A CULTURAL ICON
Kim Gordon talks about ‘Lo-Fi Glamour’ at The Warhol
“Art for me was always something I knew, so it was harder,” Kim Gordon said, sitting in an office Thursday afternoon at The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Shore. “Music, I really didn’t know anything about, so I could be more intuitive.”
While Gordon’s impact stretches even beyond those worlds — to fashion, television, movies and publishing — it’s with Sonic Youth that she became a cultural icon, starting in the ‘80s.
With “Kim Gordon: Lo-Fi Glamour,” which opened at The Warhol on Friday, she brings her art training and her musical intuition to bear in an exhibition that combines painting, sculpture, figure drawings and a commissioned score for Andy Warhol’s 1963-64 silent film “Kiss,” which plays, hauntingly, in the background. It is her first solo exhibition in North America.
On Thursday, Gordon visited The Warhol, where she performed the score, or something akin to it, in a soldout evening performance (that was streamed live on Facebook) with Bill Nace, her partner in the experimental electric guitar duo Body/Head, along with Steve Gunn and John Truscinski, who also play in a duo.
That project began when Eleanor Friedberger, who contributed to a 2008 song cycle of Warhol films, suggested to Warhol music curator Ben Harrison that he approach Gordon about scoring a film.
“When I came for the first site visit,” she said, “I said it would be cool to do something that hadn’t been done with them, like more improv than songs so it sounded like a soundtrack, and to choose a film that was longer.”
In terms of the preparation she did before the recording session last year in the Warhol Theater, “nothing much,” she said, laughing. “I knew we were going to go through it a couple times, and it’s just hard to prepare for.”
Initially, the two duos planned to play round robin in 20-minute segments, but as they started playing, it seemed “too arbitrary.”
“It was harder than I thought it would be,” she said, “because when you’re making a soundtrack, you don’t want it to be overpowering, but this is a structuralist film and it’s not like you’re intruding on the drama. But the record though had to work on its own without the film as a piece of music.”
The score is akin to her post-Sonic Youth work with Glitterbust and Body/Head that moves in a scratchy, ambient noise direction.
“Sonic Youth became, I think, much more straightforward in structures, song structures, as it went along,” she said, “but I just feel like that was something I did for so long, so why do it anymore? Body/Head is a much more natural thing for me.”
But, she added, “It’s not like I won’t return to pop structures.”
The 66-year-old Gordon, who grew up in LA and studied at the Otis College of Art and Design in the late 1970s and moved to New York City in 1980 to pursue her art career, had just a brief encounter once with Warhol, in LA. She came away with a memento that is on display at the museum, one she had actually forgotten about until this exhibition came about.
“I’m not sure the exact year, but I heard somewhere that he was doing this signing,” she said. “And I went down there. I had these boots that I’d bought at a thrift store or some vintage store, and they kind of reminded me of his early shoe drawings a little bit, so I wore them down there and just put my leg up and he signed it. Someone said after, ‘Oh, he initialed it too. That means something.’ But, literally, he smiled, I think, but I don’t think there were any words exchanged.”
The exhibition begins with a large-scale black-andwhite Warhol “Shadow” painting that is echoed by a smaller Gordon work that she said was just an abstract photograph of a pair of sweatpants she was wearing.
Among the most arresting pieces are the graffiti-style text paintings, some of them the names of early noise bands, like “Secret Abuse,” others Twitter hashtags of protest messages, including some that came from the Women’s March.
“Protesting never goes away, which is why I wanted them to be gold,” she said.
“Part of the idea of the show,” she said, “is how art has become entertainment and entertainment has become art. I was always interested in the relationship between design and art.”