You may know Zak Smith for the 750-plus pen-and-ink drawings he rendered, one for each page of Thomas Pynchon's highbrow literary doorstop Gravity's Rainbow. Those were shown in the Whitney Biennial and later published in a book. Or you may know him for 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses, a massive acrylic painting composed of 98 smaller portraits of scantily clad strippers and Suicide Girls posed provocatively with the aforementioned tentacled cephalopods.

Or, if you're into a certain type of film, you may know him for his penis.

Smith, a 33-year-old artist with a nose ring, a creatively shaved head of hair, a prestigious gallery, and a Yale M.F.A., has carved out an unconventional second career as a performer in adult movies under the name Zak Sabbath, he has appeared in such films such as Barbed Wire Kiss and Girls Lie. But beneath the punk, porn, and art-world trappings, he's basically just an overgrown Dungeons & Dragons nerd who recently organized a regular role-playing session with many of his porn actress and stripper friends, including Sasha Grey, Justine Joli, and Kimberly Kane. Sabbath is documenting their goblin-slaying adventures on the impossibly geekly blog Playing D&D with Porn Stars, as well as in a weekly video Web series called "I Hit It With My Axe."

Details: Do you consider yourself primarily an artist or a porn actor?
Zak Smith: I'm an artist; that's what pays the bills. You know, I'm in a movie every once in a while, but I'm a painter. That's what I do all day.

Details: So how did you get involved in pornography?
Zak Smith: Basically, a porn director [Benny Profane] wanted to use my pictures in a movie [Barbed Wire Kiss]. It was an autobiographical movie, and he was like, "It would mean a lot to me if I could use your Gravity's Rainbow pictures in my porn movie." And I said, "Sure, no problem. It would mean a lot to me if I could fuck all the girls in your porn movie." He said, "Well, send some pictures, because we need somebody who looks kind of like a punk." I was in that movie, and then because I had been doing these portraits of people in the sex industry, people were like, "Oh, Zak has talent." And so people that I kind of knew were like, "Oh, you wanna do a movie?" And then things went from there.

Details: Had you had aspirations for that kind of acting before that or was it just kind of a fluke?
Zak Smith: Well, it's not acting.

Details: Or performing or whatever the right term is.
Zak Smith: I feel like it's like asking, "Do you have aspirations to win the lottery?" At least from my point of view. It wasn't like I was ever like, "You know, this is what I'm gonna do." But if someone says, "Here, it's in your lap," you go, "Yeah, great, I'll do that."

Details: How many movies have you done now?
Zak Smith: Well, they always take scenes that you do and they stick them in other movies, so it's hard to count at any given time, but I'd say about six to 10. I mean, if you don't count Internet scenes.

Details: You do porn on the Internet, too?
Zak Smith: Yeah, I mean, my girlfriend had a site up for a long time where there was porn and so I was, you know, doing all of these scenes with her.

Details: What is performing in porn like? Was it different from what you expected?
Zak Smith: The thing that I really realized is that a real porn actor, somebody that works every week, all the time, is somebody who can fuck people that don't want to fuck them, you know? And I can't. I have a real hard time fucking people who I can't communicate with, who don't want to fuck me, or don't want to just fuck whoever. I wouldn't say that was unexpected. It's just, now I know for sure.

Details: Have you ever had to turn down a scene because it was with a woman that you didn't want to do it with?
Zak Smith: Yeah. I mean, you don't do it in so many words, but you kinda squirm out.

Details: Has getting involved in porn affected your rent-paying career at all?
Zak Smith: It's hard to tell. Things were kind of steadily growing for me when I started doing porn anyway. I had my first show, and it sold out and that was great, and then I had the Whitney Biennial, and then prices were going up, and then I had my first coffee-table book out, and then I did a porn movie. So it's hard to tell whether the porn movie intervened with that sort of upward notoriety spiral, or whether it had no effect and that would have happened anyway, or whether it actually had a deleterious effect and some people who would have put me in shows didn't.

Details: It's certainly attracted some attention.
Zak Smith: Obviously you get a little bit of press because of it, but on the other hand, when it comes to art exhibitions funded with public money, or lectures at state schools, there's always the shadow of the possibility that you won't get in because of the porn connection. So it cuts both ways. I think in general the private money doesn't care or is excited about the porn thing, whereas public money is pretty skittish about it.

Details: Yeah. I can imagine a Jesse Helms type having a heyday with that.
Zak Smith: Yeah, I mean, it would be really easy. It's like it's just one of those things where there are probably a million artists who have this little trigger, but if somebody decides to pull it, then you're that guy, you know what I mean? And once in a while, there are probably cases, contests or public exhibitions, where probably the reason that I wasn't even considered is because there's a porn connection. And then my work itself is very sexual, and so the porn connection makes it really obvious at times.