We break temporarily from porn (the video vault contains more than just porn, you see) to bring you three short pieces by Skip Arnold, a Los Angeles-based performance artist whom I had the pleasure to befriend in 2002.

These pieces are funny, arresting, powerful, memorable. It’s interesting to me that with the proliferation of video and the far wider availability of the tools of creation, editing, and publication, we haven’t really been able to improve upon the original video performance works of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Maybe it’s as simple as the visual register. These works look “different.” There’s a kind of power in that: absorbing works in the here and now that were made 25 years earlier almost always imbues the original pieces with a kind of mystery and magic. It’s the contrast, dredging up both personal nostalgia and a collective technological unconscious that, despite being partially or totally unbeknowst to you, has its own kind of originary sinew.

In a piece I wrote here one month earlier about the music of 1980’s pornography, I posited that 80’s smut music was “better” than 70’s because it not only successfully aped the the visual tone of the movies it accompanied (the blurry low-res Betacam of the moment), but the contemporaneous political climate as well. That was probably bullshit. I said it tongue-in-cheek, regardless. But I’m glad to have Skip’s example of 1980’s video art to lay out alongside the wet laundry of the pornography of the same time. After all, video performance art and pornography are brothers and sisters in degraded composition - are they not?

Both mangle the grammar of film unintentionally (and yet in doing so, they break out of what is often a limiting, confining syntax, with the resulting power and efficacy of a wild knuckleballer). With their minor command (or often, total ignorance) of traditional Hollywood storytelling, to which most viewers are accustomed, the creators of both video art and pornography at once alienate and empower the viewer - alienate because they confuse, and empower because they demand a kind of rigor in watching that your normal soap opera or action movie does not.

Shitty sound; non-actors acting; weird time formats; untraditional ways of according value; odd motives for publication; non-traditional audiences; non-movie theater, non-televised contexts of reception; “outsider” creators; taboo subjects brought to the table — there’s a lot of similarities there. And Skip Arnold in particular is an artist who brings persona, sexuality, exhibitionism, and The Body to the forefront of his work. My god - I just realized this - Youtube may censor me due to his cock and balls - fuck it - I’ll roll with it . . .