Hillary C.: "Cette diffusion ... dangereux."
I have never had the stomach to watch more than ten minutes of a Larry Clark film and have ignored his photography.
But ambivalent fortune brought me to Palais du Tokio on the morning I had to go to Gare de Lyon and discover for myself that the media was lying about transport: there were no trains to Montreux. Ambivalent because I would rather not have seen so many Parisians line up to see Basquiat and then purchase his posthumously branded sneakers and bric-a-brac at the museum.
The Larry Clark exhibit caught me off guard!
He's about my age and the show starts with his parents' middle-America photo studio and his work there as a teenager: the too familiar subjects of young children in cowboy hat, boots, and toy six-shooter, as Huck Finn with the sly seductive innocence that must have covertly titillated grandparents, or posed house-pets dressed-up as Santa Claus. As a teenager, I worked with Martha Swope in her dark room and, despite the glamor and sophistication of NYCity Ballet, I discovered that when it comes to images, people want what can't be there.
He's about my age and the show starts with his parents' middle-America photo studio and his work there as a teenager: the too familiar subjects of young children in cowboy hat, boots, and toy six-shooter, as Huck Finn with the sly seductive innocence that must have covertly titillated grandparents, or posed house-pets dressed-up as Santa Claus. As a teenager, I worked with Martha Swope in her dark room and, despite the glamor and sophistication of NYCity Ballet, I discovered that when it comes to images, people want what can't be there.
Larry Clark's photos reveal junkies and very young rent-boys in the 60s and 70s to skate boarders now, in Times Square and Los Angeles: ... Kids. Bleakly living the banal, voracious but prescriptively pointless lives our great system has dealt them. Specifically, chronologically and geographically, this was life as seen from over my shoulder, across the street, in the corner of the subway, someone's cousin, wife or son: that other world that "normal" people (i.e., non-artists, etc.) could fall into because, being "normal," they didn't feel things, as my nutty mom the dancer/actress/choreographer would instruct me.
Now, for the first time in this modern era there was an age ban on this exhibition. Mayor Delanoe, the photo-opportunistic, politically correct in a pro-new-world-order-with-human-values cute sort of way, applied his new anti-kiddieporn law. This uncharacteristic moralistic totalitarianism shocked most Parisians. Even the national political stars down to the middle of the road/right wing legislators expressed discomfort about it! Their sense was "well, isn't this the kind of thing we should decide for ourselves?"
These photos of pregnant teens shooting-up, kids doing outrageously odd things, sexual things they've seen elsewhere, are brain searing: but only if you really look! I found myself quite alone in front of the most challenging of his photos.*Here at Tokio, the French seemed to be embarrassed to be seen looking. Like watching a Gaspar Noé film, these scream at you: "See what complacent normality hath wrought!"
Yes, you' have to be a perv to think this was porn!
So-a little latter back in my apartment-news stations chatter away, disgusted about the newest Iraqi wiki-leaks. Even they, the TV presenters, seemed bemused at Hillary Clinton, again and again, not addressing the actual revelations about this very dirty war but saying "... this kind of unauthorized diffusion ... is dangerous."
Yes, to the mind of the perpetrator it is dangerous!
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*A graphically literal comparison is Courbet's Origins of the World, which I have to remember was also hidden for a hundred years even when Lacan owned it, but now--as the social order of the second empire isn't threatened-- it is acceptable mainstream refrigerator magnet, postage stamp material like Toulouse-Lautrec's or Pascin's hookers and absynthe addicts. These things don't shock because they no longer are what they are.
At least the French have the postage stamps.
An innocuously garbage press link: Clark still causing trouble with racy photography
Cf., For Sarkozy, Wikileaks is the "last degree of irresponsibility"
Cf., For Sarkozy, Wikileaks is the "last degree of irresponsibility"
