Larry Clark grows up?

According to William Blake, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Clearly, he never envisioned a character like Larry Clark.

A 60-year-old chronicler of adolescent anomie, casual violence, throwaway sex and drug abuse, Clark has spent much of his career photographing and filming American teenagers at their stupidest, most hollow and incoherent. By turns repellent and irresistible, his work?from Tulsa, his groundbreaking 1971 book of photographs, to the controversial film Kids?has migrated from the far margins of the culture to a ventricle near its throbbing center. Few have touched as raw a nerve in America's sleepy Rockwellian psyche. Many, on the other hand, are the photographers, writers, musicians, filmmakers, fashion designers, stylists and just plain mallrats who have followed Clark's well-trod path to the once star-spangled, now global apotheosis of kiddie trends like tattoos, skateboards and nose rings.

A contemporary touchstone as large as the Rockies for poseurs and innovators alike, as well as a lightning rod for paleoconservatives like Lynn Cheney, Clark's once-accidental career bloomed like a black rose in the aftermath of America's affluent encounter with license and lifestyle. A door-to-door baby photographer in his teens, the largely autodidactic Clark challenged the culture's buttoned-up ideology and false consciousness with nearly sociopathic gusto. The free-sex 1960s, the me-first 70s, the cocaine-fueled 80s and the Columbine 90s were perfect reflecting pools for Clark's portrayals of America's youthful, violent boredom with creature comforts.

Now, at the dawn of a new decade (the double zilches?), Larry Clark is back with a new film, a current exhibition of photographs and collages and a chemist's shop chock full of the old routine. The old act, like that of the classic Vaudevillian, never fails to fascinate and even draw a certain kind of horrified sympathy. But after all these years, isn't it fair to ask, is Larry Clark really any wiser?

To paraphrase New Yorker film critic David Denby, the sexagenarian Clark certainly takes greater interest in teen sex than teenagers do. His obsession with hairy glands and hairless chins veers eerily into pedophilia, an element that charges his pictures with the shameful thrill of peeking behind a brown paper wrapper. Yet his photographs and films repeatedly strive for more solid ground beyond the rickety American enchantment with predation, victimization and the fountain of youth, one that, in an earlier age, radically redefined the notion of documentary work.

32 years after Tulsa, two decades after Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and six years since Wag the Dog, pictures, both the still and the moving kind, have lost a great deal to an eroding sea of unsuspended disbelief. In the new, hyper-jaded climate, Clark's claim to "cut through the bullshit and tell the truth" in his portrayal of American teens stands on shaky footing.

A speed freak and ex-con (he served two years for shooting a man in the arm after a card game), Clark was lucky enough to fall in love with the camera at precisely the right moment in his life. While he and his friends hung out, copped, frigged, fought and egged each other onto new heights of empty pleasure, torpor and rage, Clark's camera faithfully got down all of the gang's shenanigans.

The result was Tulsa, a treasure trove of images taken from inside the Oakie demimonde, a place far more peculiar in its depravity than the usual urban ghetto. Matchless in its portrayal of teenage hell, everything Clark has done since strives longingly after such directness. But his frustration is unavoidable, since what separates Tulsa from Clark's subsequent work is a cut and dry legal line. There's complicity on the one hand (which he now works hard to achieve with his teenage subjects), and then there is, quite literally, becoming a criminal or a criminal accomplice (which he then was in spades).

The dirty little secret surrounding Clark today is that he is a successful, disciplined, mostly sober father of two adult children. Stubbornly tugging at the thematic lifeline the frank portrayal of which lifted him out of a trailer-trash life and amphetamine addiction, Clark has revisited his adolescence time and again with the insistence of a man out of ideas. His current exhibition, "punk Picasso" at Chelsea's Luhring Augustine gallery, only amplifies the story he has already told in three books of photographs, as many films and a lifetime's worth of art exhibitions.

Consisting of a sprawling installation of photos, video, correspondence, memorabilia and collages scored to Bob Dylan and Johnny Ace, the show unfolds like a car wreck. Scattered around the gallery without much order are pictures of Clark's parents, a baseball autographed by Roger Maris, an announcement for his son's bar mitzvah, photos taken from his books and shot on movie locations, a prop of a severed head from a film, articles about his work and a number of clippings concerning teenage murderers, like one about Steven Pfiel, who bludgeoned and hacked his brother and sodomized his sister after his parents left for a Saint Patrick's Day party.

Like a car wreck, too, Clark makes it nearly impossible to look away, so pathetic is his sustained attempt to point attention back to himself. Clipped obituaries of famous folks like Kurt Cobain and an entire wall devoted to teen idol River Phoenix drive home the point further: This is as clear a case of arrested development as has ever presented itself. To the degree that Clark manipulates real, live teenagers to act out his story and projects himself onto the pictures of others, his work withers as a genuine reflection of any reality save the monstrous proportions achieved by his own narcissism.

Older but not a bit wiser, Larry Clark provides a signal lesson on artistic growth in reverse. As is always the case with arrested development, he didn't just grow older and run out of things to film and photograph. He merely ceased to learn from himself.

"Larry Clark: punk Picasso" through June 28 at Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-206-9100.