Larry Clark at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

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(Photo Courtesy of the artist. Larry Clark, Billy Mann 1963, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery,London)

LARRY CLARK
Kiss the past hello
8 October 2010 – 2 January 2011
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC
This exhibition is not allowed if you are under 18. That’s because the images are strong and describes the youth douring the ’70 in USA and there are some explicit content. A really urban view with a strong connection with his private life.

Larry Clark was born in 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, United-States. He Lives and works in New York / Los Angeles

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(Larry Clark Untitled, 1972 Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London)

the exhibition includes the mythic images of Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), as well as other work from these periods never shown before. His 16mm film on addicts in Tulsa, made in 1968 and recently rediscovered, is also being screened for the first time.

In his photo series from the 1990s and 2000s Clark shows us teenagers in a daily round of staving off boredom with drugs, sex and firearms, together with skateboarders ranging geographically from New York to the Latino ghetto of Los Angeles. Equally based on street and rock culture, the series 1992, The Perfect Childhood (1993) and Punk Picasso (2003) confirm his cutting eye for a marginality America refuses to face up to.

The large format colour works of the Los Angeles series 2003–2010, chronicle the evolution from child to adult of young skateboarder Jonathan Velasquez, the central character of Clark’s film Wassup Rockers (2006).

Since the publication in 1971 of Tulsa, a seminal work on a generation’s lostness and violence, Clark’s work has haunted American culture. The power of his images, quite apart from their grimness and dark appeal, lies in his quest for a naked truth, a realism stripped of all prudishness.

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(Larry Clark Untitled, 1972 Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London)

Publication’s extracts

Dominique Baqué, The fragile innoncence of devastated bodies

In the work of American artist Larry Clark there is only one subject—recurring, compulsive, obsessive—dealt with via photography, film, collages, cut-ups, scrapbooks: adolescence. Not the adolescence of the ponderous Hollywood machine, or of those sickeningly watered down teen movies; but the adolescence America creates, produces, just as the sleep of reason produces monsters. What Clark wants is for kids to finally recognize themselves in this adolescence: he is holding out a mirror to them, driven by his notorious obsession with the truth.
And this is why he has chosen a dramatic form on the razor’s edge between documentary and fiction; his way of blurring those conventional dividing lines. If the teen years can be seen as the age of unlimited possibilities and promises, in Clark’s world it is all too clear that those promises will never be kept—except for the most damaging ones: drugs, AIDS, violent death, suicide. Or, worse still maybe, annihilation in the great void of life, in the nothingness of existence. For Clark adolescence comes first in the form of a body, a gloriously plural body. For there is no solitude among teenagers—unless we imagine each one radically alone, which would not be far from the truth—as they congregate, swarm, slot together, hug, punch each other out, make love. The teenager always moves in a group and it can happen, as in Bully, that the group metamorphoses into a carnivorous, animal pack: the gap between the two is narrow and quickly crossed.

10_Jack & Lynn Johnson

(Larry Clark Jack & Lynn Johnson, Oklahoma City, 1973, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London)

Fabrice Hergott, Closer to reality

Like a heady, haunting refrain, once seen Clark’s photography are never forgotten: subtle or crude, they literally etch themselves on the mind, in a zone of perception seemingly deeper than memory, somewhere between the heart and the marrow of our bones. Looking, we feel looked at, curiously associated and involved with what is being shown. Nothing, however, could be further from today’s voyeurism and exhibitionism, from the veiled pornography that has invaded everything. There is no avid consumer eye here, no body-object exploited and formatted to produce standardized reactions, no concealed cannibalism: what there is, on the contrary, is a complicity, an incalculable empathy between the photographer and his subjects. Clark’s indecency lies in his personal, internalized gaze, a gaze that is curious and astonished by what it sees. Every photograph is marked by this astonishment, by his surprise at having taken it. The beautiful image, however, is not his intention: he seeks only to be there, to blend in with what he sees, an invisible eye moving among his friends as if among shadows, without them seeming to notice his presence for more than a fraction of a second.

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(Larry Clark Untitled, 1971 Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London)

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(Larry Clark Untitled, 1979, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London)

16_zero

(Larry Clark Jonathan Velasquez, 2004, Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery,London)

12_jonathan

(Larry Clark Jonathan Velasquez, 2003 Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery,London)

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC
11, avenue du Président Wilson / 75116 Paris
Tél : 01 53 67 40 00 / Fax : 01 47 23 35 98
New website of the MAM online
Information and booking : Tél. 01 53 67 40 80
Transports
Métro : Alma-Marceau or Iéna / RER : Pont de l’Alma (ligne C) / Bus : 32/42/63/72/80/92
Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am – 6 pm
Late night opening: Thursday until 10 pm (exhibitions only)
Closed on Monday
Admissions
Full rate : 5 €
Concessions : 3,50 €
Young people (age 18 -26 ): 2,50€

Opening Exhibition photos by Andrea Alex Schiavo

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