IT’S true of the digital times that libido drives technology, but according to my friend Sergio Messina, porn is not only the engine of the Internet but the bona fide locus of art. And he’s on a mission to prove it: “At the very least it’s the perfect metaphor for the potential of digital media and a new paradigm of content production, a great example of how the world should be,” he says, with the same ardor I can remember him expressing about the latest Frank Zappa bootleg tape back in high school. We are zooming now through a dusty hinterland of Joshua trees and desert flophouses on an impromptu trip through the Mojave after the semester he spent at Chicago’s Art Institute as visiting artist teaching a course titled For Real: an exploration of today’s fetish for reality, in porn and elsewhere, but his fervor is unchanged from back in Rome, when we’d listen to Hendrix and Henry Cow and muse on culture and politics (and the politics of culture) in that emphatic art school manner.
Ten years later Sergio was playing guitar with various bands and Dj-ing at indie radio stations, blasting Italian airwaves with P Funk. He produced hip hop bands from Naples, bounced around the vibrant youth counterculture scene of the Centri Sociali in Milan and Turin, all the while pushing the musical envelope. In the late ’90s he was recording soccer hooligan chants during matches at Milan stadium and remixing it to drum & bass into aural happenings, expanding his progressively more conceptual horizons in live performances on Austria’s ORF public radio. As performer and teacher at Milan’s Istituto Europeo di Design, Sergio was a compulsive early adapter, always in some ways about the intersection of technology and self-expression, and the Internet was a natural extension of it. As an early resident on Second Life he made a name for himself as a virtual tattoo peddler and advocate for the anti-copyright cause. But what most attracted his attention in the proto-Web of the mid-’90s were usergroups, early precursors of social networks where participants shared their common interests. Those under the heading of alt.sex especially caught his interest.

“The real early stuff was Danish and British sex pictures scanned and uploaded,” Sergio says. “But the remarkable thing happened when digital pictures started — now there was no photographer involved, no real intermediary. People started producing and posting different images, stuff that seemed worthy of a closer look.” Sergio calls this massive blooming of self-produced erotica the “digital porno revolution,” a movement of uninhibited mass self-expression. He began collecting materials, mainly self-portraits uploaded to sites devoted to what you might call extremely niche fetishes, and undertook a semiotic deconstruction of the images that evolved into “The Talk,” a slide presentation/guided tour of handmade Web smut, part-academic lecture, part performance in the mold of Joseph Beuys, which he has since performed at museums, conferences and galleries worldwide.

When I walked in on “The Talk” at the Armory show last year in New York, the screen was flashing a picture of the “sneaker-fucker,” in which a naked man is having his way with a fastidiously laced basketball high-top. In this image, like in others, Messina is interested in critical context, in location and background. There’s the dominatrix self-portrait in full regalia, about which he notes mainly the suburban living room setting, the dining room set, the Christmas family portraits on the mantle and the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard visible on the bookshelf in the corner. In other words, the startling juxtapositions of the transgressive and the mundane that elevate the pictures from the prosaic realm of porn to legitimate, if sometimes unintentional, art. Sergio sees in these works of self-effacing narcissism elements that connect them to the snapshot aesthetics of Nan Goldin and Terry Richardson. And since, as Beuys declared, “Everybody is an artist,” these works of compulsively broadcast libido are artistic in a supremely democratic way. “They are political acts,” he says, “pictures that create and ‘own’ an aesthetic and therefore have a ‘temperature’ that no glossy porn spread from the Valley can ever have. These people look like us and we live surrounded by images, on TV, on billboards, that most definitely do not resemble the way we look. By reclaiming the right to be porn stars, realcorers subvert the established aesthetic conventions,” the purvey, in other words, of art.

Sergio begins each talk with a disclaimer: “I’m not a sociologist, I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not an expert on sexual behavior. I’m a musician.” Which may be true, but he’s very obviously a born performer. He has been described by writer Mark Dery as the “Margaret Mead of Internet porn,” and “The Talk” is very much a stand-up routine starring hiccup aficionados, elbow enthusiasts, corduroy fetishists and parking lot flashmob orgies. A guided tour of modern psycopathia sexualis manifested in online pictures. “The idea is to give people a tour of places they wouldn’t otherwise know about,” he says of his compilations of “Kodak moments of porn” — and to do it with a smile.

“Look at this guy with the neatly parted hair,” he says of the slide in which an athletic man stares into the camera as he hangs from his testicles. “It’s an absolutely amazing image. He totally looks like a Republican, but he’s obviously also a radical, and to me, that creates an optimistic short circuit. The idea is to talk about it in a funny way. Sure, the show is funny, but never in a destructive way.” Messina then asks, “Is it art? Well, I think art should always project a measure of urgency and danger, and these pictures have it. In spades”

From the vantage point of the present landscape, with its American Apparel ads and cell-phone reality shows, Sergio’s talk is also some sort of historical anthropology of amateur smut. “These people did this stuff 10 years before everybody else and it explains the current flourish of tweens flashing tits on Facebook. It confirms that self-produced dirty pictures are the contemporary transgression of choice. Realcore is similar to early rock ‘n’ roll in that way, like Frank Zappa used to say: ‘For all you beautiful people out there, there are a lot more of us ugly motherfuckers!'” ■