Vanitas with Porn Magazine
Vanitas art emphasizes the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. Typically, this message was encoded in the juxtaposition of superficial markers of wealth and status (coins, luxury items, etc) with reminders mortality (skulls, extinguished candles).
The broadness of this general framework made it readily adaptable to various kinds of messaging: Vanitas paintings featuring books or scientific instruments warn against excessive pride in learning; Vanitas paintings featuring musical instruments suggest a lament about the transience of earthly pleasure; Vanitas paintings featuring military insignia or weapons criticized the vanity of military conquest; …
At the core of these various sub-genres there is a common theme: however we choose to spend our brief time on earth, the same fate awaits us all. Everything is transient, everything dies and, ultimately, all human endeavours amount to little more than “a chasing after the wind,” as the author of Ecclesiastes put it.
I’m unaware of any classical Vanitas paintings from that era which address sex in a straightforward way. This seems like a considerable oversight. After all, what earthly pleasures are more fleeting and ephemeral than sex and masturbation?
Pornography seems particularly well-suited to a contemporary Vanitas arrangement. Few consumer products are quite so disposable—pornographic media is produced at an almost inconceivable rate and it is rarely (if ever) revisited by the consumer. The disposability of pornography as a medium is echoed also in our cultural treatment of the actors/actresses who perform in pornography, who are routinely judged, shamed and devalued by the very same audience that they entertain.
The intersection of these ideas was the basis for this series of Vanitas images, which place symbols of sex, masturbation, and eroticism (porn magazine, sex toys, used condoms) alongside reminders of mortality (gore and animal carcasses).
My intent here was to present a lament about the transience of eroticism. However, I am acutely aware that there is a fine line between a lamentation and a critique. There is a real danger that images like these will be interpreted as a sex-negative indictment of pornography, which is certainly not my intention. Hopefully the broader context of my work is sufficient to prevent misinterpretation. Taken in isolation, the statement “pornography is meaningless” might suggest a sex-negative worldview. But that same statement acquires a rather different implication in the context of a broader meditation on the idea that everything is meaningless. It is in that spirit that I present these images.
The Story of Punk Magazine
I thought it might be fun to share the story of how this particular porn magazine came into my possession, which has some interesting resonance with the themes of these arrangements.
Flashback to 1996: porn magazines were still a thing and I was a teenager who spent a lot of time playing in some shitty punk band that would ultimately go nowhere. Back then gay sex shops occupied a kind semi-legal status, and a lot of them stayed afloat by selling drugs in addition to the usual fare (porn, sex toys, etc). A straight friend of mine—let’s call him Mike—used to spend a lot of time in queer spaces, trying to score poppers. Waiting is an integral part of buying drugs, so Mike would peruse the porn mags to pass the time. Sometimes he would pick something up for me, if he thought it suited my tastes. This particular magazine was purchased as a joke. The gag was that the magazine is called “Punk,” although the guys all look like they might be in a 90s boy band.
We had a laugh and the magazine ended up getting hidden, tucked away somewhere I thought my parents wouldn’t find it. And the episode was quickly forgotten. Decades later, with my father’s health ailing and my parents selling our childhood home to move into hospice care, my parents came across a couple of old boxes that I’d left sealed up in the basement when I’d moved out. These contained some items that were probably worth saving: old photographs, terrible teenage poetry, keepsakes from exes whose names I’ve mostly forgotten. And, for reasons I cannot fathom, that “punk” porn magazine was tucked in there too.
Manufactured to be disposable and purchased as a joke, that stupid magazine would substantially outlive my relationship with Mike. His girlfriend left him. His drug addiction spiralled out of control. He kept a lot of guns hidden in strange locations around his apartment. And at some point, I just didn’t feel safe being around him anymore. In this series of images, the porn magazine that Mike bought me will get a new extension to its already unnaturally extended lifespan—a strange reminder of a person I no longer know, and of a time in my life when I was a very different person.
All things are transient.
