Richard Kern: Home Entertainment

I found his super-8 films in someone’s apartment once—grainy, explicitly sexual, casually violent, the kind of thing that made you feel complicit just watching. Richard Kern made work on the assumption that the point of art was to make people uncomfortable, and he had the technical skill to pull that off consistently. He composed shots and lit flesh with the cold eye of someone who understood exactly how far he could push. Most artists spend their careers apologizing for what they make. Kern seemed to think apologies were for people with nothing to say.