Kids, the hotly debated film about underage teenagers, casual drugs, and even more casual sex, should be required viewing for the House and Senate conferees who will shortly decide the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts. The movie and the story of its director, Larry Clark, help explain why government funding of the late-20th-century art world produces so much public consternation.
In the 1970s, Clark received an NEA grant of $ 5,000 following publication of Tulsa, a collection of photographs featuring underage teenagers in various stages of nudity, shooting and sniffng ampheramines and other substances. Clark himself, then in his 20s, appeared in one of the photographs, eyes closed in a drug-induced stupor.
The NEA grant, the “imprimatur of excellence,” as Endowment supporters call it, did nothing to change Clark’s behavior. He himself has described how he drank, injected amphetamines, lived off prostitutes, and was arrested for numerous offenses (including various assaults, a knifing, and a shooting). Well into his 30s, Clark continued to hang out with 15-year-olds, photographing them as they took drugs, had sex, and prostituted themselves.
While the grant money itself went to lawyers to try to keep him out of jail (“So there goes the NEA, thanks a lot,” Clark wrote), he managed to finish a book of photographs and publish it in 1983 un- der the title Teenage Lust. Clark’s photographs show, among other things, teenagers having sex in the back seat of a car, a close-up of a prostitute performing oral sex tm a teenager, and a teenage boy raping a drugged-out teenage girl while one of his friends awaits his turn. A picture captioned “brother and sister” shows a naked boy with an erection pointing a gun at a naked, tiedup girl. Several photographs include Clark, naked along with the teenagers. In what seems to be an attempt at an explanation, Clark writes in Teenage Lust: “Always wished I had a camera when I was a boy. F g in the backseat. Gangbangs with the pretty girl… A1- bert who said “No, I’m first, she’s my sister.’… A little rape.” Director Gus Van Sant liked Clark’s work so much thahe gave it a credit in Drugstore Cowboy, his movie about a merry band of drug addicts. The arts community is also enthusiastic about Cla:k’s images of the demimonde. They exemplify the attraction to the underside of life that has often been a part of art but that since the 1970s has become an obsession. As sandards of every kind — aesthetic, intellectual, moral — have come ander postmodern attack, sordid subjects presented as sordidly as possible have been increasingly admired for the way that they undercut “oppressive” notions of beauty, truth, and goodness. Clark’s work is very much of a piece with John Miller’s excremental sculptures, Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, and Ron Athey’s performance art, which involves slashing bloody designs into the flesh of fellow performers.
It’s one thing to slash an adult’s flesh, but all 50 states now prohibit the distribution of materials showing children engaged in sexual conduct, no exceptions allowed. There are no loopholes for artistic merit, and the Supreme Court, citing the state’s “compelling interest” in protecting children, has ruled that there do not have to be.
It is a measure of the chasm that has grown up between mainstream society and the art world that in every part of the country selling Larry Clark’s NEA- sponsored book of photographs could land you in jail, but in galleries here and around the globe, he has for more than a decade been regarded with something approaching reverence.
Magazines like Flash Art encourage him to talk about the erotic quality of his photographs of minors (“I like my work to look sexy,” says Clark) and to discuss his ambitions to photograph a teenager murdering his parents (“The first thing I wondered… was if the kid had an erection when he was killing them.
I said, God, what a f g image!
I’d like to do a film where that happened”). By the 1990s, Clark had the clout and connections to put together a deal to make Kids, a film version of Teenage Lust, complete with reprise of the rape of a drugged-out girl. But this version can be distributed since, according to the producers, the stars only appear to be underage.
The Motion Picture Ratings Board, not much impressed with this argument, slapped an NC-17 rating on Kids, citing “explicit sex, language, drug use and violence, all involving children.” Several critics have attacked the decision. Kids should see Kids, they say: The lives of the teens that the film shows skateboarding around downtown New York, drinking, stealing, lying, smoking pot, assaulting strangers, and having sex are so squalid that they provide a cautionary tale, particularly since the upshot of what these kids are doing is that many of them will die of AIDS.
But this is a little bit like arguing that Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of leather-clad sadomasochists ought to be printed in popular magazines in order to encourage safe sex. Someone happening across the photographs might find the activities they show disturbing in the extreme, but those in the photographs do not. None of Mapplethorpe’s “leather people,” as he liked to call them, seems anxious to live otherwise, and neither do most of the kids in Kids. There’s not even any sense of what “otherwise” might be. This film presents a world in which the postmodern assault on standards has succeeded, leaving behind no measures or models for what it means to be responsible or compassionate.
Larry Clark understands this and even revels in it. The long French kiss between adolescents with which Kids opens and its lingering shots of young bodies are not accidents. Asked by New York magazine what Kids is about, Clark had an enthusiastic three-word answer: “Sex, sex, sex.” Fifty-two years of age now and still obsessed with pubescence, he can be seen skateboarding with the 14- and 15-year-olds in Washington Square Park or at Brooklyn Banks. He is the one with the graying ponytail and the custom skateboard. As New York magazine describes it, the customization includes a picture of a young girl, naked, her rear in the air, her genitals exposed.
The point for the House and Senate conferees is not that the NEA made a mistake in giving Larry Clark that long ago grant. It did undoubtedly provide a boost to his career, lending him a cachet he would not otherwise have had; and it may even be that without the grant, Kids would never have been made. But the real point is a larger one about the distance that has grown up between the art world and the rest of the country. So long as there is a federal agency putting money into a subculture that holds Larry Clark in esteem, there is going to be trouble. Taxpayers are going to be livid about the way their money is being spent.
Are they wrong?
Lynne V. Cheney is the author of Telling the Truth: Why Our Country and Our Culture Have Stopped Making Sense–And What We Can Do About It, to be published in October by Simon & Schuster.
