X-Rated in Paris

text by Robert Goethals, phot ography by Larry Clark

Tulsa (man and woman shooting in bed) JGS

In 59, Bruce Davidson roamed the Coney Island boardwalk shooting the Jokers, a Brooklyn gang, all inked-up, singing along with Frankie Lymons "I'm not a Juvenile Delinquent," their aura of lust and threat enticing too

the looks of Italian girls flaunting curves in the sand under skywriters. In 66, University of Chicago grad and rebel photographer, Danny Lyon, shed his imperious middle-class airs and ran with the biker gang, the Chicago Outlaws, burning film in the wind on the road. You imagined the two photographers deeply involved, cultivating the rebel yell, wowing Artland with the immediacy and honesty of it all. But when it comes to the tableaux vivants of Teenage Wasteland, except for the Dark Lord, nobody pops your sockets like Larry Clark.

Tulsa (boy reflected in broken glass) JGS

Larry Clarks current 40-year retrospective in Paris, Kiss the Past Hello, is X-rated. (No one under 18. Word. And, a museum no less.) The X-rating represents a compromise between the Mayor of Paris, citing child protection laws, and Sbastien Gokalp, the magisterial curator at the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, defending the artists integrity. We told ourselves that if we removed some of the images, it would no longer be Larry Clark - and putting some of them behind a red curtain would be ridiculous, said Gokalp. Larry Clarks work is coherent. It concerns itself with the coming of age and all that this entails: love,

firearms, drugs, sex. And for Clark, the X-rating has also bestows him the publicity coup of a lifetime.

Tulsa (shot in leg) JGS

This past summer, before the show opened, Clark mused about how the Oklahoma of his youth brought about his emancipation as an artist. Its interesting because we were coming out of the 1950s, said Clark, and that was such a repressed time. I think I started making photographs in reaction to that. Why cant you show everything? Why do people pull their punches? There were great photo essays in LIFE magazine, but they always stopped at a certain place. There was always a place where everybody stopped. It was just a rule. For me there are no rules. I think I learned that from artists from painters and sculptors. It took photography a while to catch up to them.

Tulsa (boy pointing at vein) JGS

The Tulsa series first stole privileged glances into the shadow world of young, white Oklahomans expertly shooting heroin in their veins, striking poses with guns, and launching into kamikaze sex. It was a community of

teenage deviates, dopefiends, and hooligans, a community where bad things happened. A community with no face until Larry Clark revealed it. Shot between 1963 and 1971, the work mesmerizes you with its cabral, the aggressiveness makes you uptight, too. Clarks an artist uninterested in ingratiating himself with you. Ralph Gibson, the photographer and creator of the maverick Lustrum Press, first published Clarks seminal monograph in 1971. (After all the upper class editors at haute monde houses took a fidgety, polite pass.) Tulsa rocked the Kasbah. Gibson firmly believed, (before curators at world-class muses trailed in his vapors), that ethics occupied the high ground in the photographers creative explorations of the do-lo, not voyeurism.

Tulsa (black eye) JGS

Take a step back, the Paris show strikes a dolorous blow. You see youth as metaphor for trivializing resistance to the moribund future. Clarks dudes and dudettes share less than zero with the kids Bruce Davidson later shot, back in the Day, during the Civil Rights Movement, or protesting the Vietnam War, waving bras, burning draft cards, and giving you an earful on the moral responsibilities of citizenship. Lost in a stupor of booze, dope, a samsara of luminous pixels, in the Gorgoroth of the Patron Saint of Provocation, all human suffering and welfare gets obliterated from your memory banks and all social action disintegrates into noise. Puritans cavil how Clark's maldido oeuvre horns you with white trash performing their get em in/get em off dicklick tricks. But to ignore his representational veracity means youve lost your eyes.

Tulsa (Revolver, American flag) JGS

Ive always been interested in people who you wouldnt see otherwise, Clark said last August. If you look back at my books, photographs, and films and since Im doing this retrospective Im forced to look back the work is always about a small group of people who are somewhat isolated, and who you would never see if I didnt film or photograph them. I dont think I would have had to take the photographs if I could have seen them in other places.

~ Robert Goethals, November 2010