Death Trip Tee

LIMITED TO 75.

PRINTED ON LAA GD1801 WHITE TEES.

MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH RICHARD KERN.

ALL ITEMS TAKE BETWEEN 3-5 WEEKS TO PRODUCE AFTER THE ORDER PERIOD ENDS. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages.

Richard Kern, photographer and filmmaker remains, first and foremost, a portraitist.  For more than two decades Kern has sought to unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature. Kern makes the psychological space between the sitter, photographer and audience his subject. With his dry, matter of fact approach, he underlines the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography while playing with our reliance upon taxonomies around sexual representation. He first came to prominence as part of the cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, which featured personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence and perversion and was involved in the Cinema of Transgression movement, a term coined by Nick Zedd.

Kern is a regular contributor to Interview, The Face, Dazed, Numero, Vice and Purple and has published 28 books. His films and photographs have been exhibited at MOMA, The Whitney Museum and in more than 50 solo shows around the world. Kern lives and works in New York City.

In 1985, the New York City ‘zine “The Underground Film Bulletin” published a manifesto credited to one “Orion Jeriko” that defined a new cinematic movement that would henceforth be know as “The Cinema of Transgression”.   The architects of this movement included a close nit group born of the lower-east side NoWave scene that included Nick Zedd (who used the alias of Jeriko to pen the article), poet/punk musician Lydia Lunch, artist David Wojnarowicz, and filmmakers Beth B, Casandra Stark, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Tommy Turner and Richard Kern.  Along for the ride were musical collaborators like Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth and Foetus (J.G. Thrilwill).  Declaring that “nothing is sacred” they commanded that the violation of all that had come before was nothing less than the end game of their movement. Lung Leg starred in several Kern films and was the cover model for Sonic Youth's EVOL album (the sleeve design shows a still shot from the film Submit to Me). Along with other Cinema of Transgression filmmakers, Kern was a subject of Jack Sargeant's book Deathtripping.

The Museum of Modern Art has called Richard Kern the “undisputed master of transgressive cinema: and a “hardcore social satirist”.  Kern is creator of some of most recognizable and often controversial films of the Cinema of Transgression.  Films that are at the extreme ends of a genre, obsessed with perversion, sadism, and pitch black humor.  This collection of 10 films, provided by Kern and preserved with the assistance of Anthology Film Archives and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts includes Kern’s first film Goodbye 42^nd Street, the Anthology Series Manhattan Love Suicides (with Nick Zedd) and his most controversial classic Fingered with co-creator Lydia Lunch.