MOTHER!
New York, December 2024
The lights come on during my call with KEMBRA PFAHLER and I’m instantly transported to a place I believed to be mythical: an entirely red apartment she’s called home for the majority of her career. To call the artist’s home in the East Village iconic would be an understatement. The collective fascination isn’t (just) about the monochromatic furniture and walls, or the matching pieces of art that adorn it – it’s the proof of an intimate commitment an artist has made to their craft.
Few artists have carved their mythology as fiercely as Pfahler. As the high priestess of The Voluptuous Horrors of Karen Black, she has spent decades transforming the grotesque into the divine. Her performances—as glamorous as they are visceral—are raw manifestos of beauty. Over a four-decade long career, she has painted herself as the embodiment of her creative instincts: a provocateur, a painter, a poet.
But, the loud body paint and larger-than-life wigs pale in comparison with an increasingly transgressive mission: to nurture the next generation of artists. The role of mentor has materialized a long-life conviction: creation isn’t transgressive rebellion; it’s a communal ritual – a shared language of resilience and connection.
Talking in a sea of brick red, Pfahler’s apartment becomes more than a space—it’s a living canvas, a reflection of her creative power. As she opens its doors to meet us, it becomes clear that her art, like her home, is as radical as it is welcoming.
Coat Junya Watanabe
Hello, how are you?
I’m good. Let me see where my camera is. Oh, I’m in the dark. I’m very sick. You’re in Australia, no?
Yeah, it’s early morning. Can you hear the birds?
A little. Why are you down there?
I’m usually based in London, but I have family here and British winter was getting to me.
New York is the same, it’s very depressing in the winter. It’s dark and cold and everyone has seasonal depression. Sorry, I’m moving around so much. Let me show you my apartment. These are some dolls I made. They’re in articles all the time. This is my winter coat that I have to wear all the time now. I’m just cold because I’m emaciated. I grew up in Malibu so it’s hard facing New York’s cold. I’m glad you caught me today because I’m leaving on Friday. I loved working on the shoot with Stefania Chekalina. She handles her work almost like film. It adds esteem to the shitty reputation stylists have. I don’t use stylists or have a team. I have never hired anyone to do my makeup. God damn it, where are my cigarettes? I shouldn’t be smoking, but I’m smoking a lot less now. I’m only doing one a day, which is impressive for me.
Left Black dress Salon 1884, white dress Taottao
Right Full look Marc Jacobs
We’ve got so little pleasures, might as well.
I’m sober, so I have zero.
Well, you have one, that one cigarette.
All the artwork that has been my best has been done when I stopped drinking or using anything. I toured for a decade without ever getting arrested. I felt very responsible and present for all my most extreme work.
Jumpsuit Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen Studio, jacket Colleen Allen, shoes Kembra’s own
That’s impressive considering the extent of your work. How do you think being completely present shaped it?
You don’t miss out on the fun, and you don’t miss out on the bad parts either. There’s this slogan “life on life’s terms.” Regardless of if you’re using or sober, difficult things happen. My partner who I loved a lot, Colin de Land died in 2003. They started having art exhibits in hotels and odd spaces. He was solely responsible for any interesting thing that happened in the art world. He died in 2003 which, for me, is like 5 minutes when you lose someone like that. I got to experience grief in a way that was real and that made me present.
There’s a saying about how culture is paralleled by prevalent drugs of the time. You think the 60s and LSD, the 70s and coke, the 80s and 90s heroin. There’s a parallel that exists between the content of creativity and the drugs that are circulating. It’s a part of humanity; we want to find spirit lifters or stabilizers. Right now, there are so many mental health drugs. Most of the kids in my life, my little queer family, a big part of their daily life is being on the right meds.
I never thought about that relationship. There seems to be a strong move towards sobriety right now. How do you think that could impact culture?
Well, hopefully, it’ll keep the kids alive for a little bit longer. [Blows her nose] I’m sorry, my mom just told me how bad of a sound that was. But I’ve been sick since I left town. I did Valentino in September, in Paris. Incredible experience, getting to talk to Alessandro [Michele]. How amazing is it that I got to be a part of that?
Full look Marc Jacobs
It’s amazing, for his first show too. Perhaps not surprising since you are so active in the fashion space. Do you find your relationship with an applied medium, like fashion, different from an iteration of fine art, like performance?
You know, I met Rick [Owens] when I was in my 20s. He and Michèle [Lamy] are a big part of my art family – a big part of my daily existence. The reason why I am even here doing art is because of the love and support of people like Rick. We just did a collaboration together and he wrote on the label the story of how we met. He was conscious to say, “Everyone is doing collabs and they just exploit their friends, this isn’t that.” He was very articulate in saying that this was about love and friendship that has lasted so many years. When Rick came out and said those things no one believed it. They said, is that AI?
That’s rude…
No, it’s ok. It’s just that Rick is legendary. There are young people outside of his store who wait just to get a glimpse of him. He’s so humble, he would never agree but I always refer to him as an artist. When you visit his studio and watch him design and dye fabrics… to me that’s an artist working in the medium of fashion. He did a big show at the Centre Pompidou a few years back and he invited his art family. There were about 10 of us and we were asked to engage with the artwork we were looking at in the room they put us in. I was standing in front of a Brâncuși sculpture. I just sort of talked to it and laid next to it. I’m not a very entertaining performance person. I’m not show business at all. I was just talking to people who went to see the performance, I was trying to sneak in a cigarette. People were probably expecting something different, some sort of Joseph Beuys. But I’m not him. I remember there was a time when people would diminish performance artists.
Full look Ashlyn
When do you think that changed?
Marina Abramović changed the world’s perception of it when she did her piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when she sat and engaged with everyone. She’s one of the most nourishing, amazing women in the art business that ever lived, I get to be friends with her. I was there during that performance, it was performance art. But that’s for everyone. Performance art has always been a big part of my life. By accident, in Los Angeles, where I grew up, I would go to all the punk shows in the 70s. Those early punks were extreme. I saw a show when I was 15 or 16 that had a performance artist called Johanna Wendt. She was standing alone on stage in front of a huge auditorium, screaming, speaking in tongues in a strange costume. I thought to myself “Whoa.”
How did seeing artists like that help shape how you thought of your future?
It set a level for what I could dream of being a full-time artist – obviously I couldn’t do it when I was in high school. My parents tried, they sent me to special tutors so that I could do mathematics and languages because all I wanted to do was artwork and music when I was a child. I grew up in the punk scene. We were all artists; we were all creatives. Everyone who dressed in such a way that wasn't the norm was taking extreme action. Rick and I both got to experience that in Los Angeles. What it really did was shape my moral compass and the direction of my art forever. It formed my relationship with what I thought was extreme, sincere, and honest.
To me, art has morality, my motive is not to decorate rich people’s houses. That’s not my motive – my motive to be an artist has never been financially driven. My life is good when I can have the great accomplishment of making the art I want to do. As a writer I’m sure you can relate, all you want is to be able to live making your art. I got to have that dream and have it come true. When I went to LA as an adult to do my shows with my band, all the punks that I saw as a child came. The real highlights of my life are that I got to meet and work with people I respect. It’s been a pretty incredible life. It seems like it all happened in 15 minutes.
Left Cape Rick Owens, hat and sunglasses Kembra’s own
Right Dress Melitta Baumeister
It’s so interesting to hear you talk about the joys of finding community in the art world. I feel it offsets the prevailing trend fuelled by the ever-encroaching capitalistic morals in the space. How does community influence your productive process?
It’s at its core. It’s how new work and movements are born. It’s everything. I will say, it does take time. If you haven’t found a community yet, you will. I hope everyone pursues collaboration and community because, otherwise who will you deal with? The hatred of institutions and bureaucracy that don’t care about you. Community provides love and support when there is none. A lot of people who do extreme work like I do have a bad time leaving their families. My parents were always front row in anything I’ve ever done, no matter how extreme – but that’s really rare. That’s why I did my three-month-long project with Circa in England.
The Circa project, a 12-week course based on your work “The Manual of Action,” was amazing. You are not only a greatly influential artist, but you have a heavy hand in helping younger artists. Whether through that project or through your role as a professor at Columbia University. Is that a responsibility you feel?
I think it’s just natural to me. I can’t say why, maybe it’s my astrological sign, or maybe it’s my personality. My parents were hippies, that’s how I grew up, they instilled in me the need to do the right thing. I think it’s pretty creepy not to help people if you can. I’ve had a couple of kids divorce me when I’m mentoring them. I understand that’s how you know you’re ready to go out there and do all this stuff on your own, make your mistakes. But I don’t even know if I would call it mentoring, I’m just talking to people, I make myself available. I’m showing them the resources on how to survive in an urban atmosphere. Urbanity is nature to me. People say they need to get out of the city. I never do. I love it when everyone leaves.
Left Vest Rick Owens
Right Dress Ashlyn, gloves Carolina Amato, shoes Kembra’s own
We’ve talked about how your time in LA has shaped you, but how do you think New York has influenced you?
In the 80s when I moved to New York, it truly felt like living in a war. All the buildings were bombed. Performance art and extreme music were done in these strange little clubs. We were separated from the fine art world. They didn’t start merging until some of us thought “Why can't we do it?” Then we began being invited to the museums. That happened only after a lot of building our own spaces, which we were only able to do because there were so many abandoned spaces back then. But I grew up a lot in the city too. It felt a lot like Malibu when I first came here. I moved into a neighbourhood with a lot of Caribbean and Puerto Rican people. Everyone was family-oriented, and they became my family too. They helped me to live and survive. They showed me how to dress in the winter. “You can’t walk around in your underwear in the Lower East Side you punk rocker, put a jacket on.”
Despite the polyvalent nature of your career, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black feels like an accurate projection of your DNA. What kickstarted it?
Well, Pedro, in the 80s, business started flooding art. A lot of galleries popping up and conservative stuff happening in those spaces. I was young, I was in my 20s and no one took me seriously as an artist. I had just had my vagina sewn and I was naked all the time. That seemed fine art to me, it was a beauty aesthetic after all. It was unavoidable that I would do something. In ‘89 my long-term partner and my first relationship, Samoa, and I were prolific young people. We were doing performances all around town, but we wanted to tour. We found that having a rock band let us have access. Performance art was the butter and rock music was the bread. We got to tour every state in the United States for almost 10 years. I didn’t want to go to Europe because I felt like if you went to Europe people would just give you credit for being from New York. I didn’t want to go to a place where people were going to like me, I wanted to go to places where they didn’t want me. People needed us in Utah, where people would get ostracized for being queer. We had all the punks come out. There would be groups of kids wanting to help us. The support was incredible.
Your career has expanded to so many mediums. Do you find they all spawn from the same creative instinct?
The creative instinct is indescribable to me. I can’t even create a sentence to explain it. I’ve tried to articulate it. That’s what availabism was, or the anti-naturalist movement. I think all of us try to find language for what we’re doing. For some it takes a lifetime, for others, it happens immediately. But I always think it’s a positive thing to create a temperature for yourself, an atmosphere for your best work to emerge. Can I ask you what artist inspired you to become a writer?
Left Cape Rick Owens, hat and sunglasses Kembra’s own
Right Kembra’s customized flag from her band
Of course, when I was 12 my dad handed me Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
Oh, that’s a genius move on his part.
Do you have an artist or artwork that you always find yourself going back to?
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. That’s 101. It might be a bit pedestrian to say but that’s the truth. It’s survival poetry for me. Oh, by the way, I’m not naked, I’m wrapped in a blanket, but I have clothes underneath. Michèle always thinks I’m naked. I always tell her “Michèle, I’m 64.”
Speaking of your body is such an integral part of your practice, how does that affect your relationship with it?
When I was a child, I was a gymnast. I always thought of my body as a tool. Colin de Land, from the American Fine Arts, Co., asked me the most questions before my show at his gallery. He really wanted to know why I was naked. I found that nudity created a new paradigm in the beauty aesthetic. Growing up in LA, there was so much shaming around the way women looked. “You need to lose weight.” “You need to cut your hair.” I was always being told that I was too fat, that I should dye my hair blonde. So, I moved to New York and dyed my hair black.
The criticism was so unwanted, so unnecessary. As a woman, people are always telling you that you’re not fuckable. Who gives a shit? It’s so rude to tell someone that they need to improve themselves. My body was for me a way to take my power back. It sounds corny but it was.
How do you feel about being misinterpreted?
I don’t read any criticisms. I learned from a filmmaker called Jack Smith, he did Flaming Creatures and Normal Love. I got to make a movie with him. He used to say people’s opinion of you doesn’t matter. It’s nice when you get accolades. It’s nice when people want to celebrate you, but I’ve never had the desire to correct misperceptions. I also don’t believe in the intelligence of the computer. I feel like when something is uploaded it’s called application-driven intelligence. Just because it’s on the computer it doesn’t make it true. I felt that way my whole life.
How has it evolved with the advent of the iPhone age?
Have you ever left your phone in the house and left for two weeks? We all can do that. You have to figure out if you’re using technology or if it’s using you. I’m not the person that said that. I heard it somewhere, probably online [Laughs]. Probably not. I very rarely go online. I don’t mind Instagram, but then I haven’t been beaten up too intensely like some of my friends. I have to detach as a survival tool. The whole thing with the Luigi thing is horrible. I don’t believe in violence at all. It makes me sick. I tried looking him up but there were like 50 Luigis.
What do you make of Instagram’s policies that affect an artist's work?
I don’t know, but to be honest, there are so many things wrong in the world. Instagram not liking my boobs is not at the top of my list. But then again, I always think it’s important to contest the things that we use every day so maybe it should be.
When we were texting last night, you mentioned the book you’re working on. I need to know about it.
It’s a Rizzoli book, my editor is Loren Olsen. The book is more about her than me. I met her about six years ago. I don’t really do anything with anyone unless I’m friends with them. I have to have talked to them on the phone. As you know, I don’t do emails. I have to be able to know the ethics and intentions of the people I’m going to be working with. I met her at a Jeffrey Deitch gallery event. We became friends, and then she told me she was an editor at Rizzoli. That was six years ago.
Is the book a retrospective of sorts?
It’s Loren’s experience with my work. It’s a love letter from an incredibly intelligent woman. She’s incredible. She just told me two nights ago she went to Yale; I was shocked, her visuals don’t lend themselves to academia. She’s a hard-working artist. I feel so good about this book. I’m trying not to be nervous about it, it can be a bit creepy to have a book about you. It’s going to be the size of a bible. But it has a lot of pages in it.
Interview by Pedro Vasconcelos
Photography by Max Hoell
Fashion by Stefania Chekalina
Hair by Ledora
Make-Up by Tony Tulve
Phtographer’s assistant Ben White
Stylist’s assistant Tanya Korne