Andrew Richardson and Mel Ottenberg on Porn, Shibari, and the Fourth Wall

Andrew Richardson isn’t into porn for the gratification. Since he launched his eponymous sex-focused publication Richardson in the ‘90s, it’s morphed into a streetwear brand that’s seen collaboration with the likes of Pornhub, Supreme, and Crazy Horse (the famous Parisian cabaret), but the magazine is still its beating heart. Diving deep into the art and industry of the erotic while plastering your favorite pornstars on its covers, the transgressive glossy finds that there’s still a lot to be said about sex—enter the Agency issue, aka Richardson A11. From Twitch streamers to a famous madame’s chaotic bird sanctuary to Japanese shibari, Richardson is about freedom of expression, he says when he joins our editor-in-chief to unpack what’s between its folds.

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ANDREW RICHARDSON: Yo. Mel Ottenberg, how are you?

MEL OTTENBERG: I’m looking at the 11th issue of Richardson Magazine.

RICHARDSON: Do you love it?

OTTENBERG: I always love it. I’d really like to own this picture. It’s really hardcore.

RICHARDSON: That guy, Ataru Sato, he’s this young Japanese young artist who illustrated Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. 

OTTENBERG: It’s really good. What I often love about Richardson is that you’re speaking of things that I enjoy quietly and would never dream of profiling in Interview. I mean, I would never profile Bosco [Takasaki] because I want to be commercially viable, but I also just wouldn’t even think of him.

RICHARDSON: What’s amazing about her is that he’s a she.

OTTENBERG: Oh, wow.

RICHARDSON: It’s a woman that does gay manga for women where the subject matter is male. I mean, if you care about that kind of stuff. It’s a huge phenomenon in Japan.

OTTENBERG: I own like 15 of them because I think they’re so cool, but I never knew the story. That’s why I like Richardson, because you’re always digging deep. Not to get off track, but I own—let me show you. I’ve been meaning to show you this for years, actually. We’re going to my bathroom.

RICHARDSON: It’s a nice, shiny ceiling.

OTTENBERG: What?

RICHARDSON: Your ceiling is lacquered.

OTTENBERG: Yeah, it is. But this is above the toilet. 

RICHARDSON: Oh, wow. We’ve got a bunch of William Crawfords. We had him in the magazine.

OTTENBERG: I know, that really good issue where Juliana Huxtable was writing a bunch—

RICHARDSON: I think it was the Kim Kardashian issue or the one before that. I found his drawings at the New York Art Book Fair and I think Richard Prince found them at the same time. Somebody found an archive in an abandoned house of 900 drawings that he’d made in prison.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

RICHARDSON: A bookshop in Portland bought them at a flea market and then they took them to the New York Art Book Fair. People bought them for not so much money comparatively, and then they ended up being exhibited in David Zwirner. 

OTTENBERG: I learned about him in Richardson. I was not up on this shit like you are because you’re up on everything, babe. 

RICHARDSON: I’m kind of good within a specific bandwidth.

OTTENBERG: What are these [Hajime] Sorayamas? I’ve never seen a single one of them before.

RICHARDSON: We love him. He opened up so many doors in Japan for us to do some of the S&M stuff that’s later in the issue. We worked with him on a portfolio, like a review of some of the things that we like that we felt fit into our theme of agency, so we went through his archive and pulled some stuff out.

OTTENBERG: And a lot of this magazine is about friendship and collaboration.

RICHARDSON: It always has been. It’s quite a specific group of people that are into this kind of freedom of expression and are prepared to be very public about it. He definitely is a big part of that. It’s a cultural thing in Japan where they’re like, “Sex is great, porn is great.” They don’t have this kind of perverse obsession. In the ’70s, being a homosexual was parallel to being a pedophile, and now pornography is parallel to human trafficking. There are these Christian fundamental mindsets that seep into the ether and it’s just ludicrous.

OTTENBERG: And Richardson is a place to talk about this stuff.

RICHARDSON: Yeah, but we’re not interested in two-dimensional porn for gratification’s sake. We’re looking for a more psychological component, something more driven than commercial thrill seeking.

OTTENBERG: Rae Lil Black looks great, and I feel like David Sims is a fan because this is really all out.

RICHARDSON: To be honest, we had looked at a couple of different options for the cover, and the magazine was quite heavily Japan themed. She’s very interesting because she’s sort of an asymmetric phenomenon. She was living in Germany and had run out of money so she did a couple of porn scenes. They immediately went viral. She became quite famous having done relatively little porn work and never had an agent. Then she figured out the algorithm of social media and recognized that Twitch streaming and attending gaming conferences is a similar audience to the people that liked her pornography. She’s completely self-motivated and made this career for herself as a global porn star.

OTTENBERG: A totally modern 21st century version.

RICHARDSON: Exactly. She’s also pretty direct and straightforward. She doesn’t really give a fuck or care who you are or what you do. She’s really great. She helped us find this girl, Naoko, who did all the shibari for the David Sims shoot, who’s one of the best in the world. We were very lucky. There’s always a lot of luck with Richardson where we get these like-minded people together and little magic things happen. [Naoko] ended up really almost directing the photographic flow because she got in there and went beyond the levels of discomfort that we probably would not have asked her to do and made the photographs even better. 

OTTENBERG: And Heidi Fleiss and Mark Spiegler are so Richardson. With the Japan theme being so heavily explored, are those stories you’ve worked on for a long time and they ended up falling into this issue? It’s nice when an issue just flows, and they work great in the issue, even though they stand out to me as being extremely American. Were you trying for a long time to get these guys? 

RICHARDSON: We were aware of the Nick Broomfield documentary about Heidi Fleiss, I’m old enough to remember. Heidi Fleiss now runs a bird sanctuary in Pahrump, in the desert. We were fascinated with the parallel between her saving these parrots and creating this sanctuary for them, and her work as a madame—caged, uncaged, beautiful birds. And I met Mark Spiegler maybe 25 years ago when I started the magazine, because he was the biggest porn agent. It just happened to be that there’s a lot of Japanese stuff in the magazine because Japan has a different moral compass than we do in the West, but the theme of the magazine is agency. What agency do you have as a performer? I had wanted to do those BDSM images for like 10 years. It took me a while to figure out how to be allowed into that community in Japan, so that story has been brewing for 10 years. You’re a magazine person, so you know that you never know where it’s going to come from, but it does come.

OTTENBERG: I’m very starstruck for Heidi Fleiss. I love that she’s like, “I once knew everyone, and I’d rather know these birds.” Who was she saying she went to parties with and now she’s just with the birds? 

RICHARDSON: Princess Diana.

OTTENBERG: Yeah.

RICHARDSON: I mean, she has an insane address book of just about anybody who’s ever been anybody. It is pretty wild. And the house was shocking. 

OTTENBERG: Oh, you went?

RICHARDSON: Yeah, we went there. She’d had these birds for, I don’t know how long, but the birds had basically eaten the house. The birds had just eaten away everything. It was almost like a scene from Boogie Nights. There was a maid who was just going around constantly cleaning up bird shit. She had these big industrial fans with hoses going into them to turn the desert into a tropical environment that these birds preferred. It was just bird shit and humidity in the desert and a pool that was just a hole dug out with a tarp on it. It was a very kind of dystopian, fascinating situation. The noise the birds make would’ve driven me insane. I actually had to go lie down after 20 minutes, I couldn’t do it. The noise of these birds just shrieking… And then they were attacking her all the time, pecking away at her. Her clothes were pecked to pieces, and her hands were… It was a lot.

OTTENBERG: I applaud you for going, I don’t think I could break the fourth wall with Heidi Fleiss. I do need to read about it in Richardson Magazine. Nick Broomfield is someone I’d like to break the fourth wall with because I’m such a mega fan. It’s so great that you had Paul McCarthy and Jordan Wolfson talking. I haven’t read this one yet. What’s the highlight, Andrew?

RICHARDSON: As you know, I’m friendly with both, and I said to Jordan casually on a phone call, having seen his animatronics, “Wouldn’t it be great if you and Paul could have a conversation?” Because Paul is kind of the pioneer of a lot of those animatronics ideas and Jordan has respect for Paul and they’re two artists at quite different points in their career trajectory. So we went over there, showed a video of the piece, and they had an incredible conversation. But the takeaway for me is Paul saying, “Everything is an attempt.” In other words, when he goes about making work, he allows the work to go where it wants to go, because he’s just attempting to materialize the idea rather than having some kind of unachievable, paralyzing goal. Both Paul and Jordan are outstanding artists who are making work that is confrontational, and I think that there are fewer people making challenging, confronting work these days. 

OTTENBERG: I can’t wait to read it. I’m also good friends with Jordan, and I’m such a mega fan of both. Anyway, I got to go to the gym. Congrats on the new issue.

RICHARDSON: Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. Love of love, bye.