Southern Discomfort

A new monograph chronicles the singular, profane, often disturbing vision of America’s oldest enfant terrible.

- Mary Kaye Schilling

HARMONY KORINE FOUND HIS spiritual home when his family moved from a California commune to Nashville, Tennessee, in the early ’80s. Sol, his father, made documentaries for PBS and would take his son along on trips to the small towns, carnivals and backwoods of the Deep South, capturing an array of vivid characters—“goldfish swallowers, moonshiners, kids who ride bulls,” as Korine once described them. “I always liked that crazy part of America the most,” he said, “where things are seething, everything is incongruous, it seems anything can happen.”

Eccentrics, outliers and the margins of society preoccupy Korine, whose work is laden with diverse references—the tragicomic slapstick of vaudeville, the writing of Southern gothic novelist Flannery O’Connor, the visions of William Blake and the vernacular of African-American art (among others). But each work is also a portrait of the artist at that time. “In my younger years,” he told the website Cultured in 2013, “I was damn near psychotic and definitely criminal, so the work reflects that.”