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Arthur Brown Ed Bunker Charles Burns William S Burroughs Timothy Carey Arthur C
Clarke Joe Coleman COOP Baron Corvo Maxwell Crumb Virgil Finlay Madge Gill Jim
Goad Gunnar Hansen Kenneth Hyman Alejandro Jodorowsky Richard Kern Udo Kier
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Hubert Selby Siouxie Sioux Phil Spector Princess Superstar Julien Temple
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Woronov Frank Zappa Zim Zum

Words: Billy Chainsaw.

Richard Kern had seen a KKK rally and a drowned corpse by the age of six. Since
then, he’s become a legendary cult film maker and porn photographer, rich with
tales of crystal meth, bondage and human candlesticks – and the pictures to
prove them…

Who would have thought a self-confessed hick from Roanoke Rapids, North
Carolina, would one day attain infamy and fortune as a guerilla film-maker,
before turning porno photographer. Well, thanks to a run-in with a gaggle of
NYC glam chicks who warped his mind and stroked his libido one day when he was
bunking off high-school, that’s exactly what happened to Richard Kern.

He relocated to the Big Apple and, having got his mitts on a Super-8 movie
camera for five bucks, Kern proceeded to make his mark on the burgoning
underground art scene.

Via sex‘n’drug-infested celluloid shorts like Manhattan Love Suicides, You
Killed Me First, Death Valley 69 and Fingered, which starred the dark,
depraved, and for the most part nihilistic likes of Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg,
Cassandra Stark, Tommy Turner, David Wojnarowicz and Nick Zedd, he became a
legendary master of the ‘Cinema of Transgression’. He also got totally ****ed
on drugs.

Eventually ridding himself of his monkey, by the early 1990s Kern was firmly
focused on a less harmful vice – sex. In particular, still photos of
pornographic landscapes populated by girls, girls and more girls. Few are truly
able to say that their life has been a walk on the wildside. Richard Kern can.

I want to go back to when you used to accompany your father when he took photos
for the local paper. How old were you and what was the most horrific sight you
witnessed?

It must have been from the time I could sit up inside a car. It was a drowning,
because I remember pretty vividly going to this lake at night, and they dragged
this thing out. I remember seeing the covered body.

I also remember there used to be KKK rallies everywhere. The Klan would be in
the middle of the town with the whole ****ing thing, crosses burning and all
that ****. In the South in the late 1950s, it wasn’t like a thing where
everybody was shocked or anything, it was probably more like the other way
around. I was six, what did I know? I’m wondering if that’s what we were there
for [so Dad could take photos], but I know he wasn’t wearing a robe!

As your movies lean heavily on the viewer as voyeur, can you remember any
particular voyeuristic moments from when you were a kid?

Oh, sure man, I was a peeper, but not a heavy peeper. Back in the 1950s and
early 1960s, it wasn’t like you could go on the internet and see what a naked
woman looked like, and where I lived there weren’t porno mags all over the
place. The only way you were going to see something was through net curtains.
The woman next door to us always walked around in her nightgown, and she was
young. I used to try and see her through her curtains,because my windows looked
straight at hers. There were a lot of influences there, I had a paper round
from the time I was in the fifth grade [about 11 years old]. There was a lot of
that kind of stuff where the housewife would come to the door with hardly
anything on and she’d say, “Would you like to come in?” That was how I got my
first exposure to porn mags. There was a customer I had who never paid his
bill. His wife always came to the door looking like the Playboy woman with the
Martini glass in hand. One time I was going around to the different doors,
knocking on them, trying to get paid. I went to their garage and he had stacks
and stacks of porn mags and it was like another world.

In your book New York Girls, there’s a proliferation of bondage imagery. Is
this a display of your preferred sexual activity?

Yes and no. I mean, the people I tied up were mostly people I wasn’t having sex
with. Well, some of them, maybe. Bondage is a sexual activity without actual
sexual intercourse, I guess. People say it’s not sex, but it is. I don’t care
what they say!

Of course it is, and it features, on occasions, in your movies as well

Yeah. That was very thrilling at one point for me. I mean, it’s all about power
you know.

What about the movie you made with Jap Anne, The Evil Cameraman…

That was a twisted relationship…

Ah, so you were in a relationship with Jap Anne at the time?

Yeah, kinda. She would do it. It’s hard to find someone you can say, “Hey, I
have a little fantasy I wanna do for a movie” to and to get the desired
response of, “OK, sure.”

What was even harder was the scene with the blonde girl [Ice Queen] who’s
strung between the walls. That was ****ing hard to do, to lift somebody like
that and stretch them across the room [in the movie, Kern ties her feet
together, hangs her upside down from a hook , then ties her hands to the
opposite wall and leaves her suspended]. I used to shoot a lot of that stuff
around the New York Girls time, but I quit for the most part. Once, I was
hanging this girl upside down. The rope broke and she just bounced on her head.
If she hadn’t been about 20 years old, she probably would have broken her neck
and died – and that would have been really hard to explain to the police
[laughs]. I’d be in jail.

So why the fixation with shooting girls for New York Girls with lit candles in
their arses?

It started with the very first shot. It was with this blonde, Erin, who got it
stuck in her A-hole when we were messing around, shooting photos. Then somebody
suggested it would be a nice series. So I shot some more.

Were your subjects aware they’d be used as human candleholders?

Well, when they got a candle stuck in them they sure were aware of it!

Have you ever employed a casting couch when selecting your subjects?

I didn’t ever employ a casting couch, no. I was too shy. I can’t even go up to
somebody and ask them if they’ll model for me, are you kidding?

Well how do you get your girls?

Usually they contact me.

Considering your films and your photos, it’s a surprise that you’re ostensibly
a shy guy

Well, shy in real life, yes, I guess.

So don’t you see the photos as real life? Part of your style is that they are
so natural, there’s no real glamour element to the majority of your work

I mean, it is real, but it just seems like work when you’re doing it, a job.

Finally, some artists tend to be at their most creative when they’re ****ed up
on one chemical stimulant or another. How come your work hasn’t suffered since
you quit?

The whole notion that you’re more creative when you’re ****ed up is an
illusion. From my experience, when you quit doing drugs you become a great deal
more creative. Your imagination and ability to think is a lot stronger. Once
you quit, you realise that most people who are doing drugs are really ****ing
boring! I was really boring. But you know, if I’d never done acid I imagine I
would be a completely different person.


**** times for Richard kern

In 1987 Kern quit New York for San Francisco in order “to escape my drug life”.
Things didn’t quite pan out as planned. Surrounded by crystal-meth-heads, the
film-maker who regards his work as “like taking a big, fat, smelly dump and
then standing back and watching people marvel over it”, fell in with someone
notorious for frequently taking a **** on stage… the (now deceased) king of
psycho-scat-punk – GG Allin

Richard Kern: I had photographed GG in New York way back when. I don’t even
know how I got in touch with him, or how we hooked up but somehow we agreed to
do a show and I got together a band of drug addicts that I hung out with. We
were called the Drug Wars.

You were getting well ****ed up together at that point?

Oh yeah, definitely. GG arrived [at the apartment] and in true San Francisco
speed freak fashion… Have you ever done crystal [meth]? It’s not like regular
Brit speed. It doesn’t just get you wired, it takes you off some other place, a
bit like tripping out. Then if you just do it for days and days… I would meet
people who hadn’t slept for like 30 or 40 days, you know?

Tweakers?

Yeah, and you just look at them, and they would look like they were going to
kill you. The people I was hanging around doing drugs with in New York were not
threatening, scary criminals… but somehow I got involved (LAUGHS) with all
these criminals in San Francisco. They were criminal in that they would hold
people up and rob them and steal cars and **** like that. It seemed like the
whole speed culture was based around stuff like, you would even try to **** up
your best friend. The reason I’m telling you this in connection with GG is that
everybody in the band was a speed freak or a speed dealer. I don’t think GG had
ever done that **** [crystal] before, so we gave him a ton of it when he
arrived.

Were they the most ****ed up times of your life?

It was like a turning point for me.

The wake-up call?

Yeah. Having been shooting a lot of crystal, I finally went off on a [paranoic]
hallucinatory rampage because I thought I was gonna get arrested for selling
drugs. I’d taken all these photos of GG totally ****ed up. During one show I
looked over at him, he’d got a big piece of glass and he just cut right across
his face and it opened up. I had pictures of all that kind of **** and I
destroyed them all. At that point I left San Francisco, came back to New York
and within three days I was in AA.


Richard Kern’s New York Girls and Model Release are published by Taschen. His
latest, Kern Noir, is published by Charta. An exhibition of his work and films
Artist: Model runs until 8 September 2002 at the ICA, London.
www.richardkern.com

Links

richardkern.com - read more about Kern's work and buy books and videos

Kulture Void interview

More photos