EN 12341 Brandford St, Sun Valley

Kim Gordon (US, 1953, based in Los Angeles) works in a number of disciplines and cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (XGirl), music (founding member, bassist, guitarist and singer of Sonic Youth [1981–2011], Free Kitten, Body/Head) and film/video (as an actress and director). She performs guitar with choreographer and dancer Dimitri Chamblas. Her works include the ongoing series Noise Painting, depicting the names of experimental and noise bands; a series of paintings depicting the names of galleries and gallerists; works from the untitled series From The Boyfriend—Rorschach-like images painted on used denim skirts; Twitter Paintings taken from the Twitter feeds of GIRLS producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz and artist Richard Prince, among others; and her Wreath Paintings, which use decorative folk forms as stencils to produce dizzyingly colourful abstractions. One of the guiding principles of her work is the dismantling of the hierarchical sanctification of the object.

In the video 12341 Brandford St, Sun Valley, she plays electric guitar in contact with bodywork piled up in a car graveyard, shifting her electric experiments from the concert stage to the twilight setting of a suffocating world.

“As if she were in the future, she moves among the car wrecks piled one on top of the other, timidly at first. She’s an outsider, an interloper, an alien. She’s drawn to the cars and starts rubbing her guitar against the dead machines, creating sounds as she goes. It’s a kind of recycling of useless metal. It’s the flip side of consumer culture. Car adverts often resemble idyllic landscapes, with the car speeding through a magnificent desert, a winding wooded road or the glittering streets of an urban night, in an existential vision of freedom and joy. The junkyard is a hidden or forgotten landscape that conveys silent stories of violence and dreams.” KG