Amy Wet, 1992




Christina with Gun,
1990




Erin with Candle,
1994



 
Lung on the Road,
1986




Anna with Cigarette,
1993




Linda on Ball, 1994

richard kern
a portfolio

by Carlo McCormick

 

Best known as an underground filmmaker 

infamous for his confrontational cinematic 

transgressions of the Eighties, Richard 

Kern has shifted his modus operandi 

during this decade from the movies to 

photography. Including a series of stark, 

haunting black and whites, some of which 

are film stills, the current exhibition of 

Kern's work at Feature traces his evolution 

as a photographer from narrative and 

voyeuristic to obsessive and fantasy driven. 
 
Working along the aesthetic boundaries of 

taboo, his photographs continue those 

aspects of his film-making in which the 

identity of the players inform the image, 

which in turn functions as a kind of 

evidence or document of a process. 

Whereas his films involved an array of 

artists, musicians and socially marginal 

characters including Karen Finley, David 

Wojnarowicz, Lydia Lunch, Foetus and 

Lung Leg, the subject of his photographs is 

a cast of mostly female models. Here the 

work is as much about the personalities of 

those models as it is about the dynamic 
 
fantasy staged across the private space of 

the studio as public gesture--a psychosexual 

drama in which the pictorial vernacular of 

b-movies, exploitation, porn and punk directs 

the discourse of desire. In the color work 

where naked women, props and sets are laced 

with super-saturated hues by shrill 

candy-colored lighting, what is explicit is 

attitude more than anatomy. Consistently, 

what is rude is the in your face quality of 

the expressions and, in classic pin-up 

tradition, much is withheld. For Kern, the 

art of transgression is not so much an act 

of violation as a process of trying to 

show the unseeable and enigmatic. The 

theater is that of transformation, a 

play of innocence, violence, seduction and 

submission in which the ultimate story is 

one of mystery and ambivalence. A 

collection of this material has been 

recently published in Richard Kern's New 

York Girls (Purr Books), providing a 

perfect picture album of his prolific 

perversions.








Feature
76 Greene St., New York


(Through March 30)