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Kelly O: One Hundred Balls
By Nate Lippens
Far be it from me to push yet another photographer in the direction of calling their work art (and don't even get me started on architects. Christ.). But Kelly O may be a closet artist. She would probably take the same tack as sublime photographer Gary Lee Boas and say that what she does is a hobby. This enthusiast's bent makes her debut show at Sweatshop Inc., One Hundred Balls, a big goof with a sly undercurrent of subversion.
The beefcake photo, the porn shot, and the model's portfolio are all hotbeds of the collision between sex and photography. The two are intricately entwined. But rather than strippers, muscle boys, and hustlers, O focuses on the hipster denizens of Seattle's Capitol Hill, the rockers, hangers-on, barflies. In essence, scensters. Her influences are the 70s, porn (especially as filtered through the aesthetic of Terry Richardson), and Vice magazine.
If Alice Wheeler is a Northwestern Nan Goldin, then Kelly O is a drag king Terry Richardson. In fact, O dressed as bad-boy red-eye icon Richardson to take most of the photographs in the show. As the shutterbug for The Stranger's popular "Drunk of the Week" column, which "highlights" deliriously inebriated individuals in all their wrecked glory, O has been bar crawling and trolling for outrage for several years.
Possibly influenced by the fact that women frequently flashed their breasts for her lens (apparently no one has learned their lesson from Girls Gone Wild), O decided to flip the script a bit, donned her Richardson drag (replete with stunning facsimiles of his tattoos, rendered by artist Ellen Forney), and had men dropping trou and showing their balls. She boiled the screwed-up exhibitionism and macho bravado down to their pendulous essence: balls.
In his book Terryworld, Richardson snapped himself fucking and sucking and being rimmed. In one photo a young man in a T-shirt that reads "Big Daddy" is pantless, displaying his own big daddy. But mostly the focus is on T & A. Many subjects are Hot Girls with big tits, waxed pussies, and pretty faces—the grande coquette package of American porn.
At Sweatshop Inc. the wall reads, "Balls Are the New Tits."
A post-feminist, hipster laff riot maybe, but also part throwdown. O doesn't push the envelope that Richardson, Kern, et al signed and sealed; she marks it Return To Sender. This is an homage with teeth and a big dollop of unsexy sex humor.
All told, as the title might suggest, there are fifty pics of men showing their sacs. They cup them, cradle them, and offer hand signals. They have little time to pose as the photos were taken on-the-fly (pun intended). O snapped them in the bathrooms of bars, at clubs, and at the fag dance night Comeback. The latter locale would seem at first to explain the hairlessness of many of these balls—gay boys infatuated with porn smoothness submit to back, crack, and sac waxing.
But wait, many of these balls seem cleaned up—if not exactly sanitized (these are scrotums after all) then photoshopped hairless and smooth. There are few wrinkles or veins. They retain character by shape and size, but O has played photoshop pocket pool to offer a witty little commentary on the tits + balls equation where mams are always plumped, perfected, and delivered like bon bons. And so, the balls are given a digital bath.
O's persona as a raunchy good-time punk rock Gracie Allen is a clever ruse as well as an appealing aspect of her work. She obviously has a soft spot (or dare I say, a wet spot) for her subjects.
She isn't out to humiliate anyone and she doesn't have any interest in portent. There are no photos of last-call despair, no sadly piled detritus of a night's debauchery. Instead, O focuses on people.
Although snapped individually, her subjects are always part of a roiling mass, a crowded party, a cruisy boozefest. She's not taking a stab at the dark side of fun. For her purposes, depravity has its day and night.
And depravity wins the day.
