bombmagazine: Kembra Pfahler in The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.
Kembra Pfahler in The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.
The downtown legend spoke with Brienne Walsh for BOMB Daily:
“I lost half my friends for doing work about feminism, and using a kind of language that came to us out of consensus discussions during retreats that Antony [of Antony and the Johnsons], Coco Rosie, Johanna Constantine, and I had. We talked in a circle and had discussions that lasted weeks and days and hours. And we decided that through these discussions, we wanted to have an art exhibit showing stones with thirteen tenets on them, and the thirteenth tenet was ’The Future is Female.’ That caused the most controversy because it was gender specific. It was a decision we made because the scales had been so tilted towards just the male gender. But a lot of our friends are so advanced that they don’t want to speak about gender at all, they want to go to the other category, to stage 3, stage 4, stage 5, stage 6, stage 7. Recently, in the medical profession, the little boxes you could check for gender—there used to be four categories—will next year have ten: male, female, trans, LGBT, bisexual, asexual… so there’s going to be a lot of development in other sexualities. To me it goes back as far as Rilke’s Letters to A Young Poet, when he says in the first letter that sexuality is personal, and everyone’s entitled to their own expression of love and sexuality, whatever that may be, and you can’t compare or generalize. I’m not an academic feminist. I’ve been in a death rock band. I wasn’t in the art world from 1989-2000, I was on tour across the country doing Karen Black shows where no one wanted them.