At the above
Level 1, 198 Gertrude St
Fitzroy, 3065
Australia
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RICHARD KERN was an underground filmmaker, photographer, portraitist; he’s not dead. Just his 50 solo shows, 28 published books, work exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney and his regular contributions to publications like Purple and The Face has relocated his work to a more exposed position. Exhuming his work; his three-decade devotion to getting people off and bumming people out, from underneath the frothed up layers of desire-policing, polite society: the American unreality.
At the Above will exhibit original photographs from the series taken over 2022 – 2024, alongside the launch of a limited edition hardcover book. “It is always possible to be transgressive in some manner,” Kern once said, responding to an interviewer’s failure to dream, 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 Richard Kern’s work, twenty years ago, speak now only in praise. Remember: yesterday’s outrage is tomorrow’s endorsement deal.
The Now girls dress in bondage, little, nothing, like their ‘93 predecessors, but there’s none of the high key light or stylized drama, it’s all natural; realer than real, uninterrupted. It's you, you’re the one watching. The walls between subject, viewer and photographer got a hell of a lot thinner since the nineties. But the girls know you’re watching, you know, Kern knows and the guy beside you knows 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 are looking at is looking right back at us.
The New York Girls series is about “the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography,” Kern says, prodding the 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.
Each of the fifteen framed peel and stick film photographs are a personal invitation, a private moment between you, the girl, the image, white space. But the double screens, larger than lifesize looping video at your back say, the party is over. Paranoia and hyperawareness are always the last to leave. What’s a “perversion” if everybody is doing it, does it cease to be?
People don’t what to do with Kern, his girls, their guns, themselves: ‘New York Girls’ is #2,180 in ‘Erotic Photography Books’ on Amazon. His short film ‘Face to Panty Ratio’ (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!’ ‘Sex Adiction, the movie’.
The absurdity of truth: we would sooner drown in crystal water than find ourselves in any unmapped, forsaken, uncivilized place. “Well, that’s your deal,” is Richard Kern’s standard reply, No Agency' founder Alexander Tsebelis writes in the book 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. Come look. The best part is watching. Come see.
Exhibition digital by Boom Studios