MOMENTS OF CHOICE
"I decided that I wasn't going to turn the camera away, or shut the door, or shoot from the waist up." LARRY CLARK
If that’s how you choose to shoot a film - if you opt for bare loins, incestuous abuse and teenage suicide - then, to get your film shown in the UK, punching, wrestling and attempting to throttle the man in charge of your distribution company - the one person with the power to say no - would probably be something worth avoiding. Unfortunately, Larry Clark (pictured in everyday dress above) punched, wrestled and throttled Hamish McAlpine, head of Metro Tartan, the UK distribution company for Clark’s controversial 2002 film, Ken Park.
The film was banned in the UK. Surely not. It was banned in Australia, too, and with no hint of a scuffle. Clark gets a bad press all too easily. Take that altercation with McAlpine: on the surface, it could be construed as a crazed act from an artist on the cusp of rejection; look a little deeper, though, and you discover that it was anything but - Clark’s assault had nothing to do with the film and everything to do with McAlpine voicing his support, in conversation with Clark, for Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. And so it is with his work: loaded with potentially controversial content, but never simply for its own sake.
His own 38 minute entry for the Destricted Project, a 2006 feature film created to explore the increasingly merged boundaries between pornography and art through seven shorts from seven different artists, is a case in point. Despite the list of high-profile entrees (Matthew Barney, Marina Abramovic, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor-Wood and Gaspard Noé), Clark’s piece was the only one to escape widespread criticism, and it does it by extending the brief to incorporate prevalent social issues. Throughout his career, from his first photographic series, Tulsa (see above), through his feature films and right up to his current exhibition here in London, he has demonstrated a fascination with the youth of today, particularly those from impoverished backgrounds, and the real and present dangers impacting on their lives. Reality has been an ever present in his work. There was nothing fanciful about those early Tulsa pictures (1963-1971), nothing exaggerated, nothing artificial. Clark was simply documenting his own existence and, in doing so, revealing a dirty American underbelly that society was all to eager to sweep under the carpet: “I was coming out of the 1950s where everything was repressed. Back then in America there was no talk of drugs and things like that. It wasn't supposed to exist, but it did.”
It’s been the same with his films. The events in Kids, the film for which Clark is perhaps best known, were based almost entirely on real people and events witnessed during a three year period in which Clark immersed himself in the New York skate scene. The only thing not true in the film is the girl who gets AIDs from her first sexual encounter. Although people watching it might think it obscene and contrived, it was real people dealing with real problems. And that’s how he approached the Destricted Project, as an opportunity to investigate something more important than just sex as art. Clark views pornography as something negatively affecting young people today because of its widespread availability: “I’m curious about the fact that kids nowadays see it. I have a daughter of 21, a son of 24, and I’ve been taken aback by what they’re exposed to. The innocence I had as a kid just isn’t around anymore.” To investigate, he interviewed a bunch of young American men about their relationship with pornography. He then picked one who would be free to have sex with a female porn star of his own choosing. Clark filmed it. The resulting sequence, preceded by interviews, makes for sad and, at times, tragic viewing: young men psychologically confused by the pornographic stereotypes paraded as normal. Again, these are real problems affecting young people today - problems that most won't dare discuss.
Last week, I ended up - I’m not sure how - at the opening of Clark’s latest exhibition, Los Angeles 2003-2006, at the Simon Lee Gallery in London. The series of pictures follows a four year period in the life of Jonathan Velasquez (above), the young adolescent who inspired Clark’s last film, Wassup Rockers, and it's a series that once more reflects his enduring fascination with the marginalised youth of today. In following Velasquez so closely, and in placing hims so clearly in the context of an uneasy social environment, the pictures constitute an intriguing narrative in which we wonder just how the subject will turn out in the end. What will happen to him? Will he fall foul to some of the ills commonly affecting other young kids in South Central? Clark has followed Velasquez as he navigates his way through one of the most difficult periods of anyone’s life, a period during which people balk at nothing but rarely think about the consequences of their perceived omnipotence. When you’re young, you honestly think you can get away with anything; and rarely do you think about the significance of some of the choices you are forced to make.
This idea of choice is, for Clark and for us, an important one for people of all ages, but more so for younger generations who have most of their lives stretched out in front of them - entire lives at the mercy of a single moment of choice. One choice can change everything. This fragility of youth has formed a consistent backbone to Clark’s work of the last thirty-odd years, and it continues to fascinate him even today. To those that view films like Ken Park as immoral and needlessly obscene, he responds:
“There’s a moral centre to all the films. I think: consequences, you know? Since the Tulsa book I’ve been called many, many names: ‘pornographer’, ‘child pornographer’, ‘garbage’, ‘trash’, ‘he’s romanticising drugs’ and on and on and on. But there is a moral centre to all the work and the moral centre is ‘consequences’. The consequences of everything we do.”
The consequences of choice. Something worth remembering.
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Ah man, what an article. The guy sounds fascinating. To think i just watched kids and it was based on REAL events! 'Bully' was also a crazy cool film.