Ryan McGinley: The Kids Are Alright
1 February – 18 May 2003
www.whitney.org
Drawn from skateboard, music, graffiti, and gay cultures, the subjects of Ryan McGinley’s photographs interact with the camera with a self-conscious candour that is at once shocking, banal, alluring and repulsive. The images exhibited at the Whitney show McGinley’s friends and lovers enacting the daily rituals of contemporary youth culture: they hang out, have sex, do drugs, go to gigs, and romp naked in the woods. Hung on the walls of one of the most respected art institutions in America, these photographs of youthful rebellion occupy a precarious position between the two seemingly disparate worlds of the art museum and the lifestyle magazine. It is this unstable status that makes the photographs so captivating yet ultimately problematic.
When visiting Manhattan as a high school
student in New Jersey, McGinley – now just 25 – was himself the subject of
Larry Clark’s documentary photographs of skateboarders. The two became
friends and, soon after, while a graphic design student at Parsons School of
Design, McGinley began to photograph his own social circle on the Lower East
Side. In a shrewd act of self-promotion, McGinley produced and distributed a
book of these photographs titled The Kids Are Alright. He sent the
publication to his subjects, his favourite photographers and the editors of
various art and culture magazines. This was the catalyst of working
relationships with monthlies such as Dazed & Confused, Index, i-D, Dutch,
and Butt.
It is McGinley’s current role as photo editor for the notorious style rag
Vice that presents a clue to the status of his art within the context of
contemporary youth culture. With a book deal, a record label and a number of
successful clothing shops in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and London, the
magazine is a formidable example of the totally and heavily branded
lifestyle. Vice peddles pseudo-bohemia, and a carefully constructed ‘I don’t
give a fuck’ approach to life. Dubbing themselves ‘punk capitalists’, the
multi-millionaire publishers cheerfully mine the commercial potential of the
underground. The magazine and its associated products represent a potent and
bankable meeting point between the authentic and the manufactured, the
street and the shop-front.
McGinley’s photography has an affinity with the visual vocabulary of urban culture glossies, which reveals a gap between his own work and that of his most obvious artistic influences. The empathy and pathos evident in the imagery of Nan Goldin and the sex-infused poetry of Wolfgang Tillmans are distinctly lacking in McGinley’s work. Whereas these earlier practitioners of the gritty ‘lifestyle genre’ displayed a technical mastery of the medium that makes their images of the here and now stand the test of time, one wonders if McGinley’s images of turn-of-the-century youth culture will age quite so gracefully.
That said, McGinley’s work shines when it features two very different kinds of image: portraits and action shots. A close-up of McGinley’s ex-boyfriend, Marc, captures a moment of startling beauty and serenity. BMX, an equally arresting photograph, shows the aerial view of bicycle handlebars, the rider’s tattooed forearms just in frame, as it speeds across the pavement. On the other hand, other moments of the mobile made static – a close-up of a boy vomiting or the shot of McGinley’s own root canal operation – somehow lack the dynamism of his less self-consciously abrasive images.
The show is the second in the First Exposure series, a programme dedicated to giving a young photographer their first museum exhibition, and reveals an important moment in the conflation between high and low cultures. Situated between the city street and the fine art museum, The Kids are Alright invites us to expect a theoretical and technical earnestness that can’t help but be undercut by photography’s affinity with commercialised youth culture.
Nina Krieger