Larry Clark
Everybody's mother tells them not to take candy from strangers. But when will they teach kids not to become candy for strangers? Eye-candy, when it comes served in galleries, art magazines, books, and now a film, is seldom as tasty and tempting as when Larry Clark is doing the treating. In this exhibition, approximately 100 untitled colour photographs serve up a scopophilic sampler of New York City street snacks. Many feature the 'real' kid actors of Clark's recent features, Kids, and were shot between 1992 and 1995 on the film's primary location, the mean streets of New York. Some tuff, some tart; as seen through the longing lens of Larry Clark's candid camera, all are bitter-sweet.
Clark's necessarily intimate relationship with his subjects forces some of these pictures to beg conjecture: the kid with his balls hanging out of his fly, the bare-chested Lolito with a gold cross and a coy tongue pressed against his inner cheek, a group of boys on a flop-house couch, shot-gunning pot mouth-to-mouth in smoky almost-kisses. Yet, if the way Larry Clark chooses to see children is suspect, then watching him look is surely criminal. Seen as 'snapshots' taken on a film set by its director, the photos become, as in Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), touching portraits of the author's cohorts and collaborators hanging out, doing tricks and showing off. When asked in a 1990 interview if he was in love with his sensuous boy-teen subjects, he responded, 'yes, I'm in love with everyone I've ever photographed'. In this show, his look of love is cast unblinkingly in a freestyle angle, casually framing a decadence of details and demeanours.
Tacked up on another wall in the show is a small collage that might approximate a scrapbook of a day in the mind of Larry Clark. Interspersed with photographs, neatly folded pieces of newspaper isolate morbid and sublime headlines: River Phoenix - 'A Peripatetic Childhood', Sam Kinison - 'Comedian dies, wife injured in head-on collision', Boxing coach Ray Arcel - 'Dead at 94 - A psychologist, taskmaster and superb strategist'. Another snippet reads, 'The main challenge of progressive art lies in the complete expression of one's own personality through every faculty available'. As a kind of interior bulletin board, the collage takes the tragic heroes and their corresponding headlines as stand-ins for the artist. They become notes on the Larry Clark that could have been: to crash and burn like Phoenix or Kinison, or to be a survivor and saint, receiving the same epitaph as Ray Arcel. On the far right of this self portrait, mostly drawn from media scraps, hangs a crisp copy of the artist's recent HIV test result, an almost cheerful looking document compared to the other yellowing scraps, the result... negative.
It is curious to turn to the only photograph of Clark in the show. Inserted, almost absurdly, within the filmic flow of the Kids pictures, it presents Clark on a yacht (could it be in Cannes?) standing in friendly proximity to the grand diva of the new Hollywood glamour, Sharon Stone. If all of his work is a species of self portraiture, his subjects all reflections and refractions of his pet project, (the reclamation of a youth lost in the shadow of an indifferent father and the frustration of a late puberty), then where does this picture, significant in its contrast, fit in?
Perhaps he sees himself in Stone too. They share a certain fearlessness. Further, both have developed their art under the gossamer limelight of morbid humour and taboo sexuality: ostensibly straight, they have both delved into the ambiguous realm of the 'homo-erotic'. Stone played a bisexual role to a predominately straight audience, sharing Clark's basic instinct for scandal, while she reaped the fruits of innuendo. With Kids and Casino, Clark and Stone, survivors and iconoclasts in their respective industries, both appear to be tasting the peak of their careers. Yet, side by side with Stone, surrounded by the brazen glow of youth depicted in his pictures, a hint of regret creeps beneath Larry's honest smile. Could he feel a tinge of guilt for having lived to see this day; would he have rather soared and burned-out early, achieving the ultimate anti-hero status and rising Phoenix-like above the ashes of a misspent youth and the glittering debris of a talent wasted?
In the show, as in the film, the real-life hallucinations and tragic fantasies that Larry Clark projects, however cruel, or vague, are refined and illuminated from within the shadows of a disciplined and adventurous life of art and crime. Once a baby photographer and part time hood, for over 30 years he has relentlessly pursued his vision to the magic 13th step of any good recovery program, bringing self-love beyond the limits of ego and conceit and into the realm of honesty and art. But can an ex-drug addict with a penchant for X-rated pictures of pre-teens really be the one to weave a morality tale about AIDS and innocence for America's youth? The new pictures attempt to raid the romantic American stronghold that is at the heart of the cult of youth and rebellion, bringing its most precocious jewels into a focus that's clearer than real.
