Japan Times, June 1, 2005
NEW ART SEEN
RICHARD KERN
A voyeur for today
By Monty DiPietro
The photographer Richard Kern grew up in a small town in North Carolina, the son of a newspaperman. As a teenager, Kern had a part-time job changing the marquee at the local cinema, and one of the perks was free films. It was during a screening of Roger Vadim's camped up 1968 sci-fi flick "Barbarella" -- featuring the comely Jane Fonda as a frolicking space kitten -- that Kern experienced a sexual awakening while masturbating in the balcony.
News photo
"Office" by Richard Kern
I think the above anecdote is telling, because while there is no graphic nudity in Barbarella, the frequent glimpses of Fonda's curves through her loose and see-through costumes brings the film a deliciously erotic atmosphere.
This is the same atmosphere that characterizes the '70s French erotic cinema that continues to inform the photographs in Kern's ongoing "Soft" series -- a body of work that is the subject of a new exhibition at Speak For, a spacious downstairs gallery in Tokyo's trendy upscale shopping neighborhood of Daikanyama.
Speak For is a cool gallery space of almost 200 sq. meters with concrete walls and thoughtful design details. It also functions as a bookshop, stocking a small assortment of avant-garde art books from the last 20 years.
There are 16 C-type prints in this show, most are from the "Soft" series, which seems a perfect fit for Speak For, but about a half-dozen are drawn from the artist's other series of sexually explicit work, which badly compromises "Soft," visually overriding the subtleties that give his best-known work much of its appeal. It would have been far better to stay with just one mood here.
News photo
"Itchy Foot" by Richard Kern
Apart from that, the show is fairly good -- about half the pictures are poster-sized and at this scale they really come to life. What Kern does here is basically point his lens through the folds and cracks in the clothing of young women, stealing glimpses of a thigh or panties, and a breast. The subjects are all models -- the pictures work like staged voyeuristic servings of vicarious erotic pleasures.
What makes the pictures mature and interesting is Kern's undeniable skill at working the line that divides sexual suggestion on the one hand from pornography on the other. In Japan, as in America, that line can move a little, depending on the mood of the times and where exactly you are standing -- but in Kern's vision, it is from the point of view of the line itself that one gets the most highly erotic effects.
In a representative photograph titled "Bench" (2003), we see a young woman leaning forward to adjust her shoe while sitting on a public bench waiting for a bus. It is a sunny day and her hair is highlighted. Through the neckline of the woman's yellow blouse the silouette of one of her breasts is revealed.
The interesting question is, are we seeing or stealing this moment? Obviously the chance of finding oneself in this moment is nothing like the act of hiding a camera in a department store's changing room or following schoolgirls up escalators with mirrors glued to your shoe tops. If there is such a thing as good honest innocent eroticism -- Kern means to fake it.
"I'm looking for the shot that triggers a particular reaction in my head," said Kern in an e-mail interview last week. "If I were to voice that reaction out loud, it would be something like ' that's nice, look at that ', or 'Wow.' I think of it as a kind of innocent, pure feeling that I had in my youth when I first became aware of the opposite sex."
I happen to be writing this review while sitting in a cafe in Paris where I am fortunate to be spending some time this spring, and I can't help thinking that Kern is quite European in his approach. Here, where magazines and billboards are a bounty of breasts, Kern could easily be working with major-brand advertising campaigns. But elsewhere, that would be impossible -- he would have to choose one side of the line, or the other.
"Attitudes vary from person to person of course," says Kern. I can tell you that press reaction to my work has been good in France and Italy, but not good in England. I was shocked by the reaction to a show I had there. A writer for Time Out suggested that I should be locked up! In the United States, the reaction to my last show was good. For the first time, writers from respected publications like Artforum wrote about the photographs as photographs instead of getting hung up trying to decide if the work was pornographic or not."
On this question, I am far more worried about the likes of Araki's bondage nudes, or Japan's widely available tentacle-rape comic books, which have always appeared to me as dismayingly demeaning to women -- in fact anti-erotic. With "Soft," all Kern is doing, and doing quite well, is sneaking up on life.
Richard Kern's "Soft" is showing till June 12 at Gallery Speak For, B2, 28-2 Sarugaku-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; (03) 5459-6385. Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; closed Mondays.
Monty DiPietro welcomes readers' comments at newartseen@assemblylanguage.com
The Japan Times: June 1, 2005
(C) All rights reserve
