Lot 1044 D

"In The Valley Sultan concerns himself with the working conditions of the porno industry in the San Fernando Valley, one of the most important production sites of the sex business in America. (…) What interests the artist are not the more or less acrobatic acts of copulation and their stimulatory potential but the context in which this naked images arise. This group of works attains its dialectical tension from the fact that it confronts an image-producing industry, which wants to show everything and hence by definition is committed to absolute public revelation, with a point of view which, in an emphatically casual manner, seems to touch only upon the fringes of what is taking place. What Sultan records are the pauses in filming, the gaps, the moments of boredom and waiting. But above all that is the sites of filming themselves which become the main protagonist of The Valley. The respectable, middle-class houses with worn-and-torn couch ensembles, kitschy wall decorations, plushy children's rooms, and carefully kept-up lawns. These sites of an everyday middle-class domesticity which appear in The Valley as a filmic-surrealistic backdrop landscape, as a sham surrogateof a domestic coziness that long ago ceased to exist." (cited from: Stephan Berg, The Enigma of the Visible, in: Stefan Gronert (ed.), Larry Sultan, exhib.cat. Kunstmuseum Bonn i.a., Bielefeld i.a. 2015, pp. 92)