Richard Kern
dal 16/1/2014 al 10/4/2014
Segnalato da
16/1/2014
Richard Kern
La Termica, Malaga
Naked and Famous. This show brings together the portraits he's been doing to celebrities from cinema, music, art and fashion scenes during more than three decades.
Richard Kern’s “Naked and Famous” solo show will open on January 17th at La Termica, Malaga (Spain).
Almost fifty original works by Richard Kern (North Carolina, USA, 1954) which seek to unravel and illuminate
the complex and often darker sides of human nature.
This show brings together the portraits he’s been doing to celebrities from cinema, music, art and fashion
scenes during more than three decades. We can see Nick Nolte, Crispin Glover, Vincent Gallo, Asia Argento,
Marilyn Manson, Nick Cave, Courtney Love, Kim Gordon, Marina Abramovic, Richard Prince, Candice Boucher,
Bruce La Bruce..., and even Lydia Lunch, curator of the show and Cinema of Transgression primadonna.
A Peepshow box is added in the same artspace of the exhibition where visitors can watch Kern’s video pieces
and films through a little window sitting on a high stool.
Through his portraits, Kern makes the psychological space between the sitter, photographer and audience
his subject. With his dry, matter of fact approach, he underlines the absurdity of truth and objectivity in
photography while playing with our reliance upon taxonomies around sexual representation.
Kern is a regular contributor to Vice and Purple and has published 11 books, some of them with Taschen.
His films and photographs have been exhibited at MOMA, The Whitney Museum and in more than 30 solo
shows around the world. Some of his most memorable films are ‘Right Side of My Brain’ (1984), ‘Fingered’
(1986), ‘Submit to me Now’ (1987) and ‘Clean’ (2011). Kern has shot music videos for artists such as Marilyn
Manson (‘Lunchbox’), King Missile (‘Love Is...’), The Breeders (‘Divine hammer’), Sonic Youth (‘Death Valley
‘69’), and Is Tropical (‘Lover’s Cave’).
“Photography is a way to get into intimate situations with other people”
Richard Kern
KERN’S NAKED PORTRAITS
That portraits embody a “representation of the structuring of human relationships” about the work of Richard
Kern, where the degree of intimacy brokered between author and subject - and the tensions such intimacy
provokes - might be considered to be the true subject of his work.
Richard Kern’s portraits play off the artist’s admitted voyeurism against his model’s evident exhibitionism.
Conflating two forms of desire - one fundamentally private (voyeurism), the other essentially public
(exhibitionism) - which are played out before the camera’s lens, Kern’s resulting photographs are highly self-
conscious, and clearly intended for public view.
Kern’s photography embrace of the aesthetics and social, economic and libidinal ideologies of amateur
pornography, and voyeuristic photography - genres that have grown exponentially with the availability of
digital technology and access to the internet - is evident. These genres suggest - through their widespread
proliferation - a democratization of the construction of sexualized identities: a process in which Kern himself
has long been both a pivotal figure and subversive pioneer.
What Richard Kern makes seems very ordinary today. We have Terry Richardson and Suicide Girls, the
website that democratized onanism in the underground. Flirting with everyday, naturalness and eroticism in
his less choreographed side, Kern seems fiercely contemporary today, even so much for someone with his
background and his age. But there is a secret here: he invented all of this. Kern has helped to propel a new
aesthetic in erotism.
CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION
Richard Kern first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East
Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities
of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry
Rollins in movies like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern
had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence, and perversion and was one of the leading
lights of the movement which Nick Zedd coined the Cinema of Transgression.
Transgression, underground, celebrities, art, poetry, fiction and crude reality swarm through the
cracks of “Richard Kern. Naked and Famous” images and trying to seep trough our retina in order
to change our way of focusing the human figure.
“Movie ‘Blow up’ is the guilty. Damned, it looked so cool to be a photographer”
Richard Kern
Lydia Lunch, curator of the exhibition, tell us about the show: “It makes sense that Kern, after having
seen, done and documented our delirious technicolor death trips in films and photography, has now chosen
to present his subjects stripped of all artifice and in doing so, rebels against the fraudulent appropriations of
empty excess which litter the pop culture landscape now fashioned as a cheap side show full of silly circus
clowns wearing their sleaze on their sleeve”.
Opening: January 17, 20 h, Including Film Screening, 21 h
LA TÉRMICA - Diputación de Málaga
Av. de los Guindos, 48 Málaga
Hours: From Tuesday to Saturday, 11h-14h and 17h-21h Sunday and Holidays, 12h-19'30h
Admission free