Richard Kern
by Matthew Higgs (2004)

Richard Kern, photographer, occasional pornographer, former-filmmaker and video director, and a man once amicably referred to as the 'Evil Cameraman', remains, first and foremost, a portrait artist. For more than two decades Kern has - with a shifting band of accomplices that, over the years, has included post-punk diva Lydia Lunch, artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, Rita Ackermann and Lucy McKenzie, the novelist Geoff Nicholson, and musicians such as Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers and Marilyn Manson - sought to both unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature.

Unlike self-portraiture  - which through its peculiar mixture of narcissism, self-absorption, and self-conscious lack of objectivity, often takes the form of a kind of egotistical public self-analysis, portraits of other people tend to depict a more objective record of the social (and emotional) entanglements that exist between two or more individuals. (1) The San Fransisco-based writer Kevin Killian has identified the portrait's embrace of this entanglement as a "social contract." (2) Killian's "social contract" echoes art historian Richard Brilliant's  assertion - in his important 1991 study Portraiture - that portraits embody a "representation of the structuring of human relationships". (3) Both Brilliant and Killian's notions reverberate in a recent article by the British writer Dan Fox, who suggested that all art ultimately "deals with our individual relationships to each other and to the world. No matter how deep the terms of discussion are couched in abstruse philosophies or socio-political histories , a lot boils down to economies of exchange: the fundamentals of how we see each other, how our bodies coexist with one another and the objects around us." (4) Fox could well have been thinking about portraiture, and more specifically about the work of Richard Kern, where the degree of intimacy brokered between author and subject - and the tensions such intimacy provokes - might be considered to be the true subject of his work.

Portraits make evident the intimate social dramas between two (or more) individuals: they make public the often private (or privileged) interactions, relationships  and "economies of exchange" that typically exist beyond or outside public scrutiny. Kern himself has described photography as a "way to get into intimate situations with other people." (5) Portraits are essentially a collaborative act: evidence of an agreement between artist and subject of the respective desires to portray and be portrayed. Richard Kern's photographs - typically, although not exclusively, of young women - play off the artist's admitted voyeurism against his model's evident exhibitionism. Conflating two forms of desire - one fundamentally private (voyeurism), the other essentially public (exhibitionism) - which are played out before the camera's lens, Kern's resulting photographs are highly self-conscious , and clearly intended for public view.

Kern's portraits would appear to have emerged from an investigation into the classic (male) artist - (female) muse relationships, such as that which existed between Man Ray and Lee Miller. In their shared, participatory role within the construction of these images, Kern and his (typically) female models foreground the degree of complicity that exists in the production of such images. The Scottish artist, and occasional Kern model, Lucy McKenzie has said of her experience modeling for Kern: "Now I realize how much participation [there] is in pornography, and a woman's consent to be objectified is a manifestation of the overall willingness and need for intellectual life to transgress. Transgression is not always a negative action and in thinking about and making art it is clear that the examination of the very private, personal and sometimes squirmingly embarrassing can be a fundamental element." (6)

What power relationships, or "economies of exchange", exist in Kern's images are consequently far murkier than we might initially imagine (a scenario that is further complicated by the subjective relationships we - as viewers - bring to such images.) In her introduction to Kern's book Model Release, McKenzie articulated her own relationship with portraiture's complicit nature: "In Richard's work I can see his refined understanding of power relationships. His subject matter is so very narrow and obsessive that this really surfaces. On a personal level, I enjoyed the very cardboard cut-out roles that are present within this kind of situation, men versus women. [...] Any tension thrown into play by basic sexuality involved in a photo shoot was diffused by the cartoonish power roles we fitted into ... there was a clear, understated understanding that neither photographer nor model was impressed by the predetermined power structure that exists for this kind of encounter between men and women, artist and model." (7)

Despite their apparent 'naturalism' - often evoked through his use of domestic or, more recently, 'pastoral' outdoor settings - Kern's photographs are, in the artist's words, "fakes." Kern has stated that significant part of photography's  appeal is "... the fact that you are never really sure about what you are looking at." (8)  This element of 'uncertainty' or 'artifice' was perhaps more pronounced in Kern's earlier photographs produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Invariably highly theatrical, Kern's images of this period were dramatically lit, staged tableaux that echoed the 1970s photographic work of artists such as Jimmy DeSana and Lucas Samaras (the latter of whose work Kern was exposed to as a student). Of course photography - by its very nature - presents us with only a partial, highly subjective take on reality: What is excised from an image is as crucial as that which remains. Photography, through its framing (and editing) of a situation invariably dramatizes and intensifies reality.
 
'Softer' than his previous work, insomuch as the closed in, claustrophobic atmospheres and nihilistic impulses of his earlier work has been tempered, Kern's recent photographs evoke instead a somewhat soft-focus world view: one not dissimilar to that of the 1970s erotica of photographer David Hamilton. Kern himself has acknowledged that there has been "... a softening of the images, " adding that they are no longer "... as blunt." (9) Kern's desire, to move away from the more aggressive repertoire of his earlier production has been provoked by his realization that, "There are a lot more ways to show perversion ... well not perversion exactly, maybe subversion ... than [simply] showing someone tied up." (10) In Soft Kern's embrace of the aesthetics and social, economic and libidinal ideologies  of amateur pornography, and voyeuristic photography - genres that have grown exponentially with the availability of digital technology and access to the internet - is evident. These genres suggest - through their widespread proliferation - a democratization of the construction of sexualized identities: a process in which Kern himself has long been both a pivotal figure and subversive pioneer.

Footnotes
(1) Aspects of this text have been developed from my earlier essay "Likeness", in Likeness: Portraits of Artist by Other Artists (San Francisco, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2004), 11.
(2) Kevin Killian, "Two Way Street" in Likeness: Portraits of Artist by Other Artists (San Francisco, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2004), 28.
(3) Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 1991), 9.
(4) Dan Fox, "A Song In My Heart", Frieze 79 (November-December 2003).
(5) Richard Kern in conversation with the author, 2004.
(6) Lucy McKenzie, in Richard Kern "Model Release" (Cologne, Taschen, 2000), 10.
(7) Lucy McKenzie, in Richard Kern "Model Release" (Cologne, Taschen, 2000), 10.
(8) Richard Kern in conversation with the author, 2004.
(9) Richard Kern in conversation with the author, 2004.
(10) Richard Kern in conversation with the author, 2004.