Harmony Korine's photos of Japanese TV capture a haunting world

Watching soft-core pornography on late-night TV isn't a pastime most people would want to immortalize on film. The activity is potentially boring and a bit shameful, involving cultural products of dubious aesthetic merit. But documenting life's long stretches of disgust and tedium isn't unusual in Harmony Korine's artistic practice, as viewers of his films Gummo and julien donkey-boy are aware. His black-and-white shots of Japanese television in Pigxote, on display at Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery—a series of hauntingly beautiful female almost-nudes—invoke an artistically powerful combination of desire and disgust.

The show is organized in groups of two to four related shots. Many of the frames feature a woman appearing in different poses. For example, a woman taking a shower, her hair piled on her head in a bouffant, appears in two triptychs on opposite sides of the gallery. In one photograph we see her filmed from behind, wearing only a pair of high-cut black underpants. The framing provides us with very little context, except a vertical line (a hint of the shower stall's corner) and a sliver of black (the frame of the television itself). Her left arm is folded against her side, her right arm reaches across her chest and rests behind her shoulder. She faces toward the camera in profile. The pose is graceful and modest, and wouldn't be out of place in a nude from a 19th century photograph, or even a Renaissance painting.

But what might elsewhere be alluring is a little disturbing here. The woman is bare in front of the camera, but her pose seems to imply that she isn't comfortable with it. Covering herself makes her appear more, not less, vulnerable. The photograph is indistinct, in places a little over-exposed. The distortion introduced by photographing an already low-resolution image further distances us from the image's intended erotic charge: The grid of horizontal and vertical lines that makes up the television picture, emphasized in these photographs, imposes itself on the sensual roundness of the woman's body. Her beauty seems partly irrelevant, and we're left to wonder about the men behind cameras.

Korine took the photographs six or seven years ago while staying in Shibuya, Tokyo. He doesn't remember many of the details of the their production; of the camera he used, he says it "had black buttons on it."

He's more voluble about his motives and mental state while taking the shots. In an artist's statement on the gallery wall, he explains that, under the influence of Clorox and speed, "I was watching television late at night and I kept falling in love with the girls on screen." In an interview, he further explains that his reading about films that supposedly include spectral images (Three Men and a Baby is one) influenced his television viewing. "[I would] see these kind of—I would say, like, figures in the back. You would see a couple boning, and for whatever reason I would see someone who had, you know, died in that same room. What I was going to do was basically capture that. Re-photograph the monitor looking for ghosts, or dead extras."

The metaphor of haunting aptly describes the works' unsettling undertone. While some subjects are recognizable from one photograph to another, like a gun-toting lady detective in fedora and pushup bra who appears in several shots, in other cases it's hard to tell if a woman is the same or different; faces are indistinct, identities blur together, and you find yourself trying to identify a woman by the cut of her underwear.

If Korine's motive was to document "something that's eerie or slightly nauseating," the emphasis may be on the "slightly." His choice of photos, he says, was partly based on the fact that "I had to find work that was tame enough for Vanderbilt." But Joseph Whitt, assistant curator at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, emphasizes that the gallery didn't censor him. Whitt, who calls Korine "the poet laureate of my generation" (he's been a fan since Gummo came out in 1997), says he was surprised no one had thought to do a show like this before. When the project came to fruition, he told the photographer that "I don't want to be a curator, I want to be an organizer." Nevertheless, Whitt feels that the material is a good choice, because it's "a little bit more subtle" and "invites a more quiet reading."

In one of the show's funnier shots, a pretty model is shown demonstrating a piece of exercise equipment. She wears a black sports bra, plaid shorts, Reeboks and striped socks. The complex black outline of the machine dominates the center bottom of the composition, looking like one of Marcel Duchamp's fantastic machines in "Large Glass" or "The Coffee Mill." The woman leans over it at an awkward 45-degree angle. Both she and it are blurred; it's impossible to guess her emotion. But this picture makes the viewer want to guess. While the situation is bizarre, it's also human and a little sad.

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