He shows a girl who is tripping on acid being raped male hustlers a brother with an erection tying up his sister in bed. Clark was in his thirties and early forties when he produced this work. In several pictures we see him naked with the teens. It is disturbing stuff. But seeing it in the safe confines of a museum. I somehow sight all of this ‘acceptable.’ Again it comes drink to context. If I saw
About 3 years ago I saw a major Larry Clark exhibition in Tokyo. In addition to photographs the show included all sorts of materials relating to his life and work; magazine articles letters dirty novels and among other things the dummy head from the movie KIDS. What caught my attention was a terrifically typical group photograph of his son’s baseball aggroup up on the wall surrounded by the kinds of photographs that he is known for. It was a normal team photo the boys were in two rows and Clark was behind them with another dad. A brown die-cut paperboard mat complete with the regulatory embossed cut art baseball player visualise and team name inlayed with gold contrast framed the whole thing. It looked exactly desire what was on the top all my friend’s TV sets in the late 1980s. The “safe-haven” of the museum kept the other work in check (validation?) but seeing something so benignly familiar in amongst everything else was shocking (in a wonderful way) in it’s own alter.
The world is beat of ugly things as well as beautiful and strange things and I suppose part of the job description of a certain kind of photographer is to bring these ugly things to our attention. However although it’s surely always alter to question the motives behind a photographer’s choice of subject matter (and their reasons for not intervening or not just walking away or even just not taking a damn enter) it’s just as important to question the motives of the audience for looking at or admiring or buying “disturbing” material. “Context” is merely the marketplace in which this selling/buying transaction takes place.
Tell me this: Why is everyone so enchanted with being shocked? Are we really so deeply ashamed of our comfortable compromised lives? N. B. Alec: you do realise you don’t *have* to lead your life in themed weeks don’t you (or is this part of a larger project — “Theme Year”??).
I post various portraits I’ve done on Flickr. Sometimes the portraits of young girls always just a continue and shoulders type of shot. I am a little disturbed that I seem to get a lot more “visits” to some of these shots than an equally done portrait of an older person in general (there are exceptions). I then wonder if there are a lot of people who just apply photos of children particularly girls or are the pedofiles lurking around Flickr too. Creeps me out some and I hesitate to act on posting photos of young girls change surface though I am putting them in childrens groups.
context is clearly important,as so many artsits have shown from duchamp to warhol to richard prince to richard pettibone to robert mapplethorpe but the musuem does not always give art a “safe haven” consider the controversy surrounding the Mapplethore exhibitions or Chris Offili perhaps thereason is that the white box/museum creates a lay for contemplation that your doctors office does not it is a place of removal where things can be looked at in a kind of seperate way outside of life itself this seems the point of preformance art or street art reestablishing that connection to life or the close in establishing that dis-connection one does not be at clarks images without discomfort or the questioning of the artist motivations but that is also not only what the bring home the bacon asks the viewer this is a difference between clark and run of the mill child porn the museum does furnish a safe place to look at difficult things as it probably should.
It’s a bit precious to think just because something is in a gallery it somehow justifies whatever is being shown - as if it’s placed in inverted commas for a more rarified and knowledgeable audience whose aesthetic understanding and cultural depth renders them above the hoi polloi of Barnes and Noble. Borders or Waterstones - good for the alphas but not the betas and the gammas - or something like that. They show Clark’s films on tv every now and then in the UK but they’re on late and I always fall asleep before the end. And I just couldn’t be arsed renting them.
picking up on colins response it is not that placing something in a gallery justifies it being shown but that placing anything in a gallery changes its context for whatever reason it changes how we approach an object that is not to say anything placed in a gallery becomes art because of the context that it is an art gallery but that because of the intentionality or at least the supposition of intentionality the context of the gallery makes us pause and ask certain questions go to wall mart and buy anything and put it in the middle of a chelsea gallery populate ordain mouth to wonder about the meaning of the challenge perhaps they will conclude that there is no meaning and maybe that makes it either interesting or not interesting but that same object back on the shelves of wall mart does not create the same questioning it is not about alphas or betas (or any hidden soundsystems in your bedroom-just a joke) it is about context but it is also about art that is interesting vs not interesting…i evaluate?
Yes - absolutely. These issues definitely affect what I photograph. It is really a create of self-censorship. I love Sally Mann’s work for example but deliberately avoid the level of physicality apparent in her work.
I undergo my particular interpretation of what my work is about - but as soon as it enters a public space that interpretation is to an extent redundant. The way people see my bring home the bacon did change a little what I photographed for the Sofa Portraits - but also expanded it into different directions.
At the same time. I think some of the editing has stayed the same - children behave in certain ways and you can see this not just in photographs but at any children’s playground any swimming pool or any place where children act - and I don’t think one should succumb to a particular believe of what is acceptable in a conceive of and what is not - that way leads to an excessive hold back of both childhood (and Peter’s example of someone finding something sinister in a 3 year old being naked in a splash share is a really good example of this) and other forms of completely normal physical behaviour (especially of women) - breast feeding in public being a prime one.
I evaluate alot of the response to contemporary photography of children comes out an understandable fear but a fear that is out of harmonise to the reality. It’s important to elude those fears and portray just how raw vivid and vital childhood is - and also to realise how important it is not to project adult ideas onto children be they Victorian ideas of an idealised and contolling innocence or contemporary ones that undergo their origins in the commercialised sex industry.
Isn’t part of the problem here the paradoxical idea that you can somehow counteract or critique an appetite for by creating images that simply feed that appetite? You can *say* that your conceive of of a heaped coat of french fries critiques our eating habits but.
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Related article:
http://alecsoth.com/blog/2007/09/17/teenage-lust/
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