Under Pressure: Divine Darkness
‘By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of divine darkness to describe the encounter with the divine” Dionyisus “The Mystical Theology”
We are all Under Pressure: the pressure to survive our mortality. Yet youth and particularly adolescence, this “fourth sex” are closer to their moment of birth, closer to God, closer to the spark of the divine than any conscious adult. They are in flux; fluid with past, present and future coursing in their veins and shining in their eyes. These 13 – 17 years olds, underage for the most part yet post child in their psyche are symbolic of the struggle of good vs. evil, their consciousness raging with battles for acceptance, independence, empowerment, affirmation, rebellion and sanctity.
Through light, gesture, action, inaction, speculation and revelation a new attitude, a new rebellion, a new generation is curated across the photography in these pages. They are reproduced here to be thumbed, held, stapled together, bound by forces known and unknown, for us to become witness to their stories, their faces and the inter-zones of their existence.
Cian-Oba-Smith’s Motorcycle Boy sits menacingly, defiant; his all terrain trail-bike designed to outpace the law or rival street gangs. This is youth as threat. Youth as provocateur, as outlaw. In Michael Salerno’s poetics of light and shadow; a blonde angel-haired boy-child moves through the frame like a dancer. These hand painted photographs are a meditation on memory. The boy looks at himself, his twin-shadow, observing the other frame of reference, and the boy’s memory of his movement becomes a window between worlds in which he can always leap. Larry Clarke’s couple kissing. The boy’s cock rising in his grey unforgiving briefs. “Teenage lust”, the kicker of reality, we can all relate to the intensity of the emotion in that moment. Clarke’s a master of showing it how it is while framing reality like an artist or cinematographer. Clarke vs Gus Van Sant. He can render the flesh as deftly as a religous painter. Clarke vs Lucas Cranach. Tobias Zelony’s boy on a BMX looks mischievous, bored, we see his gang, they are at the edge-zone of the town, its outer-limits, and the midday sunlight is harsh and unforgiving. They have beer and like Copolla’s Outsiders, they look ready to rumble. @benjiharless we are living Warhol’s dream. The youth stars of instagram are far powerful than Hollywood royalty. Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings are the new silk screens for the #generation, who are now art directing their virtual reality as reality. The courtiers of club culture and instagram are like Hermes or Orpheus: angels and messengers in a game of truth and consequences. @benjiharless will you take me out to see the new trash clubs in NYC, can we post selfies togther?
Alina Gutinka’s gangster has a heart and the words “I love you” tattooed above his nipple as if he’s been doodled in felt tip by a Cute Kawaii girl. It doesn’t matter if the pistol he’s packing above his hip is real or fake, the heavy lidded eye’s say it all. He’s seen things most boys his age have not. His burden is yours to shoulder if you care for it and he’s ready to off load onto you at any time. This intimacy with danger, from the Skinhead photography of Nick Knight to the latin sexuality of Alberto García-Alix’s documentation of youth on the fringes of society is laced with erotic tension and fantasy. Camilia Funtealba rexamines gang and street culture with dead-pan humour in an image of what I read to be father and son. The high-waisted, perfectly-styled oversized jeans is a fashion missive from the broadwalk of what looks like Venice beach, but it could be any Venice beach of the imagination, where gang culture which is often also hereditary is as black and white as the shadow line: you are either in or out. Sasha Chaika’s double page, the anatomy of a boy’s bare back is placed like an oversized window onto an industrialised city architecture. The fantastic architecture of youth’s oversized limbs, lead us to imagine overstretched torso’s, fingers and toes that defy the rest of the body’s cartography. We see a girl in the bathroom, the stripe on her jumper elongating the arm, superhumanly, a virtual distortion anew architecture of temporality. But what is temporal and what is not? Tobias Zielony’s boy resting by the fence, his bike laid next to him is an eriee, almost divine image. Is he resting, is he injured, or is he dead? Is it a staged photograph or is it photographic evidence? All fictional and non-fictional narratives can be assumed. As we also assume that everything is fake and everything is real simultaneously. It’s the law of in-authenticity, a version of Baudrillard’s theory on hyper-reality and the simulacra. All adolescents know it instinctually. Nothing is as it seems yet every existential waking feeling is more real than real. The fantasy artwork of Michael Salerno takes us to the erasure of youth. Like Joseph Szabo’s iconic image of the young girl on the beach smoking, a fag in the lips of a child is always a symbol of the passing of innocence into experience. The boy’s eyes are smudge-painted over black, maybe to represent mourning, a death; a ghostly reminder of how fast the innocence of youth can be lost, and the shadow line of adultism crossed into divine darkness.
“The impossible is the least that one can demand.” – James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Be reasonable Demand the Impossible” – Malcom McLaren
