The American performance artist whose painted body and shock-rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black turned the queer-transgression underground into living image · filed through the circle the archive enters via Ron Athey.
Kembra Pfahler (born 1961, Hermosa Beach; based in New York) is an American performance artist, visual artist and musician, and the Bureau files her in the Performance sub-section as the shock-rock-and-image pole of the queer-transgression circle the archive enters through Ron Athey. A content advisory governs the filing: the work involves nudity and confronting bodily imagery, documented here as serious performance practice rather than shock, with no method detail.
Her best-known vehicle is The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the glam-punk and shock-rock band she formed in 1990 with Samoa Moriki and named after the actress Karen Black. On stage Pfahler appears with her body painted in vivid, saturated colour, staged as a living image rather than as conventional rock performance, and the band's mixture of music, costume and tableau makes her practice equally a band and a performance-art project. It is the band form that ties her, like several figures in this sub-section, to the music underground rather than only to the gallery.
Pfahler works under a philosophy she calls "availabism": the principle of making art from whatever is available, the body, paint, found objects, the stage, turned into a vocabulary of striking images. The approach connects her to the do-it-yourself ethos of the underground the archive documents, and to the New York Cinema of Transgression around Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, the no-wave-adjacent film scene that overlapped the early industrial and noise worlds.
Her place in this dossier is the circle she belongs to. Pfahler and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black were part of the extreme queer-performance underground around Ron Athey, Vaginal Davis and Bruce LaBruce; the band performed at Athey and Davis's G.I.M.P. club nights and at the Outfest performance festivals the two curated. That circle is the live-performance counterpart to the transgressive sound the archive files, and Pfahler is one of its most visible figures.
Her standing is established as well as underground. She has held solo exhibitions including Fuck Island at Participant Inc, performed at major institutions including MoMA PS1, and co-authored the 13 Tenets of Future Feminism (2014) with Anohni and others. The Bureau notes the breadth without overstating the industrial-music tie: Pfahler is filed on the connector test, as a central figure of the queer-performance circle the archive's sound grew up beside, and as the painted body turned into enduring image.