At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami right now, you’ll find Harmony Korine’s first-ever U.S. retrospective. More than 50 pieces have been gathered for a freewheeling portrait of an artist: there are his adolescent writings, zines and collages he crafted in the ‘90s, paintings of a figurative nature, and his latest forays into game engines. It’s a knowingly chaotic, unstable mix that lives up to the exhibition’s title, “Perfect Nonsense.”
“I think it was from a quote or something where I said I wasn’t necessarily concerned with the films making perfect sense,” Korine said of the title over a video call.
As a filmmaker, the 53-year-old Korine has indeed defied the traditional bounds of movie-making, his transgressive hits from Gummo (1997) to Spring Breakers (2012) eschewing narrative for the construction of off-center realities. His visual works are likewise unorthodox, deploying materials such as house paint and VHS tapes to render compositions with a psychotropic charge.
Harmony Korine, (2016). Craig Robins Collection. Photo courtesy of ICA Miami.
More recently, since relocating to Miami, he’s founded EDGLRD, a studio and collective producing experimental content from games to fashion using cutting-edge tech. The company is behind Korine’s 2023 project AGGRO DR1FT, filmed using thermal cameras with A.I.-assisted visual effects. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where Korine and his crew arrived in 3D-printed masks, then in Los Angeles, with a rager in a strip club.
Mediums and forms appear to collapse across Korine’s practice. Yet, there’s a considered method behind the madness, he told me.
“I’m always thinking about what works best, or what’s the most interesting, or what’s something I haven’t tried?” he explained. “Or, you know, is there something to be done in whatever the form is? Maybe the form doesn’t exist. And you start to think, is there a new form or a new shape? Can you present something that’s art in this form, you know?”
A Physical Cinema
Korine came into view in 1995 after writing Kids, the Larry Clark film about the lives and lusts of a group of skaters that marked the onscreen debut of Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. His run of deeply indie films followed—Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Trash Humpers (2009)—unpacking a brand of American dislocation through characters like a Michael Jackson impersonator and a man suffering with chronic constipation.
Jacob Sewell in (1997). Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.
From the 2000s, his visual art tapped the same surreal vein. He has created mesmeric checkerboards with house paint on canvas (“Checking Madness”, 2014), combined iPhone and hand-drawn imagery around a ghost form he named Twitchy (“Young Twitchy,” 2019), and assembled VHS cassettes and covers into distorted painted collages (“BLOCKBUSTER,” 2018). It’s work that slips between modes and mediums, as if restless or mischievous.
“I’ll be struck by something, some idea or an image, and then I’ll think ‘oh, this will be interesting on a flat surface.’ Or maybe it’s a movie, or it’s writing, or something like that,” Korine said. “I try out a lot of stuff. I do a lot of things that are just never seen.”
Harmony Korine, (2020). © Harmony Korine. Photo: Capehart Photography.
One thing that can be seen at the ICA Miami survey is Korine’s “Fazors” series (2016), a group of paintings with spellbinding patterns that radiate outward from a single point. The compositions vary in repetition, texture, and color, but their aim is the same: to send the viewer into a hypnotic trance. Korine has described them as “sensory or energy-based paintings.”
The sensory, in fact, has come to dominate Korine’s practice of late. While his earlier films do convey a perverse flood of sensation (Werner Herzog, who costarred in Julien Donkey-Boy, has called Korine’s work “physical, direct cinema”), the artist, via EDGLRD, has increasingly sought out technology to ramp up the perceptual overwhelm.
Harmony Korine, (2024). Photo courtesy of ICA Miami.
AGGRO DR1FT, for instance, was Korine’s bid to transcend traditional filmmaking, to seek out “post-cinema, this sensory feeling of being inside the film,” he said. Its follow-up, Baby Invasion (2024), took a wilder, more immersive tack. The film gleefully tracks various robberies via the perspective of a first-person shooter game, where, using generative A.I., the faces of the burglars have been replaced with that of babies. The disorientation is intentional.
This interest in technology, Korine told me, reaches toward “post-articulation, creating some mechanism or device that’s much more sensory than traditional entertainment—something that’s more inexplicable.”
Beyond Narrative
Korine has yet to run out of steam. “I have all sorts of ideas,” he said. What interesting forms could he wrangle out of a practical joke show, say, or from a creepypasta video? Right now, though, he’s working on several anime projects, while itching to get back into movie-making.
“It’s funny because I started out as a writer, and now almost everything I do, there’s less and less, or almost no dialogue,” he said. “Now I have very little to say in terms of articulation, and much more to say in terms of physicality and aura.”
Harmony Korine, (2014). © Harmony Korine. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
In a sense, after years of befuddling movie critics with his films, it seems right that Korine’s work should find its way into a museum—to be viewed less as cinema, but experienced bodily, as a totality.
“It really feels to me like one thing,” Korine reflected of the retrospective. “It’s all part of one vision. It all comes from one source. It’s in different mediums, but it’s really one whole work.”
Maybe there’s even meaning to be found in this perfect nonsense, I venture. Sure, Korine conceded, though “it depends on what ‘meaning’ even means.”
“But then what is life?” he added. “It’s mostly nonsense.”
“Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 61 NE 41st St, Miami, Florida, through October 4.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
