The Trouble with Larry

Self Portrait, 1962. Photo Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, NY.

Larry Clark, known to the art world since the 1970s for his graphic photographs of methamphetamine users in Tulsa, and more widely famed for his explicit depiction of bad behaviour in the 1995 movie Kids, is currently being given his first North American retrospective at the International Center for Photography in Manhattan. On Saturdays, it’s craning room only at ICP.

Untitled, 1963. From Tulsa. Photo Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, NY.

Curator Brian Wallis lauds Clark as “one of the most important and influential photographers of the second half of the 20th century.” But one image in the show, taken during the making of Kids, encapsulates what makes Clark — and this retrospective — so hard to take seriously. It’s a self-portrait that shows the fiftysomething artist (who is now 62) standing shirtless next to Justin Pierce, one of the Washington Square Park skaters whom he cast in Kids. Clark is mimicking Pierce’s outfit: baggy jeans sliding down his hips, boxer shorts ballooning over the waistband. Clark’s “research” for Kids demanded that he spend his days hanging out in the teen skater scene. (If one of the trials of teenagerdom is enduring your parents’ attempts to relate to you and your friends, then Clark’s children — yes, the infamous teen ogler has three of his own — must have had a mortifying adolescence.)

The ICP show includes photographs and collages from the past 40 years. In addition to Clark’s Tulsa series — which was shot between 1962 and 1970 — there are images of teens having sex; naked teen hippies in a New Mexico commune; teenage hustlers in Times Square in the 1980s (one particularly disturbing scene features a girl being raped while tripping on acid); and collages combining images of near-naked teenage boys, photos of Matt Dillon and River Phoenix ripped from the pages of Tiger Beat and newspaper clippings about teens who committed violent crimes.

Also included are Clark’s early-’90s teenage skater series and casting Polaroids of the Kids actors (Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, along with the “real” teenagers featured in the film). There are other fascinating documents from Clark’s life, including a history of drug abuse that he provided to St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in the ’90s in order to get clean, as well as snippets from episodes of Donahue and The Today Show featuring teens who killed their parents or committed other violent crimes. The latter inspired the storylines for his later films Bully (2001) and Ken Park (which is still awaiting wide release).

Untitled, 1971. Photo Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, NY.

Clark is the spiritual forefather of a certain set of quasi-artists who hover between cult and mainstream literary, film and fashion culture: Vincent Gallo, J.T. Leroy, Asia Argento, Terry Richardson. They can be lumped together for their firm conviction that portraying disturbing, illicit or abject subject matter with a certain raw, low-tech surface makes it more “authentic.” (Fellatio: truth’s pinnacle.)

To be fair, Clark was once the genuine article. When he began shooting his meth-addicted friends in Tulsa in the ’60s, he was also shooting up — daily. Applying the old chestnut “write what you know” to his photography worked. The photographs Clark took of wannabe Natalie Woods and James Deans — like the pregnant, beehived prostitute injecting herself, or the group of duck-tailed boys tying tourniquets in their Southern working-class family room beneath a Jesus painting and a vase of plastic flowers — are both formally beautiful and emotionally trenchant. They influenced Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and certainly come closest to validating the ICP’s grand claims for Clark’s significance. But the Tulsa series is the first and last set of Clark’s images that complicate the notion of exploitation (because of the short distance between the using artist and his using subjects) and reach towards richer, more nuanced meaning.

Long before he picked up a camera, exploitation was a comfortable mode for Clark. In the introduction to Teenage Lust, his self-published book, Clark writes of his longing to use a camera to turn back the clock to his glory days as a boy “f---ing in the backseat... the fat girl next door who gave me blow jobs after school. I treated her mean and told all my pals. We kept count up to about 300 times we f---ed her in the 8th grade. Once when I f---ed her after Bobby Hood (ol' horse dick) I was f---ing hair and air. A little rape.” Clark may have been an amoral asshole as a teenager, but at a certain age, this excuse stops being valid, or interesting.

Untitled, 1992-95. Photo Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, NY.

As Clark got older, he glommed on to younger subjects, developing friendships with them that resulted in their willingness to expose themselves to his lens. His position in relationship to his subjects slid from being a compelling one in the Tulsa series — does stepping back and capturing your self-destruction save you? And/or does it make you an artist? — to something more sinister. He used teenagers’ susceptibility to mould themselves to grown ups’ desires in order to maintain a vision of himself as a rebel cutting through the bullshit. It’s a disturbing position and at the same time one of the most banal: If I keep taking pictures of kids, can I avoid becoming an adult? As his boomer-clown skater disguise attests, Clark’s loath to admit that he’s the adult doing the manipulating.

Clark’s position as cultural renegade is undermined by the predictable lechery of his films and photographs. This is an artist who shares with John Updike that most conservative, widely accepted of western, middlebrow axioms: that eros, delivered in the most obvious form — underage flesh — provides redemption. In an interview in Pataphysics magazine, Clark rhapsodized about the final group sex scene in Ken Park: “Normally I think in this film you would just show how broken all the kids were, but in Ken Park I had this idea that I wanted to have a scene that showed some kind of temporary redemption — maybe some kind of temporary salvation, maybe something uplifting… my idea was to say, well, I’m going to do this by the kids coming together and having sex.”

This is, of course, a sex scene with young, good-looking actors, engineered by him for adult viewers. Why is Michael Jackson vilified for creating his Neverland, and Clark isn’t? Clark’s work isn’t saying anything “real” about teenage life; it’s a narcissistic reflection of his own perpetual impasse. And although his visual sense is quite good, now that the style he helped invent has been co-opted for American Apparel ad campaigns, it’s become irrelevant as art.

The Larry Clark retrospective at the International Center for Photography in Manhattan ends June 5.

Miranda Purves is a Canadian writer living in New York City.