Kathe Burkhart, Give It to Me, Baby!
Daria Brit Shapiro
Kathe Burkhart’s first solo exhibition with Moti Hasson Gallery, "HARD CORE," provides an explicit peek into a pornographic world littered with bric-a-brac and paraphernalia. Burkhart presents a series of voyeuristic photographs shot through the window glass of Amsterdam porn shops.
Never one to shrink away from controversy, Burkhart is known for her heinously hilarious portrayals of Elizabeth Taylor caught in compromising moments — eating shit, screaming obscenities and making tabloid-esque pronouncements like, "I don’t have AIDS." Ultra fabulous and creepily perverse, Burkhart follows a similar thread in her eleventh New York solo effort.
Printed on canvas in large-scale, the photographs that comprise "HARD CORE" behave like windows themselves, capturing all the seediness and kitsch of the infamous Red Light District. Brightly colored, festive arrays of rubber-clad mannequins and dildos are shot in soft focus, lending a delicate painterly quality to the very gauche objects within the image. These photos are accomplished still lifes, minus the fruit baskets and annoying tedium. Instead, the viewer is assaulted with visions of pink cocks, plastic tits, leather masks, whips, lubes, lotions and a very naughty Santa. One photo even captures a lazy Susan spinning with all kinds of deviant delights. Peeling away the thin skin of decency that shrouds our most immoral impulses, "HARD CORE" makes the pages of Barely Legal seem almost Victorian in contrast.
Drawing from her extensive background in feminist theory, Kathe Burkhart delivers a one-two punch to the romantic psyche, exposing its frailty to a consumer subculture that thrives on human depravity. Burkhart’s photographs are not to be mistaken for erotic art, rather, they provide a glimpse into the world of the sexual cynic.
There is nothing titillating or tantalizing about the items contained in these photos, nothing to make us yearn for the Times Square days of yore. Gazing at these scenes through a woman’s eye feels somehow mischievous, like the viewer is engaged in a critically charged peep show that illuminates an industry intended mostly for men. With everything presented through a female voyeur’s perspective, Burkhart deposits the viewer knee-deep in a world that is intended to be so hidden and inaccessible, we partake in all the sordidness by the simple act of looking.
Devoid of any wispy or hopeful idealism, these photographs act as mirrors that reflect our own improper impulses back at us. The artist utilizes all the tools that are meant to tempt us, but instead they deter us. In "HARD CORE," Burkhart has achieved a brand of anti-pornography that reveals, revels and repels, all at once. These photographs cause us to look deep inside ourselves to locate our inner pervert; we should all reach into Burkhart’s photographs, extract a riding crop and give ourselves twenty lashes for loving it so much.
