Susannah Breslin interviews the 57-year-old scat video producer who is at the center of what may be the "most extreme obscenity trial in U.S. history." Of note: he compares himself to Picasso, Mozart, and Kafka, and does not consider his work to be pornography.
Snip from her intro:
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled "The 2 Girls 1 Cup Defense," focusing on the case of Ira Isaacs, a Los Angeles based director of coprophagy and distributor of bestiality films who was indicted last summer by the Department of Justice's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force for various obscenity-related offenses. Not long after that post went up, I got an email from Mr. Isaacs himself. He said if I wanted to interview him, I could. So I did. That interview is now online at Radar Online: "But Is It Obscene?"
And snip from her Radar interview:
RADAR: How did you get started making these movies?
IRA ISAACS: When the Internet was happening, I wanted to enter it in some way, and I wanted to do something different. In the past, you needed a lot of money and people to make a movie. Until video cameras were invented. Then the Internet was a big breakthrough for distribution. So, I started making a lot of money with these fetish shock videos. I was distributing shock art films from Europe.What do you mean by "shock art films"?
You talk about art? What is art? Art is what artists do. If it shocks you, it's art. One of the things art should do is make you think and question things. Shock art has always been something that has been a very popular thing through the 20th century and the 21st century. People used feces as shock art. There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.] So, the Internet allowed me to be an artist, to reach a lot of people. It allowed me to be on the edge, to do what I would never do as a fine artist. If you're going to paint, you've got to compete with Picasso. If you want to write a great classical music piece, you're competing with Mozart. I would never write anything like Kafka's The Trial. If I was going to make a mark, I was going to do it in some extreme shock way.
Link to Radar piece, and here's the post on Susannah's blog with more out-takes and background. (Photo, via Radar: Getty Images). [Ed. note to Susannah: you win at internet dumpster-diving, dude. Seriously.]
Previously on Boing Boing:
