I don’t know. I loved the giant Larry Clark show years back,
Punk Picasso at Luhring Augustine, where he showed piles of detritus that made
an overwhelmingly compelling case that Clark was sexually assaulted as a child
and his career has been the result of that trauma, like he was doing Mike
Kelley’s career in reverse. It was so convincing that it was hard not to
suspect that on some level it was a bit of a put-on, a fiction possibly derived
from fact, which would make his later work more compelling. But after this show,
I have an even harder time believing that he is just not messing with us. The
show features vintage shots of young men, large off-handed figurative paintings
of naked young men and graphic collages of naked young men with erect and
ejaculating penises. Perhaps it is the presentation or maybe just the misfortune
of being good at sequencing otherwise unspectacular images into something more,
but it is hard to feel a real desire in the work. It feels like Clark is trying
very hard to provoke instead of reveal something. I could just be that the
large paintings feel downright labored-on in comparisons to the collages, and
the work of bespeaks a man making through choices instead of struggling to unburden
himself. So I don’t know. The work isn’t bad, it just feels like he has tipped
his hand.
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