Harmony Korine Has Something to Say

Harmony Korine nostalgia fuels the internet: the iconic bunny boy in his feature debut Gummo, Tumblr screenshots of the scuzzy words he wrote in Kids, the lurid bikinis of 2012’s Spring Breakers. But no filmmaker has arguably given less of a shit about the stuff they made in the past. In recent years, he’s rejected tradition entirely, making art that traverses the worlds of tech and cinema. I watched crowds of people walk out of AGGRO DR1FT, his Travis Scott starring Miami mafia movie shot entirely on an infrared camera, with garish nonsensical dialogue. It looks like a GTA cutscene. I loved it btw. Korine also works in paint, photography, and printed matter. His first museum survey in the United States is called Perfect Nonsense, currently running at Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. It captures three decades of his work across all of his mediums. Calling from his Miami apartment, where he’s lived for the last decade, he spoke to me about this retrospective, Skibidi Toilet, and his plans to return to traditional filmmaking. Harmony Korine: What’s up, bro? Douglas Greenwood: Everything’s great! I’m coming to you from London. We’re coming to you from Miami. Are you having fun down there? Congrats on the exhibition launch. Thanks, I’m really happy about it. It’s nice to see everything from the last 30 years all in one space. Does it feel like you’ve been working for 30 years? It feels like I’ve been working for longer than that. I think I’ve been doing a variation of the same thing since I was 15, in high school. I feel you. You’ve got this inimitable energy to your work that so many artists try to imitate. You only know that energy properly when you see your version of it, whether it’s through film or a painting or a zine you’ve made. You do so much. I think that’s why I feel so burned out. The retrospective is just a smattering of the work I’ve made. For every painting or film, there’s 10 more that couldn’t make the cut. It’s difficult to turn off my imagination. So how do you start putting this together? They approached me a couple of years ago, and I mostly let Alex Gartenfeld and his curation team put it together. I’m pretty happy making the work and then letting those guys construct their own narrative based on it. And I rarely ever look back on it. I’m always thinking about what’s next. You’ve lived in Miami for over a decade now. Does the heat of that place have a hold on you still? Yeah, I’m in a permanent state of heat stroke. I just want to walk around sun kissed all day. In delirium, smoking cigars, dreaming of fishing, and drinking Mountain Dew. Do you feel like Miami audiences see your work differently? Probably, I think the vibes here are different. Irony really doesn’t exist in Miami—even the hipsters drive Range Rovers. I was in Venice when you premiered AGGRO DR1FT. I remember hearing rumors that you’d intentionally turned up the volume to piss people off. I was trying to get as many people as I could to walk out. I was trying to figure out if there was a pain threshold with volume that people would allow themselves to experience. We asked the projectionist to crank it to the point of distortion. People were putting earplugs in, it was so intense. Do you love being antagonistic? I was just born that way, so I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with being paddled in school growing up. Like it doesn’t seem real, unless there’s some kind of pain attached to it. As you were unearthing these old works, were you reminded of how they were made? I was thinking of the Macaulay Culkin shots from The Bad Son… It was a long time ago. I think it coincided with the Sonic Youth video. I think most of those images were shot over the course of one afternoon, and then we printed it and made Xerox copies, because I like the way the Xerox looks. But I’d forgotten about a lot of it. When I first walked in and I was like, “Holy fuck. Where did all this come from?” Sometimes before I interview people I like to search their name on eBay, and see what the most expensive item there is. Yours are your Supreme decks from 2011, but your art books are not far behind. I gave away almost all of those books to friends, so I’ve actually bought them back from eBay or booksellers and stuff. My favorite thing on eBay was my signature on a cue card for fifty cents, buy it now. Two quarters. Even less than the postage. I love that it made more sense for this guy to get two pieces of bubble gum than to keep the signature. If it’s any consolation, someone tried to buy my Cannes cap you designed off of my head at the festival last year. I was wondering what your meme consumption was. I like Skibidi Toilet. I’m excited for that movie. By Michael Bay? I actually think that would be amazing. I think that, in some way, that’s the greatest pairing. Pain & Gain is a great movie. Is there anything you haven’t done in a while that you’d like to? I feel like making a movie again. There’s a lot of stuff in the works with animation and gaming engines but it’s been almost a decade since I made a film, something scripted. There’s sometimes images you can’t get out any other way. Do you want to make it in Miami? My family is here, but I also like the idea of going somewhere else, like the Caribbean. Lefty has started making movies. What’s she teaching you about art? I don’t know! She was at the opening, and it was the first time she’d seen any of that stuff. She’s at the point where she’s just starting to make stuff herself, so it’s fun for me to watch her and hear her ideas. She’s a true character. I think she’s gonna make great things. Who deserves a retrospective? A Herman Nietzsche retrospective would really freak a lot of people out. For film, Alan Clarke, Michael J. Fox, or Burt Reynolds. Do you ever spend time in Hollywood anymore? It feels strange now because it’s decentralised. There’s no centre of power anymore. Kids who are doing streaming are more powerful than studio heads. Within America, there’s this idea of New York and Los Angeles dominance. There’s so much America that’s out there. New York and LA are not America. People should make art in Baton Rouge. You found Miami. And look what it did: Gave me permanent heat stroke.