed a divergent approach. Each portrait comprises a pair and is displayed as a diptych: the subject appears in everyday street clothes on the left panel and repeats the exact same pose, completely nude, on the right.

My first glimpse of these porn star portraits was in David Rimanelli's preview in the September 2004 issue of Artforum -- the same issue in which I saw, some pages later, a full-page mostly nude Pamela Anderson, sitting with her knees spread, donning a g-string with a dollar sign and spike heels, her breasts expectedly buoyant, but deceivingly unscarred, her hair and lips gleaming (a black and white photograph by Sante D'Orazio showing at the Stellan Holm Gallery). Just a few pages later, in that very issue of Artforum, is Jeff Koons' Wolfman (Close Up), from 1991, in which he appears copulating with his then-wife, porn star Ciccolina -- but that's old news. More pertinent than the art world's much evidenced play with pornography is the mainstream co-opting of the porn aesthetic.

Porn star Jenna Jameson (Greenfield-Sanders' most famous porn subject, whose portrait graces the XXX cover, and whose print boasts the highest asking price) and Pamela Anderson both recently released autobiographies (in Anderson's case, thinly disguised as fiction) and both are bestsellers. They seem to be arriving at the same place in pop-cultural significance. Jameson, though not cowering from her porn star status, is crossing rather smoothly into the mainstream -- appearing on VH1 and E True Hollywood Stories, even in the young woman's magazine Jane; and Anderson (who writes a regular column for Jane) carefully rides the line -- a veteran of nudey mags, with a few unauthorized home videos in circulation, she remains a household name.

Indeed, not only Greenfield-Sanders, but more than one of the porn star subjects themselves (in their autobiographical notes at the end of the book) credit the mainstream film Boogie Nights with inspiring their venture into the adult industry. In this case the appropriation of the porn lifestyle is so attractive, it instigates the real thing.

And XXX is certainly attractive. Of course HBO and 60 Minutes want to do a documentary. Of course Jenna Jameson's book is a bestseller. Everyone likes looking at naked people -- especially porn stars, who are so good at being naked. And Greenfield-Sanders does make his subjects easy to look at; he pushes the porn thing only just so far. Other than being naked (and, albeit, often well-endowed), they're not doing anything to offend. This is the stuff that is readily absorbed into the mainstream. Not to say Greenfield-Sanders sanitizes the porn stars. While his is, clearly, an effort to humanize his subject, it is not by way of cleansing them of their porn stigma. Their almost unanimously waxed-bare nakedness certainly exposes them (especially hung on the gallery wall in the large 58 x 88 inch format) -- yet they are not made pitiable. Their bodies, though mostly in great shape, are not airbrushed to perfection -- they are blemished, asymmetrical, disproportionate, like all of us.

But the thrill of all the raw nakedness subsides fairly quickly; it is -- at the risk of sounding too cliché -- the steady, communicative gaze of these people (who are also porn stars) that becomes far more compelling.

Too bad the mainstreaming of porn is only a superficial conversion, a preoccupation with the "forbidden" packaging and not the values of sexual expression, acceptance, and safe practices that porn star Nina Hartley (who contributes not only her image, but also an essay to Greenfield-Sanders' XXX) and many of her adult-industry colleagues so tirelessly champion.

January 12 – February 12, 2005
John Berggruen Gallery