Looks Dirty
On pornography, clothing, and the body
Exhausted in the lead-up to the festive period, I found myself once more at the gates of Vex Ashley’s art porn site, afourchamberedheart. Some years ago, I had been alerted to her fascinating work, which evokes the atmospheres of Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses, Francesca Woodman’s nude photographs, and a postgraduate cultural theory seminar (this is complimentary!). At the end of November, I attended a fascinating exhibit at the Barbican, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion and noted that the weekend following, the Barbican was hosting Ashley and several other artists, performers, and sex workers, and installing the mirrored room used in her film Echo Chamber (2025). This, and some of the work in Desire and Decay led me back to Ashley’s work. In Desire and Decay, I had seen ‘wet look’ clothing that evoked leaky bodies, I saw clothing that had been ‘offered’ to a bog and then retrieved and staged as if garments had been discarded for an orgy, and specially made lingerie designed to morph and contort the artist’s body (Michaela Stark). All of this made me think about the connection between clothing and how we wear it, and how our clothing smells like us whether we want it to or not. I think our porn smells like us too.
Somewhere between the short and the moyen-métrage, I find Vex Ashley’s work is designed (like all porn) to arouse the viewer, but it is not interested in guiding you towards orgasm. Her work is not especially wedded to the cum shot, and if there is one it’s often somewhere in the middle of the work, rather than the end. Echo Chamber is particularly of the moment, asking us to imagine the mirror box as a version of the self-surveillance we all undertake, and a place in which everyone who enters makes their own porn.
In Porn: An Oral History, one of Polly Barton’s interviewees makes the following observation about their experiences with pornography, in that watching it urged them towards “exploring the question of what sex would be like if it wasn’t just a reciprocal exchange of orgasms. What would it be like if it wasn’t some version of the banal question posed in women’s magazines: are you getting enough orgasms?” (2023: 309)
Earlier in November, I’d bought an online pass to Berlin’s Porn Film Festival, where I encountered the film CUMRAGS from Bunnydrone Studios. In this 16 minute film, we follow two friends who enter a Berlin dark room and experience a variety of encounters. What I found especially moving about this film were the silent gestures of care that took place within it that were a part of the sex but not in themselves sexual gestures: the offering of a cigarette, the holding of a bottle of poppers, a clasped hand across a bench. This film made me think about the importance of work that depicss sex as something far beyond reciprocal orgasm, and about what can happen when you experience community in some of the places where you have sex. Community, sex, and its possibilities are also the subject of Peaches’ 2026 video for her song ‘No Lube, So Rude’, currently available to stream for free in its explicit version via Erika Lust’s site.
Yesterday, I finally watched Vex Asheley’s latest film, Some Reddish Work (2025). Loosely interpolating Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, this is an explicit, 26 minute period film that captures something of what it means to be abandoned, to shriek and fuck in front of a bonfire. One thing that particularly interests me about this film is how it evokes the shiver of desire, and how it depicts a wild, carnal belonging. It does this through its stark and carefully planned atmosphere, and through the intensity of the performances on offer. There is a hayloft, a tin bath, drystone walls, bracken, and a bonfire. At one point, a man falls to his knees in a field as if overcome, and everyone cavorts naked by the fire, as if we inhabiting some of the scenes of Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. The smells are vivid here: wool, stone, worn linen, moss, dry grass, milk, smoke, charred wood. Frost on the road means the cold air holds the scent of living animal hide, and of the piles of shorn sheeps’ wool against which our foursome take their pleasures. The body’s scents are conjured here for you, to come undone.