RICHARD KERN: NEW YORK DOLLS
AT THE ABOVE
BOOK LAUNCH / PHOTO EXHIBT
SHOW TEXT,
ARTIST BIO.
BOOK LAUNCH / PHOTO EXHIBT
SHOW TEXT,
ARTIST BIO.
ARTIST BIO.
RICHARD KERN was an underground filmmaker, photographer, portraitist; he’s not dead. Just his 50 solo shows, 28 published books, work at MoMA and regular contributions to publications like Purple and The Face relocated his work to zones of greater exposure. Exhuming his work; his three-decade devotion to getting people off, bumming people out– from its original birthplace. Far beneath the frothed up, desire-policing layers of polite society: the American unreality.
He has, however, brought his New York Girls series back to life, in collaboration with No Agency. New York Girls Now is made of 27 new girls. The same contortions of“perversion”. The same guns, candle-sucking and cigarettes, looked at different.
At the Above will exhibit original photographs from the 2022 – 2024 series, alongside the launch of a limited-edition hardcover book. “It is always possible to be transgressive in some manner,” Kern once offered an interviewer, who could no longer dream dissent beyond this “numb, unfeeling, image-saturated age”.
The first book was delivered to Barnes and Noble concealed in paper. A lot of the groups that rallied against Kern’s work, twenty years ago, now speak in praise. Remember: yesterday’s outrage is tomorrow’s endorsement deal.
Like their ‘93 predecessors, the Now girls dress in bondage, little, nothing. Left behind is the homespun hyperstylized. This is all-natural, realer than real. No bedding backdrop; backyard Peep Show. It’s you; watching without obstruction. The walls between subject, viewer, and photographer got a hell of a lot thinner since the nineties. But these girls know you are watching, you know, Kern knows and the guy beside you knows that you know he knows. So what’s the problem? Exactly. It’s voyeurist whiplash. A slip and slide of perversion, pleasures.
Besides, these girls live today, Now, when we know most of what we look at looks right back at us. Kern says the series is about “the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography,” prodding our blind loyalty to classification systems around sexual representation. The best part of anything is watching, the photographer once said, parting the legs to his mind.
Every peel-and-stick photograph hanging on the wall is a personal invitation. But the looping video at your back, larger than lifesize, says “party’s over.” Paranoia always shows up early and leaves last. What is a “perversion” if everybody’s doing it, abnormality goes on sabbatical?
People don’t know what to do with Kern, his girls, their guns; themselves: New York Girls ranks #2,180 in ‘Erotic Photography Books’ on Amazon. ‘Face to Panty Ratio’ Kern’s short film (with music by Thurston Moore) lives on www.xvideos.com beside: ‘She Hulk XXX’ ‘Girls Convinced To Have A Painted Body Bikini For Cash’ ‘Nurse and aesthetician observes patient’s erection!’ and ‘Sex Adiction, the movie’.
The falsehoods of consensus and the absurdity of truth. We would sooner drown in crystal waters than catch ourselves (or be caught) any place not lawfully zoned by morality. “Well, that’s your deal” is Richard Kern’s standard reply, No Agency founder Alexander Tsebelis writes in the afterword. Well, that’s your deal.
People just don’t know what to do with these New York Girls, Richard Kern, themselves. It is always possible to be transgressive in some manner. The best part is watching. Come look, come see.