Thursday, Mar 26, 2026

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Penguin napping, abusive nuns, exploding cadavers and tragic games of russian roulette – these are just some of the tales in Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys and Girls, a new book and exhibition by artists Larry Clark and James Gilroy. The two met in downtown New York in the early 1970s and formed an instant and permanent bond rooted in drugs and a shared pleasure in indeterminancy. “We were living with abandon and not thinking about the consequences,” Clark tells me. Gilroy elaborates, “Back then, you walked down the block and maybe ran into somebody or into a situation. We’d just get pulled into something every day.” The collection, which sits somewhere between an unflinching memoir and a personal sketchbook, collides their bold, vulgar, hilarious oral histories with Clark’s photographs and Gilroy’s drawings. Each gesture amplifies the next omission in a chaotic and sometimes nightmarish stream of consciousness that’s impossible to put down.

The book spans many years, ranging from the 50s to the 70s and beyond. Throughout, we encounter Clark’s snapshots of artists, lovers and revellers staring down the camera – images brought into being as proof of life, rather than cynically extracting from it. Gilroy’s drawings brim with rapture, atmospheric sketches of the weird and unpalatable, spurring you to read on. In an art economy voracious for autobiographical narrative, you can’t help but feel like the friends are playing a game of cat and mouse with the reader, testing the cultural critic’s threshold for the messy truth, waiting to see who squeals first. And yet, underneath the salacious stories runs a rich vein of tenderness. The dialogue between Clark and Gilroy is intimate and painstakingly honest, offering a rare glimpse into the connective tissue of male friendship over multiple decades.

As poet Max Blagg writes in the book’s foreword, Clark and Gilroy are “veterans of a thousand burnups, breakups, smash palaces, and nocturnal collisions that they somehow survived like the mythical phoenix”. Their survival is significant, and as the book reveals, a rare viewpoint amongst so much young death that surrounded them – a haunting destruction of possibility. Against all odds, the duo, [Clark, now 83, and James, 77], remain standing – two inseparable friends, able to reflect upon their merciless view of the world we live in and their own participation in its madness. 

Here, Clark and Gilroy speak on living free, valuing the unexpected, and the importance of bearing witness to your friends’ lives.

 

What was your first interaction like?

Larry Clark: Ralph Gibson was a friend. He was hanging out with Sam Wagstaff, and we both crossed paths there.

James Gilroy: We met and became fast friends.

How did your friendship evolve? What was the connective tissue that helped retain the relationship?

Larry Clark: Initially, it was drugs, man. We maybe shouldn’t say that, but back in those days, that was contingent.

James Gilroy: I think beyond that, we had the same sensibility, you know, both having come from the street... Larry came to New York and took to it right away. Not everyone’s like that.

What was the genesis of Bedtime Stories for Bad Boys and Girls?

Larry Clark: I mean, we were always telling each other stories and sharing stories amongst friends. People get high, and you tell your personal stuff. They bare their soul with you. The whole thing is to bear witness to their lives. You wouldn’t do that with someone you didn’t feel safe with.

What was the process like putting the book together?

James Gilroy: I started doing drawings from Larry’s stories. Larry has so many pictures of so many experiences that he can give me to riff on. I use that process of drawing on an oil ground, so it doesn’t look like just a drawing on paper.

 

by Gem Fletcher