The great misconception about Richard Kern, according to Richard Kern, is that “I fuck the models. That it’s some all-out sex shoot, some big wild sex life,” he says. “That’s not the case at all…”
The veteran New York photographer and filmmaker means the models featured in more recent work. Generally they’re young, pretty, suburban and semi-naked, and photographed in the style of paparazzi “upskirt” shots – the kind more usually seen in tabloids rather than art galleries. The focus on their gussets and doe-eyed expressions may often get him labeled as a perv – the softcore voyeur to Terry Richard’s hardcore exhibitionist – but, quite reasonably, Kern rejects the allegation: “I don’t think I’m any more of a dirty old man than anybody else.” In any case, his earliest works were far more confrontational: grainy, Super 8 arty slasher flicks featuring death, brutality, sex and subversion of all kinds, such as his iconic “Fingered”, were underground favourites in the early Eighties, and formed the backbone of what his collaborator Nick Zedd termed the Cinema Of Transgression (“Fingered” and others feature in the new “You Killed Me First” exhibition at the Kunst-Werke).
Back then, Kern says, “we were lifting from 42 Street Movies – they call them grindhouse moves now. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, ‘Make Them Die Slowly’, ‘The Last House On The Left’. People in the art world think they’re above all this shit. The idea was to take the references, put it in an art context, and watch the art people go, ‘oh my God!’”
Kern, now a laconic 57 years old, has relished the act of provocation throughout his working life. When, in his early twenties, one of his early films about the Lower East Side demimonde received a critical pasting (just as Nan Goldin’s “Ballad Of Sexual Dependency” was being exalted) his attitude crystallised into a simple, enduring imperative: “fuck you.”
As transgression is co-opted into the art-historical canon, the development isn’t without its ironies. “It’s really funny,” Kern says. “Nick Zedd said, yesterday’s pornography is today’s art. It’s vindicating in a lot of ways.” Then there’s the fact that when “Fingered” was originally slated for presentation at the 1986 Berlin Film Festival, Kern attracted violent accusations of misogyny. Advance word-of-mouth led to cancellations when the film went on tour in Germany. “And now,” Kern grins, “people pay to come in and politely watch it.” You’re invited to do the same, middle-finger raised in sympathy.
Text by Kevin Braddock