EXHIBITION

March 19 – April 25, 2009

ClampArt is pleased to present, “Kids Behaving Badly”—a group exhibition, including photographs by Larry Clark, Karlheinz Weinberger, Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisroe, Thatcher Keats, Ryan McGinley, Jill Greenberg, Brian Finke, John Arsenault, Marc Yankus, Michael Meads, Janine Gordon, and Collin LaFleche.

At turns chaotic, bold, and often strikingly and surprisingly beautiful, the photographs in this show reflect life as it is lived and felt.

Springing from Larry Clark’s searing, personal photographs of his drug-shooting friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma from the 1960s and 1970s, the group of photographers presented here largely follow in the same autobiographical vein.

United by an interest in capturing the inimitable and powerful energy of youth, the exhibition focuses upon the pleasures and terrors of pushing societal boundaries during one’s formative years. Adolescence and early adulthood represent a period of identity formulation, and experimentation and risk-taking are naturally integral to the process. Further, identity formulation includes establishing a sense of societal affiliation, and the photographs in the exhibition unsurprisingly concentrate of images of lovers and friends.

Generally allied by what has been described as the “snapshot aesthetic,” the artists included in “Kids Behaving Badly” look not “to reform life, but to live it,” to quote John Szarkowsky, former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Mapping a continuing lineage which now spans a time frame of nearly five decades, “Kids Behaving Badly” demonstrates the camera’s unique and impressive facility for documenting and interpreting our messy and frenetic lives.

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