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New York Scene: Two dudes talking about art Steven Kaplan

Art et Politique Number 13, Winter 1990

URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/36159ac

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Publisher(s) Revue d'art contemporain ETC inc.

ISSN 0835-7641 (print) 1923-3205 (digital)

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Cite this document Kaplan, S. (1990). New York Scene: Two dudes talking about art. ETC, (13), 55–58.

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New York Scene : Two dudes talking about art

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hip Americana : "Steve McQueen, 1973 Dodge Challenger, the Flame Steak Restaurant". — Did anybody actually cover Dylan? — Not to my recollection dude. Maybe Pruitt-Early can get Julian Schnabel to do "Don't Think Twice, It's m ' in m..* Alright". ~m- — Or Roberta Smith on "The Times They Are A W.T,V - ~4rHÎTO»"tO Changin". — A Larry Gagosian/Mary Boone duet on Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You GoGo". — The possibilities seem endless. A new industry in T. i S the making. Pruitt-Early, Painting for Teenage Boys, Dirt camoflage. Old — Hear that, Pruitt-Early dudes? Chevys Never Die, early 90's. Heat transfers on fabric with (Two dudes split down the street and walk into the plastic shinkwrap, 6 panels; 58,4 x 58,4 cm each. Larry Clark exhibit at Luhring Augustine Gallery.) — Whoa dude. Teenage wasteland again. introduction to photography. His family later sent him — I figured we'd extend the theme from the last show. to art school to hone his skills. — But this time it's snapshots. Clark, meanwhile, was hanging with a heavy crowd, a — Snapshots is a good word dude, rather than wrong side of the tracks assortment of hoodlums and photographs. These shots are too casually brutal, too junkies. It was the dawning of the drug culture. They candid and crude to get caught up in the usual handle would crack open an inexpensive, over-the-counter of Art photography with a capital A. They're more like nasal inhaler called Valo and extract 150 mg, of pure photojournalism, scarred images from the battlefront. amphetamine from the cotton wick. — Kind of a family album of wasted youth. The — Uh dude. Valo. How do you spell that? young, the restless and the damned. — Don't bother looking, man. It was taken off the — And enough nudity, especially male frontal, to sink shelves years ago. So here's Clark, back from art a battleship full of Jesse Helms. Bad boys with big school, high as a kite, hanging with his buddies, dicks, big drug habits, big hustles, big pistolas. Life on shooting speed, digging the scene and taking photos of the mean streets. Clark has an affinity for that scene. it all. — An affinity? He certainly has one for teenage boys. — Sort of a participant/observer, right? Where is this dude coming from exactly? — Yup. Clark was documenting the seedy underbelly — From Tulsa, Oklahoma to be precise. But I'm not of youth culture in his hometown, even as he was sure if that answers your question. jumping in with both feet. Fixing shots, playing with — Yo dude, you know what I mean. Is he a chicken needles and with guns, getting into burglary and armed fancier? Does he like to swing with the young cats? robbery, having casual sex and group sex, scratching — Well certainly in the spiritual or iconic sense, if in for a vein, getting wired, nodding out, dodging the no other. Clark is fixated on adolescence as some cops. formative, violent and sexually cataclysmic moment. It — A real counterculture trip. probably has something to do with his background. — Over a period of nine years, from 1963 to 1971, — Do tell, dude. Clark returned to Tulsa several times to party with his speed freak friends and chronicle their scene, leaving — When Clark was a teenager himself, in the fifties, behind a harrowing record of the self destructive trip: he was drafted into the family business, a door-to-door the druggy vacancy, barely submerged violence, petty baby pictures scam that took him and his mother criminality, the day to day detritus of skinny, tattooed through scores of two-bit Oklahoma dustbowl towns. arms being spiked with a needle for that roller coaster — Baby pics, dude? rush and the inevitable hollow bummer bringdown that — "Kidnapping", as iwas known in the trade. They'd followed. And, of course, Mr. D. Death. By the time show up at a house during the day, while daddy was the photos were published, most of the protagonists working at the factory or oil refinery, and hit mom up had already died from drug O.D.U. for a couple of hard-earned family bucks in exchange — All this is rendered in a very deadpan, matter of for posed shots of her darling infant. This was Clark's fact style. There's no sensationalism here, although you could imagine a B-film, série noir treatment of — Dude, I agree. These composite or multipanel tragic, violent lives from the lower depths. You know, constructions often lack the rawness, immediacy and with a high key light and long shadows thrown down a subversive beauty of Tulsa or Teenage Lust. They gaping alleyway. don't get under the skin of the subject, and they don't — Yo dude. Tankfully Clark as the integrity not to tell us anything about the media that we don't already dramatize his shots with cheap, cliched effects that know. But a lot of Clark's recent work does hit target. would scream lurid all over the front pages. These Like "Children of Alcoholics" (1988). Or the triptych were his friends, remember, and he presents them in a of the kid with the Iron Maiden poster and cut off way that you imagine they would have preferred: denim jacket holding a gun in his mouth. candid, unadorned, no bullshit. — That last one is about as new as yesterday's — It's the simple, artless nature of these photographs headlines of the two boys who shot themselves because that makes them so real, so powerful. Tricky lighting, of a Judas Priest album. The PMRC would be proud : angles and compositions would provide irony, would "Satanist rock causes teen suicide." establish an intrusive distance between photographer — Clark is stretching to make points in his new work, and subject. A distance that was, in fact, absent when to teach an object lesson about the dysfunctions of Clark took the shots. He was part of the crowd then. American life. Like the collage with a pamphlet from Now he's the survivor who brings us these notes from Covenant House on "How To Talk To Your Teen". The underground. current events chuckle about Father Bruce Ritter and — When Tulsa, a book of 50 black and white the sexual abuse in teen shelters is clever, superficial. photographs, was published as a limited edition And that's where it remains: right on the surface. paperback in 1971 (legal complications prevent a There's no resonance, no pain, and nothing is revealed. second edition), most of the people depicted were dead — Of the recent work, my favorite is one of the large, or in jail. Clark started to follow the younger brothers untitled, bulletin board-like pieces that combine and nephews of the Tulsa group, photographing the magazine and newspaper cutouts, other memorabilia sex and drug exploits of a second generation. These and Clark's own b/w photos. It's personal and frankly photos, as well as later work from New York centering fetishistic, a display of "live fast, die young, leave a on the teenage hustlers on the Deuce (42nd Street), good looking corpse" icons that feels like a work-in- were collected in a second volume, Teenage Lust: An progress. Autobiography, published in 1983. Selections from — The visual references in that piece are wonderful: both books are hanging in the gallery. Lenny Bruce, Billie Holliday, Bruce Lee, the 1965 — In that case, most of this show is a retrospective of Rolling Stones, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Clark's art since the sixties. What about the new work? Roberto Duran, Johnny Thunders, a Jesus postcard, a — Not surprising, it remains fixated on adolescence, "Fuck Off and Die" button, and an envelope addressed but Clark's focus has shifted to a media referential to "Sean Penn, LA County Jail" that was sent back, edge that is both more intellectually engaging and marked "Contents Unacceptable : No Nude Pictures." somehow more dispassionate and disinterested than his Plus some of Clark's own b/w's of a teen hustler and a original work. Rather than concentrating on subjects couple fucking. that he knows intimately and personally, Clark has — It's as if Clark is replicating, through the prism of widened his perspective to include publicity shots or his own subversive slant, the pinups and souvenirs on teen fan magazine tearsheets of pinup idols such as the bedroom wall of a particularly hip and particularly Corey Haim, River Phoenix and Kevin Dillon, and maladjusted teen. polaroids of Matt Dillon shot off the video screen. — And who is this mystery teenager? When he collages this material with his own black and — Could be some dude Clark knows. A composite white photos of, for example, a bulging, spreadeagled dude made up of hundreds of impressions and teenage crotch swaddled in skintight cutoff jeans, I experiences. Maybe the teenage dude Clark once was don't get the point. A union of high and low, the and still harbors obsessively in his soul. famous and the unknown? An expose of teen sexuality — Or the dude yet to come. It could be that dude, that bridges the pretty boy appeal of actors with the dude. nuts and bolts of teen hustlers? A reminder that sex is always what sells, that any girl (or boy) looking at Leif Garrett's face in Tiger Beat is ultimately thinking of his equipment? Steven Kaplan