Richard Kern, Adriene's
eyedrops, 11 x 14 inches,
C Print, 1997

Being acquainted with Lydia Lunch's practice, it was surprising that her work didn't raise similar problems. But her contribution to the show was, in many ways, antithetical to her confrontationist and visceral performances for which she is best known (including collaborations with Richard Kern such as the notorious no-wave film Fingered ). In fact, it was this apparent difference in sensibility between the two groups of works that generated most interest. The works were seemingly united in a loose "punk" sensibility, and Lunch has not only collaborated with Kern also modelled for him, explaining the rationale for a joint exhibition. But Lunch's work also expresses a curious deviation away from Kern's. A different side of the confrontationist and performance persona for Lunch (who claimed the Marquis De Sade as "the worlds grandest philosopher"), is revealed in works which place her behind the camera. Once Kern's model, her documentary-style photographs represent the artistic perspective of one of his photographic subjects. 

Both sets of works focus on what many would regard as marginal aspects of society: Kern, with his subversively playful anti-pornography, and Lunch, with her depiction of dysfunctional youth and entropic America. Working in the realm of what Sontag calls "the obscene," fantasy plays a large role in Kern's work. His models collaborate with him to orchestrate how they wish to be represented by role playing in front of his camera. Conversely, Lunch's subjects essentially play themselves, with a grounded banality that is selectively accentuated but not overtly falsified or constructed. As emphasised by her selection of images, Lunch reveals a meditative, more introspective self; a persona located in a sensibility framed through her own lens with a disenchanted America as her backdrop. This counterposes Kern's phantasmic images. 

Susan Sontag argues that the "obscene" is a social convention, a fiction imposed upon nature by a society convinced that there is something morally indecent about sexual functions and pleasure. Sontag further describes "the obscene" as an extremity of erotic experience and that modes of extreme social transgression (such as pornography) are ultimately not really about sex, but death. This is particularly so when there is a focus upon the pleasures of transgression rather than mere pleasure itself.¹ The "obscene" accommodates forms of moral and social transgression that are plainly toyed with in Kern's photographs and Lunch's performance/writing. If the marginal or "dysfunctional" is the obscenities of a "functional" society, then Lunch's photographs seem to illustrate an entropic transgression of normative societal values. As such, the works sit like a post script to her more provocative and confrontational practice. 

In evaluating "pornographic" art such as Kern's, critics tend to feel the need to apologise or at least defend his practice by stressing how it differs from other branches of pornography, or even the term pornography itself. Kern's work is alleged to be non or mock exploitational, as his models menace with feigned anger and a self conscious exhibitionism that distances them from consumer pornography. To this end, his subjects are not portrayed as objects, but as collaborators and performers with personalities. Through aggressive portrayal and activity his work is the antithesis of passivity of subject demanded by the consumers of pornography which, Judith Butler argues, is always a suspended action. With titles like as A few Tough Women and A lot of Stupid Men, Kern's process has been described as breaking the traditional power relationship between the active gaze of the photographer and the passivity of the model. 

But does this work subvert pornography in its most popular and banal forms? Does it overcome the common accusation of female as object and the male dominated gaze? Are such positions naive? Does Kern even hold these as considerations? In any case does donning women in violent regalia undermine power relations or does it reinforce them with the only difference being an exchange of perpetrators? It's doubtful.

These works are a mixture of his earlier fetish pieces (reminiscent of the "New York Girls" series) and more recent work which emphasises a presentation of the female on her own terms. The women depicted in the later works reveal more of themselves Ð as people involved in the everyday Ð than they reveal of their fantasies. For example, the topless subjects of Lucy's Zits (showing Lucy at her mirror popping her pimples), or Christine's Comb or Lara's Nails are firmly grounded in the mundane. These works are less manipulative and more meditative, drawing on the everyday, even though many are drawn straight from popular representations of nudes that have existed since the invention of the camera. The overall element of fantasy is played down as the background is less of a studio environment and more domestic, including common references to New York. 

Nudity is the common thread between this later work and Kern's earlier work. It is ironic, however, that nudity is starker and somehow more profound in a domestic, understated environment, where previously it is almost an afterthought to fetish and fantasy. This grounding of his models in terms of their own domestic realities makes the viewer appreciate their vulnerabilities, even mortality. It is not the vulnerability of exploited passivity, which is supposedly the hallmark of popular pornography, but a vulnerability in terms of their own humanity. 

In Adriane's Eye Drops, a girl whose own vision is obscured bares her breasts seemingly inadvertently as she stretches to apply eye drops. Her eyes look to the ceiling, her nipples survey the viewer. While playful, her prone stance is disconcertingly innocent, yet at the same time inviting. 

In Pauline at the Window in Hollywood, the most Bataillian of all these photographs, we are observed by her rear while she stretches toward the open window. Though perverse, it could be an image dragged out of an imaginative (if not completely surreal) Penthouse shoot from the Seventies, perhaps illustrating some extraordinary letter in "Readers Writes". Yet the pose conspires with the salt and pepper shakers to link with Simone from Bataille's Story of the Eye, who "developed a mania for breaking eggs with her behind".² We are invited to stare at her prone body; a tease to look but not touch. 

Kern encourages the fantasies of his models as much as his own, and they choose to parade their personae and recontextualise their sexualities with assortments of defensive and offensive armaments: guns, knives, hair combs, egg beaters. This is a collaborative project, but one where the same power relationships inherent in pornography are rehearsed over. Sontag argues that models who play the role of sexual objects are viewed as blanks Ð personages only seen behaviouristically Ð and the voyeur projects his own desires onto their absence. If this is the case, what does the accentuated demeanour of Kern's models matter? In any case, it is difficult to determine just whose fantasy they were working through. No matter how much this collaborative aspect of his work is stressed, Kern is still prone to the charge that his work will not fully escape the frameworks that he is allegedly attempting to subvert. 

When commentators defend Kern by claiming that his work is different than pornography they are maintaining a distinction which his work actively errodes. And someone such as Paul Goodman, who argues that it's "not whether it's pornography but the quality of pornography", is still bringing into play moral criteria of 'good' and 'bad'. Judith Butler's approach to pornography is more interesting in this respect, because she identifies the way that these discriminations are a form of censorship which produces as much pornography as it claims to restrict. And instead, she argues for a proliferation and deregulation of these images, because it is through the production of a chaotic multiplicity of pornography "that the authority and prevalence of the reductive and violent imagery produced by [the] pornographic industries will lose their monopoly on . . . the power to define and restrict the terms of political identity".³ 

In contrast to Kern, Lunch describes her project as: 

The need to create tangible objects, which one sheds like dead skin imprinted with little bits of psyche etched under the surface. Hoping that with the birthing of each new creation, a new found freedom will inhabit the space previously haunted by ghosts who demanded to be made manifest. To be made real. By flesh and blood . . . by hands which long to caress something tangible. Momentous of ones existence. To give body and voice to the objects of one's desires . . . obsessions . . . frustrations and anger, thereby releasing them from the cubby in which they smoulder.⁴

While Kern celebrates "the obscene," Lydia Lunch's photographs, under the title The Space between Breaths, suggest the closure of "the obscene", entropy and death. In these meditative works, depicting disenchanted youth and a tender juvenile sensibility, she expresses a quiet rage in what's known on American daytime television as "dysfunctional" society. While Kern's work is in rich colour, Lunch uses black and white, suggesting a certain archaic memory or dream state. The black and white lends them a Bataillian gravity emphasising a mortality that contrasts and to some extent completes Kern's thesis on transgression. Lunch has stated that she has sought in lost men "a place to lose herself." In these dream scapes there is no need to look. 

Germain Greer claimed in a recent interview that women are simply objects fantasised by men, and that real women don't exist. In the "New York Girls" series, Kern used Lunch as a model, so in the context of the current exhibition it is interesting to see what a New York girl does when she's behind the camera. As Lunch states, her desire is to create "tangible objects, which one sheds like dead skin", and the affect produced is very different to that captured by Kern. As evidenced by these photographs, what she sheds is herself, her persona, her surface. They reveal the understated other side of her factionalised persona. Her photographs bring her visceral performances to a logical conclusion, creating a sanctuary and a point of anabasis. 

Lunch's photographs are separated into two groups. One is populated with images of disaffected teenagers, who one suspects have just crawled out of their smouldering cubby (after first setting fire to it). The other group depicts the abandoned landscapes of empty buildings, wrecking yards, and the breeding grounds of underground militia movements. 

Rusty depicts a lanky blonde "backwoods" boy with nothing to do. Lost to the World shows a boy smoking in a doorway. Their expressions are vacant, the body language aggressive. Johna, the most disturbing portrait, depicts a dog tagged, mohawked teenager smoking in front of a rusty mattress skeleton. Johna's mock-Marine persona emulates and manifests the symbol of failing American aggression. There's a lost innocence in these photographs, and there is also pain, disillusionment and a vacancy that epitomises that segment of every blank generation. These are the real denizens populating the Gothic America of a popular imagination. They are a manifestation of the fear of rural America by its metropolitans. 

The landscape photograph, Vicksburgh (a symbol of the old South as the site of one of the American Civil War's longest and bloodiest sieges), depicts an old collapsing house overgrown with weeds. Sawmill Boulevard similarly evokes the overbearing statuary of cemeteries in its barren poignancy. Kutuna Hora 1 & 2 depict skulls piled on top of each other in what appears to be a monk's crypt. Taken together, these images portray a European sensibility, defining the oppression of history, tradition, and finally death. There are no people in these landscapes, the presence of children can be traced in the generational betrayal and neglect which seems to smoulder with the rebellion to overturn. And the buildings are seemingly surveyed from the angle of a child, looking up at these statuesque forms with suspicious interest. Lunch's photographs show the antithesis of the promised American Dream, which is the real underside of America. 

Lunch doesn't show porn she lives it. Her factionalised self is the obscenity that challenges established morality and is the site of a confrontation with middle America. What Lunch describes as her own "shocking reality" is really what Sontag claims is the real meaning (or yearning) of transgression; they are tokens of death. In these works, the girl from Gotham city goes Gothic. Beside Kern's work, she also offers another perspective on the girls he photographs. While each of these girls may be framed as and in a fantasy, each, like Lunch, is sure to have her own real meditative space. If Kern's photographs have a tendency to objectify, then Lunch's work qualifies the process. The teasing and the exultation of youth is portrayed and exploited by Kern, while Lunch views the world through the opposite manifestation of youth; the rage and rebellion muffled by the indifference and the weight of history. As Lunch argues, her photos "give body and voice to the objects of one's desires . . . objections, frustrations and anger". 

Felix Deftereos
1998

1. Susan Sontag, "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967), reproduced in Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye, Penguin, 1982, p.106.
2. Georges Bataille, ibid. p.14.
3. Judith Butler, "The Force of Fantasy, Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess", in Differences, vol.2, 1990, p.121.
4. Lydia Lunch, "The Space Between Breaths", catalogue essay, 1998. 

© The artists and 
Courtesy of the artists & CCP.

Richard Kern, Christeen's
comb, 11 x 14 inches, 
cibachrome, 1998

Lydia Lunch, Adam & 
Allajandro, undated

Lydia Lunch, Vicksburg, 
Mississippi 1994