Hard As Opal

A woman stands before us wearing a strap-on dildo: »are you ready?« The question seems to be directed to her partner and to the viewer in equal measure. Hard as Opal by Jared Buckhiester and Dani (Leventhal) ReStack is a video work which consists in a series of rapid cuts and short scenes assembled into a collage-like whole. It takes a while before the various narratives begin to fall into place. Through careful editing, individual scenes are brought together in such a way that the stories are gradually assembled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

It becomes apparent that the protagonists are a lesbian couple and an old acquaintance from their school days who is going to help them fulfil their wish of having a child, playing the role of a kind of studhorse. The viewers are given insights into intimate scenes – some of them almost too intimate. We see a close-up of a freshly operated wound, a breeding stallion copulating with a model horse, the birth of a foal, and a man looking through a porno magazine while sleeping with a woman. Sex as pleasure between two loving individuals is contrasted with sex as a means to an end.

Through the alternating images of the reproductive process, the artists create an associative analogy between people and animals, expressed using both in the content and the technical manipulation of the film. (Lara Legeland)

* We can only show an excerpt of this work in the online archive. For the complete version, please contact the artists and Video Data Bank.