LONDON — Video artist Omer Fast turned a Los Angeles vacation with his family into a quest to explore the day-to-day labor of pornographers, the topic of his latest piece debuting Oct. 17 at the Frieze Art Fair in London.
“It is very, very mundane, on a daily basis, probably like working at Walmart,” Mike Quasar, the producer of the film Fast visited, told the N.Y. Times.
After gaining access to a film set, he brought in his own crew to shoot a making-of, of sorts. Fast’s version follows four porn stars for one full day, but splices in fictional threads that tread bizarre themes, including one narrative that involves a dinosaur egg heist.
He said, “I need the absurd, I need the humor, I need the surreal,” in order to mitigate the “anxieties” of porn.
Still, Fast says the final cut won’t be sugar coated (i.e., viewers can expect to see penetration).
“It would be totally hypocritical to clean it up,” he told the N.Y. Times.
Fast, a critic’s favorite on the video art scene, hasn’t tackled porn before, but believes it is too central to our culture to ignore. But that’s not to say he’s shied away from controversy: his previous work centered on the death toll in Iraq and Afganistan caused by drones. His next project will be a feature film adapted from a Tom McCarthy novel.
To read the N.Y. times article about Fast's upcoming exhibition, click here.
