Screen Test

I’ve been listening to a lot of audio porn recently. (First for fun, then for a project, then for fun again, if you must know.) There are many types of audio porn but, on the whole, it is exactly what it sounds like: sex without the images. Without visual input, porn can actually feel more intimate and engaging because it requires the listener’s imagination to feed the other senses. It’s like how the book is always better than the movie. (Unless, of course, for you, the movies are better than the books. In which case, audio porn is probably not for you. But rest assured, there is more to this essay than what you do with your sound-canceling headphones because, honestly, that’s between you, your Screen Time report, and God.) To me, experiencing erotica within limitations like these is far more realistic and compelling because it plays into the way intimacy and eroticism work in our brains.

A brush of skin, a too-long look, the taste of beer and sweat commingling on someone else’s lips — this is how it works. These intimate flashbulbs imprint in our memories as glimpses, not whole scenes. When recounting our escapades to friends — or replaying them over (and over) in our minds — we string these moments together to make a story. But, outside of a few flashes of burning clarity, we mostly fill in the scene using our own imagination (e.g., I remember the feeling of my fingers on Ciarán’s cold spine, but I don’t remember the color of his sweater that I slid my hands underneath). There’s lots of science behind this, but we won’t get into all that — we already know this to be true. Our spank banks are stocked with fleeting thrills, not three-hour epics.

Enter Screen Test, a new art book full of said fleeting thrills and other sensual ephemera made by SF-based designer Griffin Funk and printed by Colpa Press. The book’s 170 semi-gloss pages are full of pixelated shots of fingertips, hip creases, clavicles, the corners of soft pink mouths, as well as the occasional gun, and a single wad of cash. These 340 incredibly close close-ups are photos Funk took of his TV while watching hundreds of art films, Hollywood blockbusters, soft-core porn movies, and Youtube videos over a year-and-a-half-long period. While Funk says the stills reflect a range of “extreme emotions,” including loss, love, and violence, the overwhelming sense is sex. (Isn’t it always?) I reached out to Funk to ask him about the book’s themes. “What's the Jenny Holzer quote?” Funk said to me over video chat. “‘Violence has its sexual side’?” Later, I realize he’s misremembered it. The actual quote is “Murder has its sexual side.” The delta between the two feels significant.

Among other things, Screen Test is an exercise in slippery contrasts. Full-bleed diptychs portray glowing red skin aching across from a background of frosty blue nothingness. Emotionally, this feels like the hot pang of shame that deals the final blow to already-subsiding pleasure when a lover has left your bed too soon. (Did they kiss you goodbye, or leave in silence? More red, more blue.) It is a reminder of how glaring and cold aloneness can feel when it’s lit up by fresh technicolor desire. Despite their tight cropping and low resolution, the images convey rich emotional content. This is yet another dichotomy. One that connects Screen Test to Funk’s references, Paul Elliman’s Untitled (September Magazine), and Anne Collier’s Women Crying. Like Screen Test, Elliman’s and Collier’s art books also use cropping to emphasize patterns in media like print ads and fashion editorials. 

Taking a photo of a photo (or, in this case, a photo of a video) is a literal reframing that redirects the viewer’s attention. Herein lies another exercise in opposites. In Screen Test, Funk often takes an overtly sexual or violent scene, freezes it, and crops it to find a new focal point, one that’s more intimate, interesting, delicate. This act creates a squinting, searching tension. Like Funk is trying to repeatedly point out an overlooked beauty that was there all along. There’s something hypnotic about flipping through hundreds of images that exhibit such similar subject matter. It’s like the slight humming pleasure of sitting in the car wash while being lightly pummeled and vibrated by those giant spinning brushes made of hundreds of cloth strips except here it’s a symphony of soft pink body parts gently flipping by me as I turn the pages. In seconds, hundreds of arms, hands, knees, hips, butts, and mouths gently pass by just inches from my face. This is like soft-core porn made by a generation who sat too close to the TV.

I feel that part of the reason these crops resonate is because Funk, like me, went through puberty on Tumblr. A site whose dominant visual language included the shoulder blades of a naked white woman sitting in a bathtub, an errant nipple through a threadbare white tee, and innumerable black and white photos of delicate collarbones. These sentimental aesthetic tropes, while not originating on Tumblr, were certainly proliferated by it. When I chatted with Funk I brought this up. He countered that the image of collarbones evokes a feeling of vulnerability for us because it is a consistent visual archetype used across many different generations and media, not just one experienced by sensitive 20-year-olds on Tumblr. I’m not going to fact-check this but okay, sure. Still, this theory brings up another question. If people have been turned on by the concavity of someone's neck for multiple generations, then why is mainstream porn still so fucking bad?

What I mean is this: The visual subtlety that Screen Test emphasizes is appealing because mystery and suggestion are an ingrained part of our erotic sensibilities. Imagination thrives in constraints and the suggestiveness of a collarbone is such a turn-on exactly because of how little information it provides — allowing us to paint in the rest ourselves. But mainstream porn seems to miss all of this. Instead of engaging our brains by teasing us with rivulets of desire, PornHub blasts a firehose of cocks into our phone screens and asks us, self-assuredly, like a hockey bro I went to high school with, “Are you, uh, wet yet?”

I’ll set the culpability of the rest of you aside and speak directly to my fellow millennials: why are we putting up with this shit? We spent our young adulthood on Tumblr and Instagram, and have, at one point, fawned over “aesthetic” photos of lattes, rustic loft-like cafés, blobby book covers, and millennial-pink branding. That each trend has then gone on to repulse us implies the existence of strong dynamic aesthetic (without the scare quotes) preferences. While there is a growing contingent of porn-makers with more thoughtful sensibilities it seems as though, in the mainstream, there has been virtually zero trickle-down impact of our generation's highly discerning visual culture. The vast majority of porn is still dumb, blunt and ugly.

While reinventing porn is decidedly not Funk’s aim or intention — and his book is far more classically beautiful than any aforementioned Internet trend — this line of thinking does bring up another point of resonance. Because most porn is so bad, we’ve had to develop built-in cropping capabilities. Temporarily amputating part of our brains and blurring our vision to focus in on the parts of porn that do get us off — the grip of their hands, a devious look, a particular sound. In this sense, we are used to doing cognitively what Screen Test does practically on every page by creating limitations that allow our imagination to fill in the rest.

In the middle of Screen Test, there is a shot taken from the 1974 French film Going Places (Les Valseuses) that is my favorite in the book. In the movie, two young, down bad French men with tight pants and great butts run through a series of half-baked scams to get money or sex. In the first half of the film, the pair are perpetually dissatisfied, even with their supposed successes. They repeatedly blow their money and have anticlimactic sex (including once with each other). But the men undergo a change when they pursue an older woman, a mother who is also an ex-con, played by the beautiful French singer and actress Jeanne Moreau with her perfect downturned mouth. Here the two are temporarily softened from frantic dumb boys into doting sensuous men. After taking her shopping and out for lunch they have a tender threesome. She gives one head while the other fondles her hair — this was where Funk went click. 

The cropped photo Funk printed in the book is a profile of the woman’s face obscured by the one man’s thick forearm pulling her into his crotch. Her hand is resting against his trousered thigh and the sheen of her pinky nail matches the subtle luster of a delicate silver pendant hanging on a slim chain against (where else) her collarbones. The photo feels romantic and whole with so many points of contact holding the two (and, out of frame, the three) of them together. But there is so much more to the story. Back in the film, the woman sneaks out of bed the next morning and we think she is going to skip town, leaving them in her sexy, mysterious wake. Instead, she takes their gun, slips into the other room, and commits suicide by sticking the barrel up her vagina and pulling the trigger. (What was that Holzer quote again?) The men are stunned and so are we. The “why” is left largely unanswered but perhaps it's better this way — I heard eroticism thrives in the dark.