Artforum
January 2005
Feature, Inc.
23 October – 11 December, 2004
Before becoming known as a photographer, Richard Kern was a director of short death-punk films, pioneering a post-Warholian B-porn aesthetic that made itself at home on Sonic Youth album covers and in East Village basement screening rooms at a time when it was still possible to call such culture “underground.” In the meantime, Kern’s photographs have been published in magazines as various as Purple and Barely Legal. Kern does porn, art, and also fashion photography, sometimes all in one shooting day, but it’s not in this cross-over potential that the singularity of Kern’s work resides, it’s in the way he strips this multi-tasking down to its hollow core and in how he elaborates his peculiar distance from the labor he performs whenever he picks up a camera and aims it at a posing model.
The nine photographs on view at Feature Inc. all play on pornographic tropes of voyeurism. Kern’s lens peeps through windows and half-open doors to capture glimpses up his models’ skirts or down their blouses, locating panties or nipples. Blurry foreground elements such as doorknobs, potted plants and window glare eroticize the simultaneous proximity and remoteness of the unseen photographer. It’s hard to say whether Kern is referencing “amateur teen” and “up-skirt” porn genres, or if these images were actually taken on the job. I prefer to think that we are looking at up-skirt porn that is referencing itself, that Kern and his female models are conspiring to open up a pose within the pose, cheating an off-the-clock art moment on the porn clock. This new pose and the gaze it plays for may not look immediately different from those of pornography, and the model, photographer, and décor are all the same, but the singularity of the chosen, agreed upon moment seems to tear itself away from its initial context, reterritorializing itself here, in a picture like Woman undresses (Chicago), 2004. These are stolen moments, captured on negatives the artist chose not to turn over to his editor.
Unlike Terry Richardson, whose work seems fully invested in the dream of making commercial fashion transgressive, or trangression fashionable, Kern doesn’t pretend that image culture is a non-stop party. And unlike Ryan McGinley, who’s photographs seem to document a dream of youth freely exposing itself in moments as innocent as nature, Kern exposes the economics and the artifice of every situation. They make work seem like play, whereas Kern plays at working. The crucial difference, and it’s always sensible in his strangely uptight images, is that a Kern moment is aware of its own non-belonging as either play or work time. In Office (NYC), a model posing as an office worker seemingly caught unaware as she squats to retrieve a fallen document, conspires with Kern to re-appropriate the pornographic situation, coolly reproducing it in an image that is closer to the sensibility of Pierre Klossowski than the snapshot neo-realism of wild boy lifestyle photography.
We see nothing, really, in Up Skirt 1 but the lavender dead end of the model’s panties. We see an image not bothering to break the rules of the genre its title so straightforwardly names, and a hobbyist’s attention to form and detail. We see Kern showing himself seeing not much, and his model agreeing to show it. A Kern image seems to start from the boredom of looking at a world already photographed in advance, then finds its discrete distance from this boredom and this world. Kern captures nothing but some young, blank flesh, a moment slipped into panties and carefully, soberly returned to its own opacity. There is no simulated joy in this moment, only the joy of simulating it.
- John Kelsey
