Plinth

When the project was announced in 2023 (via a super edgy GQ profile) it was shortly before the Venice Film Festival premiere of AGGRO DR1FT, Korine’s 80-minute infrared thriller about a Miami-based assassin named BO who monologues about his professional lethargy and love for his kids and his curvy wife before taking on a demonic crimelord. While the film bears a slight stylistic resemblance to Spring Breakers, Korine claimed he 'Wasn’t wanting to make a movie. Was wanting to make what comes after movies. Was wanting to be inside the world. More like a video game. But who’s playing who.' At the film’s press conference, Korine and the EDGLRD team (including Eric Kohn, ex-Indiewire Editorial Executive) turned up in plastic masks with a sort of Eyes Wide Shut by way of LEGO vibe.

While the film’s festival reactions ranged from ambivalent to appalled, Korine and co. were undeterred, announcing a rollout via a global film tour, debuting AGGRO DR1FT in 'unconventional venues' such as strip clubs and bars. Pretty edgy stuff! Whether or not this strategy has worked remains to be seen; the New York night was described as 'almost comically dead' and when my friend sent me a video from the London night at EartH Hackney, it had the distinctly tragic try-hard vibes of a 16-year-old’s sparsely-attended house party. What could be edgier than paying £50 to stand in a half-empty room of indifferent east London scenesters?

But for whatever reason, Korine is really stuck on the thermal camera aesthetic utilised in AGGRO DR1FT (which is sort of painful to stare at for a long time, by the way). Following on from a first exhibition in Los Angeles last autumn, Korine debuted AGGRESSIVE DRF1FTER PART II at Hauser & Wirth’s Saville Row gallery in May. The exhibition will run until 27th July and comprises ten works (nine canvases and one video installation) inspired by the film in a large impersonal gallery space reminiscent of a car showroom.

From a distance – or if you only see the images online – the paintings look like nothing more than screencaps from AGGRO DR1FT. A close-up of long acrylic nails; a long shot of a boatful of gun-toting gangsters; baddies creeping through a treeline. Up close and personal, they’re actually quite impressive oil paintings, with visible brush strokes and bits of dirt and dust stubbornly stuck to the canvas. In certain spots, there appear to be hand and bootprints. The colours are vivid and punchy, and the oil paint creates a forgiving cohesion which makes the images appear artificial from a distance.

The question remains – what’s so edge lord about EDGLRD? The term entered the pop culture vernacular in 2015 when it was first submitted to the repository of internet knowledge known as Urban Dictionary. For a while, it was used as a loose catch-all for any online (usually male) provocateur obsessed with making inflammatory statements (Elon Musk, Milo Yiannopoulos and PewDiePie are a few popular names, but one need only scroll the depths of 4Chan or some of the dicier subReddits to find less famous examples) but – as is the nature of internal slang – it’s fallen out of common parlance in recent years, with the accused edgelords themselves too gleefully adopting the term as a badge of pride for it to retain weight as an insult.

Naming an artistic venture EDGLRD in 2023 is, to use another bit of internet slang on its way out, kind of cringe. It shows that Korine, for all his supposed interest in video games and contemporary internet culture, is out of step with the zeitgeist – like when Elon Musk tried to rename Twitter ‘X’, a laughable attention grab that has barely stuck (even those that call it ‘X’ have to follow up with ‘formerly known as Twitter’ to clarify what they’re talking about). Speaking of cringe, there’s nothing more embarrassing in 2024 than using AI to make art – another thing that EDGLRD are doing, which perhaps explains why everything the content studio has created so far is kind of ugly. AI was used in the creation of AGGRO DR1FT, though it’s unclear to what extent. The fact that there is no screenplay credit (and that the script is repetitive and often nonsensical) has led some to speculate that Korine plugged the prompt ‘Write a Harmony Korine assassin movie’ into a ChatGPT-style programme.

There’s also the matter of Korine and the EDGLRD team’s repeated reference to video games without actually describing which video games inspire them. While Grand Theft Auto is an obvious touchpoint for AGGRO DR1FT (it’s likely he’s also played the indie smash hit Hotline Miami) Korine seems unable to articulate what it is about video games as an art form that inspired the AGGRO DR1FT venture and to speak to his own experience playing them. This is what remains frustrating about this whole chapter in Korine’s career: the lack of specificity. All of Korine’s previous work, while intentionally provocative, felt interesting and engaged with contemporary culture – this is the man who changed the global perception of Disney kids Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, after all. AGGRO DR1FT feels dated rather than futuristic.

Another element of this dated aesthetic is how Korine frames black bodies within the film. His depiction of race has repeatedly been highlighted as a concern, and while cries of 'It was a different time!' could be given in defence, there’s little to suggest Korine’s understanding of racial dynamics has changed much throughout his career. In 2010 he opined the loss of minstrel shows, stating 'I guess, that type of entertainment is considered socially unacceptable or something. To me, that was the grand age of entertainment— someone who could just slap some face paint and cork on their face and then go out there and sing opera.' In AGGRO DR1FT, there’s a similar sort of pantomime: while the lead character is played by white actor Jordi Mollà, the salacious shots of his unnamed Black wife twerking and announcing how horny she is for him position her as an object, represented only in broad, stereotypical terms. It’s true that no character in the film has much depth beyond Bo, but given Korine’s form, it’s a continuation of a pattern of behaviour and not an element of video game aesthetics that needed to be replicated.

At the Hauser & Wirth gallery, middle-class Londoners admired the canvases while their toddlers zoomed around the concrete floor; it was almost voyeuristic, a reappropriation of gangster aesthetics associated with rap music repackaged by a beloved cult artist for the inspection of cool late-30s hipsters who would probably pop by Jolene on their way home. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that (I love Jolene), and perhaps the cringe of AGGRO DR1FT and its oh-so-edgy marketing rollout is the point, with Korine set out to create something quite lazy knowing it would be embraced by the art establishment that has always entertained him even when he was trying to fight strangers on street corners. Perhaps he’s trying to test the limits of his own credentials – the paints will undoubtedly fetch a high price tag in private sales, despite their relative lack of ambition. Maybe the entire AGGRO DR1FT project (and perhaps EDGLRD itself) is one big joke. But 10 months after its Venice Film Festival premiere, it’s hard to tell what the punchline is.

By Hannah Strong