Black Teeth, Butt-Prints, and Bouffants: Revisiting Kembra Pfahler’s Electrifying Art

Kembra Pfahler, photographed by Marissa Fortugno.

“Performance is not entertainment,” shock artist Kembra Pfahler explained during the launch of her new eponymous book with Rizzoli at Dover Street Market last week. The statement distills four decades of uncompromising work into a single phrase. For Pfahler, performance is ceremony, a ritualistic act of critique, and collective transformation. Since arriving on the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, Pfahler has been the driving force behind a feminist underground in New York. From her early Cinema of Transgression to The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (her legendary rock band of painted, blackened-tooth performers in mountainous wigs), to gallery interventions featuring dozens of painted nude bodies, she’s forged a visual language entirely her own. Along the way, she’s obliterated every rule about acceptable femininity, refusing the polite confines of female artmaking and performance. The new book collects four decades of ephemera, performance documentation, and portraits of her unflinching vision. To celebrate, we’ve gathered some of Pfahler’s most electric moments from the book. 

———

Kembra Pfahler in Innocent zip top by Samoa Moriki, 2008.

Stills from Blue Banshee, director Mike Kuchar, 1994.

Kembra Pfahler home between tours, New York, 1994. Richard Kern.

Skeleton Fornication II, 2006. Katrina del Mar.

Kembra Pfahler modeling Chanel water bottle holder, Interview, 1990. Joshua Jordan.

Flyer for First Annual Kembra Pfahter Film Festival, August 27, 1993. Imagery from Fear of a Karen Black Planet, video to promote A National Health Care (1993). Katrina del Mar.

Kembra Pfahler with red chair and flower headdress, c. 1995. Katrina del Mar.

Kembra with Tape and Bowling Balls, 1995. Richard Kern.

Kembra Pfahler TVHKB tour collages and set list, 1998.

The Anti-Naturalist Show, Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1995. Laure Leber.