INTRO
I mix my own colors. Mercy runs along the edge of absolution bowing before blue finds its second grace. Dipping three fingers into the paint, it's cold and gunky, I streak it across my cheeks and feel it as it hardens then cracks, unseeing me. It drips down, dislodging symbols from old wounds. I pour in some black when a dream is mentioned, when someone lets go but doesn't leave, a scar within a scar. It's different with the other colors but the process remains the same. I light another cigarette, remembering purple, the bruises on my knees, and then the rhythm changes. This is how I'ved staved off numbness, the floor painted red, a cover for the bathtub, a coffin to hold the inevitable but never my becoming. I'm waiting in the wings while the paint dries between my thighs, a residual wetness, the line between pleasure and pain, sewed shut.
I sit on the ground in Kembra Pfahler’s Lower East Side apartment and make a wish on an apple core. I didn’t know this was another wish device like 11:11 or shooting stars but she could easily give anyone a reason to believe in something. A punk icon of New York’s underground art scene of the ‘80s, Kembra is best known for her work with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the death-rock band she founded with Samoa Moriki, her husband at the time, in 1990. Beyond the band, Kembra’s multidisciplinary practice has led to the creation and refinement of her vocabulary of images (the pillars of her process) along with other tenants and terms of her artistic philosophy which she’s coined including availabism, anti-naturalism, yesterbating, beautilism and future feminism. When wreathed together – ceremony, transgression, the radical pursuit of freedom – Kembra’s life’s work (what she calls her “heart of heart’s work”) is a testament to what it means to listen as she states, “each and every thing I make always tells me exactly what it wants to be.” And yet, as she continues to evolve – walking in Mugler’s runway shows of late, collaborating with Rick Owens, teaching formally as a collegiate professor, exhibiting in renown art institutions globally, working to publish a coffee table book – her most invaluable hallmark is revealed: endurance; fueled not solely by tenacity, grit, which she has, but joy and a generosity of spirit. Kembra weathers storm because of her refined instincts sharpened by decades of self-trust. In creating the world she wants to live in, she lives on. Red walls, red floors, Marlboro reds, black Sharpies.
I’m still trying to think of my wish. In the meantime, she shows me the titles of songs she’s been working on. They’re scrawled in black Sharpie on pieces of paper taped to the back of her studio door: New Rape City, Little Black Throw Up Dress, Slippery When Dead. She’s never written about things so volatile but it’s all in response to the times. She tells me it's scaring her band members, they’re looking for ascension. She tries to remember all of everything else, the emotional fodder of being a kid in Maui “talking story” (Hawaiian pidgin for passing time by chit-chatting or rekindling old times), her friend known as “the talking coconut” who taught her Spanish, the things that feel imagined. Redirection, control. It’s easy to forget. She offers me a cigarette and we proceed to smoke out of the window. This feels surreal but familiar, like the ends do justify the means, like there is fate but maybe no god. I wished without wishing, I was present, I was there. This is the result of that moment, of pulling out the things that are worth sharing while holding tightly onto what’s mine, shh.
INTERVIEW
Lindsey: Obviously you've had such a long and prominent career and one of the first things that I find really inspiring about you is your ability to seemingly continue to find and chase joy. You also just released The Manual of Action video series with Circa.art as a means of sharing your process, your epiphanies with people in hopes that we too might be able to cultivate that sense of enduring creativity and essentially joy, everyday. It sounds simplistic but actually it’s so hard to achieve, to feel.
Kembra: Starting with Circa and The Manual of Action is a great place to begin because I’ve been in a really strange place since the beginning of the pandemic as I was receiving such strange invitations from magazines and galleries. I remember during the first few weeks of the pandemic, a big newspaper called me and asked if I would write an article about how horrible New York is going to become, giving them the real dirt about the devastation, negativity and horror happening throughout New York because of the death’s around the pandemic. I thought to myself, would the New York Times have called me in the 80s saying something like AIDS is so wonderful, how can we get ahead of this? How can we monetize and turn this into a real estate boom or an art boom? It was such an offensive jump off to me considering the loss that I personally experienced the first few weeks of the pandemic.
I made a decision the first year of the pandemic to quiet down and think things through. I was in such a state of shock that instead of aggressively pushing myself to comment about what was happening, I felt like in order to find any kind of positivity around what was happening I had to sit on my hands which I found to be very, very difficult to do. Everyone around me was in a hyper-state of being, they all fled the city and everyone would call me and ask, what's happening now? Are the buildings burning down? Are you sick and dying? The pandemic was a time for me to reflect and to work on new work and although that was very painful for me and for the entire world, I felt like it would have been a shame and misguided for me to try to analyze something that I just had to live through.
After the mid aughts, things have become so hyper-branded that anytime there's like a new movement on the rise or something big in the world occurs, as artists, we're the ones that usually process stuff and do artwork about what's happening – or at least that's the kind of artwork that I do. So to answer your question, it's been very important for me not to judge my phases of my own personal growth and that's what happens to a lot of people. I call that being in a liminal phase or liminality. When you're in your process, it's indescribable how long that's going to be, it could be a year, it could be a month, it could be two weeks but in the New York scene there's so much bureaucracy inflicted on most of the arts right now, it’s important not to let the bureaucratic aspect of life obfuscate the actual process of making work while not sabotaging opportunities. I always remind my friends and myself never to compare your process to other people's processes because the odd thing is that sometimes the process changes.
Lindsey: Right, and when you mentioned things being hyper-branded, for a lot of artists coming up nowadays, their fame reflects a moment and they then become pigeon-holed into or defined by a single project, aesthetic, whatever it is. Change, experimentation or sharing new work begins to feel like a risk, hindering growth. It’s tricky to balance it all when ascension is also synonymous with sustaining a career.
Kembra: It is tricky and in the same breath, I'm not interested in comedy and doing this is not funny but I still have to have a sense of humor about what I'm doing. Especially when doing what I call my “heart of heart’s life's work,” I need to remain right-sized about it. It's the biggest work I've ever done but in the relationship to the whole world, I say don't sweat it, just let it be born and let it exist. All that kind of behavioral stuff and emotional stuff I can say gets a lot better as I've gotten older. Age is so derided and so devalued and people get so afraid about age changes but one of the nice things about getting older is that if I look back, my 20s were the hardest decade that I've experienced, the 30s got a little bit better, the 40s better still.
Lindsey: Totally, and especially being a woman. What made it better along the way?
Kembra: Well, because I was tenacious and I spent so much time on my actual artwork, I started to understand more of what I was actually doing. I think it's also impossible to know exactly what you're doing when you're doing it. Some artists will not show their work or their writings unless they've completely figured it out but one of the things I talked about in The Manual of Action was something I learned from this woman's dance group called Dance Noise. They did shows at the Pyramid and their philosophy in the 80s was to pick a title, make a poster, pick a date and then figure it out. My feeling about doing new work is that sometimes it takes years to figure out what you've actually done and time is the only thing that’s allowed me to figure things out. I remember after my first decade of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, one of my art friends said to me, it's time for you to stop doing this. You've done this enough. I went home and I was meditating on that suggestion for me to stop and what I felt was that I'm never going to stop doing that because it’s part of my work, I'm never gonna let go, it’s part of my vocabulary of images.
Lindsey: Right, and there’s a certain vulnerability in that, too, because for something to endure, it may not change but you change, your relationship to it changes. For you with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, you undergo a complete transformation, what’s it like coming back to that part of yourself each time year in and out?
Kembra: I'm fortunate that I guess I have that thing where fear isn't really a big part of my life. With clothes I usually hate everything. I like a more minimal flair and I'm not into over styling. With my costume for the band, I realize it seems really contrarian in a way because it does take so much push to transform from bottom to top. The minimalism I’m talking about has to do with color palette, accessories and lines. There's a really specific thing that I do with The Voluptuous of Karen Black look where the wig has to be a certain height and the make-up is a really graphic display and I don’t always nail it, there are days that I've gotten ready for shows that I’m 100% on. There’s days when I’ve got 15 minutes to get ready, literally, and I throw the make-up on and ask myself what I can wear and sometimes it’s a piece of paper in the corner – which I’ve done. I’ll wear my set-list; this is a practice that I call availabism in which you make the best use of what's available. I have my own set rules of what I like to project into the world and then I break my own rules, you have to allow yourself to break your own rules. I do that mostly because of circumstance and availability. When I'm on tour every day sometimes you lose your wigs or I've been in situations where my makeup was stolen and I've had to come up with something really different. I remember being on tour with Coco Rosie and I did not feel like being in my costume anymore so I opted to do an hour long show explaining to this huge audience how to walk on top of bowling balls. It was fun and if I had done otherwise it would probably have been rotten. Luckily, I've been in situations luckily where I've taken risks and they were successful risks, I encourage people to allow themselves to do so. It might not work, but sometimes it does.
Lindsey: The tangent that I'm drawing from availabism is to hope, to optimism and control over outlook. Nowadays people are saying that hope is punk and I like that sentiment because it is really easy nowadays to be nihilistic, to roll over and succumb. Am I on the right track?
Kembra: Not to use a cheesy metaphor but if you think about what a volcano does to the world, it explodes and creates new islands for things to grow on. I agree that that hope is critical, optimism is critical but it's also something that we have to work towards. It doesn't just come from opening a cereal box or taking a pill. Hope is an accumulation of determination, of hard work, of shameless sharing. There are ingredients that you can collect that will create an atmosphere or a temperature of hope and sometimes it takes days, weeks or months to have any glimmer of hope present in your life but it doesn't matter how long it takes, it's always worth working towards. It sounds very, very corny but I feel the same way about love. It's always worth working towards love and that means loving your band, loving the work that you do, loving the place that you're creating to live in. I don't know if that sounds incongruous or too hallmark but love and hope are very much aligned for me and hope is priceless.
Lindsey: Right and as you mentioned it’s knowing how to cultivate that for yourself, like that’s a superpower. I know one of the lessons in The Manual of Action is self-excavation and that feels like another ingredient per se to this equation, how do you self-excavate?
Kembra: Totally, self excavation was something actually that came from a discussion that I was having with Joseph O'Connor, the person who started Circa. Self excavation was a way to create discipline around yourself. How do you learn about what kind of color palette you want in your life? How do you learn which authors you love the most or want to emulate? How do you learn which languages appeal to you? Do you love French? Do you love Chinese? Self excavation has to do with putting time in to figure out what your very own vocabulary of images is by going into mad scientist mode. Instead of going through a book, or going on to the computer and listening to someone else's program which is what I call, application driven intelligence or appligence – instead of relying on this, I like the idea that individual artists themselves create their own coding for the ingredients needed to self excavate. Rather than just simply looking something up quickly, it’s about taking the time to experiment with it yourself. How was a color like cobalt blue born? How was robin's egg blue? With all the colors that I use in Karen Black, I mix in my own colors.
Lindsey: Radical honesty baby – which ties into what you were saying about not comparing your process to others’ process. I also feel like as an artist today, the self excavation process is even more crucial because we more or less have the same tools for research, you have to want to dig deeper. There’s been this resurgence seemingly with things like self-publishing, vinyl, libraries even and that’s felt refreshing but how is that also related to your concept of “yesterbating” and this obsession with nostalgia?
Kembra: A tool for how to get away from getting sucked into that gutterhole of compare/despair is to simply go offline. I do have hope also that we're not going to make all of these things extinct. I really, really want to make a point to remind people that Google is not the Holy Grail. I'd love to see 20 Different people starting their own Google companies. Even in our English vocabulary I question when we stopped inventing new words? I used to work for Oxford University Press and that was one of the only straight jobs I ever had. I kept thinking, why did they hire me here? Why aren't they firing me here? Everyone in the office knew about the performances that I did. I had just done a performance where I sewed my vagina shut. Someone sent a fax to the president of Oxford University Press about it and how they couldn’t have me working for them but she wrote back saying that they looked forward to working with me for decades to come. What I learned when I was at Oxford was that if you have a word that you've invented, if you put into print more than two or three times, it can be submitted to the dictionary to become an actual word in the English language. It surprises me that poets, writers and artists aren't coming up with one word after the next to describe how truly bizarre things are right now.
Lindsey: Right, especially because everyone is obsessed with newness but taking risks feels a bit harder nowadays doesn’t it? I don’t know if it’s because of self-censorship or this general plateauing of singularity. What words do you think we’re missing or would create?
Kembra: If I knew exactly how to articulate the spirit of the times we probably wouldn't be here talking right now. I think it's necessary for us to speak about the spirit of the times. I'm completely in agreement with you and I don't remember things being this difficult ever. The pandemic has felt like a decade ago but since then, I don’t think any of us have really processed what happened, let’s call it “the new end.” In the same vein, I wanted to bring up this idea of financial racism. When the new end was starting it all of a sudden became really unpopular not to pretend that you are a one percenter. I think that's kind of a tragedy because it used to be a joke in a way, the bloatedness of overdoing it. It's become a combination of the surrealist movement, futurism, and world war three. I don't think that people realize completely that because we're at war, war is happening here, it’s with us right now. When war is not exploding in our faces, people think it's not really present. There can be days, weeks and months that can go by especially in New York where we're just getting inundated with that ostentatiousness and we forget about it.
Lindsey: You were also here when New York was seemingly in its prime culturally, it was a different place. Obviously money has changed the place but what has endured? Subconsciously or consciously, lack is always tapping us on the shoulder. Today for many artists, resources equate to having money and money warrants a sense of security and in turn, freedom.
Kembra: It's a city like all the other cities in a way. There are the cities across the world that are just the wealthy cities, where there's this movement to clean and wipe away people that philosophically and aesthetically don't match. I can give you a list of resources for artists in New York City. I go to this place called Materials for the Arts, they offer a range of free materials including paint, paper and fabrics. These are the kinds of things I share in The Manual of Action because it was important to me to make a class or a school that shared things that I couldn't learn in university or art academy and a lot of that had to deal with what jobs could I do to survive and what resources I could I use to make artwork. As far as people getting press and notoriety for your work, I would never ever solicit press. I would throw my hands straight up in the air and write my own press or ask any writer that I knew to give me an honest assessment of the work. I don't care if it's good, bad or indifferent but will you please write about my work in exchange for art or payment? You can also make a fanzine and self-publish it, it’s not a creepy thing to do. It's basically exactly what the magazines are doing except the magazines have a roadblock of attitude and elitism. As an artist, I would never wait for recognition, I would self create that excitement because it also really helps you to learn about your work.
Lindsey: I like the idea of a fanzine a lot. It’s interesting because the idea of and our relationship to self-promotion has really changed because of the channels and platforms we now have and use. It feels silly to talk about but it seems like people are posting less or the act of doing so is more calculated; less vulnerability and more self-censorship. In relation to your work, I think of the differences between fear and horror where the latter is actually an interesting platform that turns shock value into conversation.
Kembra: I think there's a lot of great new work being born. What I can say to the artists that are going to be reading this is that there is such a gap that needs to be filled. It's our job to replace that void with something beautiful. There's really nothing else to do so please take the risk to be vulnerable. Please, please show what you're doing regardless of it being good or bad or nothing. There was an artist called George Kuhchara, a filmmaker who said, “I'd like to do something, whether it be good, bad or nothing.” I learned from an artist and one of the best filmmakers that ever lived, Jack Smith who lived on First Avenue and First Street, about what it meant to get your mood altered by the press. Regardless of if a review was good or bad, it would change how you felt about the work. When I heard him say this I was a young artist in my 20s and I made a decision to not value press – and that's different from a writer giving you constructive criticism. There's a kind of healthy detachment that's necessary to cultivate and I think you cultivate that by having a community of friends that you can have a sense of humor about stuff with. It’s hard to cultivate community but that's also worth taking the risk to do too.
There's something about being in your first decade of being an artist that just fucking sucks. The disappointment can be so ravaging. There were people that I was coming up with that had nervous breakdowns that never came back, there was so much attrition. Creativity is one of the nicest things that human beings can share with one another but what I also really wanted to stress is that we don't have to grow up to be artists. I wish the art world itself could be more expansive because it's so fucking tiny and elitist and all these big shot dudes with so much swag and stuff, it's such bullshit.
Lindsey: It's bullshit because it's also formulaic. Cheesy but I’m gonna say it, when I think about art I think about freedom but with its commodification, the artist themself becomes a commodification. As an artist if you’re tapped by LVMH for a collaboration it’s great for your career but is it great for your art? How much of being an artist is about being a martyr?
Kembra: I do feel inspired by our conversation because there's been like two or three other people that I've spoken to and it does feel like change is coming. Hopefully, there's space being made for others to exist, there is room for so much more. As an artist there are little weird ceremonies that you can do when you're in the studio to set a temperature and a tone for the work you’re making. It can sound ridiculous but it’s about knowing what kind of music you like playing, having books you like around, to make new work. I like having Oreo cookies that are frozen. I write things down with a black sharpie obsessively because my eyes don't see anything except black Sharpie. I would always encourage people that are doing their own artwork to figure out what your own process is. What's the best way for you to do your own work? It takes a lifetime to figure that out.
Lindsey: Right and so much of figuring that out actually requires the passing of time, it happens in hindsight. Even the process of coming into yourself like what you were saying about aging, it’s more so about refinement so it begins less to feel like being vulnerable and more just about being honest perhaps? I love that when you’re performing you’ve made it a point to differentiate it from acting.
Kembra: I know for myself, I can't take acting emotionally. Karen Black isn't an acting experiment, it's just me wearing a costume. I am the same person as I am inside of that costume as I am out of it. I started doing my best work when I stopped drinking and getting high before my shows. During the 80s, we were all such major heads and we would always get totally trashed before we did performances. With Karen Black and with the work that is happening now, that's not even a part of it and one of the reasons it's not a part of it is because it's worth remembering what you do.
Lindsey: Right and obviously with something like a performance or sharing your work in this way warrants opportunities for epiphanies or moments being “memorable” per se but what about in your daily life?
Kembra: The Artist’s Way, the book by Julia Cameron, which may sound super corny, gave me a lot of really positive suggestions like the practice of “ three pages a day” in which you wake up, fill out three blank pages and throw them away. When I'm doing my best work, I'm doing that and when I stop doing that, I say to myself, god, I wonder why I feel so out of focus? That's one of my tools and I totally suggest doing that. Especially with the act of throwing the pages away, it allows me to vacuum clean my brain. I also think it's also really a positive exercise to reach out to people that you admire instead of fanning out on them. Ask questions!
Lindsey: How do you maintain this sense of energy? I feel like also when something becomes your job, expression and purity get muddled by productivity. It’s hard to keep things sacred.
Kembra: I don't think all of us are always doing our best work. I recognize it not being my heart of heart’s work but sometimes there's years or months that go by and that’s just the work I’m doing to keep my muscles going. It’s impossible to do your best work 24/7 and that would be exhausting as well. I’ve been working on this book for Rizzoli that’s coming out soon and it’s been interesting to look back on all the things I’ve made over the course of my career.
Lindsey: Was the book your idea and how would you describe it? I feel like the thing with books is that they’re usually quite retrospective or comprehensively formal in nature versus a zine which can feel a bit more auspicious. Have you had any epiphanies as you're looking at your old work while compiling it?
Kembra: I was afraid to do a book, I had fear. I also didn't want to yesterbate. I didn't want to look back on my old work because I thought it would bring up too many feelings and too many painful memories even though a lot of my memories are not about pain, right? I've never felt that I had the emotional sobriety or strength to look back at what I've done and the reason I'm doing it now is because I feel that I can handle it at age 62 to understand what I have done in the past. I never wanted to grow up to be a coffee table book because I felt like it was vanity and I thought, isn't this what dead people do? Isn't this what people do when they don't have ideas?
The epiphany for the most part is that I like what I've done more now. I’m not even trying to pat myself on the back harder but something happens where I look back and think wow, that must’ve been pretty hard to do and it was. It’s also about being able to salute the people that I worked with like Samoa, the genius of my Karen Black members, the genius of the women that I've worked with in the book.
Lindsey: Another thing that comes up when I think of acknowledgement is sacrifice? What’s the role of sacrifice in your life?
Kembra: Sacrifice is not equal to martyrdom and self-harm. Sacrifice is a choice that exists when you're at a fork in the road and you need to make a decision about moving in a direction. It's alright to change your mind about sacrifices that you make and to make adjustments with sacrifice. In my experience, it has been worth it but unfortunately, my own personal sacrifices do have an effect on others around me like the decision to not want to have kids or to not be in a traditional marriage, that scares people. People get scared when you're not representing a certain demographic and within my personal relationships my artwork comes first and for people, that's never an easy pill to swallow. The partners that I've chosen in my life get with the program until they don't and that can be hard unless you're choosing to work with someone who's another artist as well, that can happen. Sacrifice when it comes to your personal life, it may look a little bit rough but it doesn't feel rough to me. It's the freedom that I want but in culture and society, I have found that people are moving towards conservatism and I do think there’s a way to push back on that but as far as what that is, we all have to discuss that more on the daily. I was at the women's marches in the 80s and 90s and I'm disappointed in my generation of women, of punk rockers, it’s like where are we now?
Lindsey: It’s easy to be passive nowadays but all of the things that we’re living through currently are history defining and we have to decide what we want to stand for, these are things that seemingly can define a legacy. What are your thoughts on the differences between fulfillment and success?
Kembra: There's little successes and then really big successes and I think that's very individual. Each of us are allowed to have our own goals that we push towards. Some people want to build a building, some people just want to get their diabetes sugar levels in order. For me, I would like to create a space for people by turning this apartment into a residency where people won’t have to pay money for and can use as a studio – that would be an idea of being successful to me; to be able to share the things that I've created and make those things available for people of other generations.
Lindsey: How is that different from feeling fulfilled?
Kembra: I think fulfillment for me sounds too much just like a hunger or something but I do feel like there's daily fulfillment. I've been through a lot of tragedies, I've had a lot of experience with death so fulfillment to me is a daily lack of agony and pain, it’s a kind of gentleness. Success is more about the long term things that I'd like to share in my legacy and fulfillment is more about the present. I like the idea of doing a gratitude list or a daily inventory, thinking about all the things that the day held for you, the things you’re thankful for and having a consciousness about it. That helps to make things not feel like such a big blur. I do a lot of very vanilla things but call myself dark granola, I’m a beach goth.
Lindsey: Beach goth forever. For me, a huge part of fulfillment has to do with relationships and for you in your work and also your role as a teacher, there’s also this balance of having to be mindful of the ways in which you’re conserving energy as you’re giving it.
Kembra: I go through periods of time where I’m in intense isolation. The people that are in my friend group, identify and recognize that isolation has nothing to do with mean spiritedness and it's just something that I have to do to prepare myself to deal with the outside world. It's always been a part of my life but it’s not a part of everyone’s life to be able to remain in a deep state of work and meditation for long periods of time and it shouldn't be, it's just something that I do. I've been scolded by some people that are in my friend group for not communicating my needs or when I’m about to enter into this state. I need to remember to explain to them what's happening, I love having people in my life but sometimes I have to detach from love in a way and that's caused me some problems. I'm still learning how to not harm the people around me when I go into these intense periods. There's a lot of shit that I have to change in my life, I'm not perfect and I want to get better as I get older.