Near the end of Kim Gordon's performance last night at Issue Project Room, she wailed into a harmonica, her briefly abandoned guitar hanging from her shoulder—a signature moment of searing noise and elegant destruction. Gordon's collaborator at the dimlit industrial-cathedral space in downtown Brooklyn was painter Jutta Koether—"the duo share an unabashed pleasure in disregard for technique," the program read. Koether paced through the crowd, distributing Xeroxed copies of a 1993 writing on the failures of advertising by Gordon's late, longtime friend, Mike Kelley, the renowned visual artist, "anti-rock" musician and Sonic Youth collaborator. Gordon's deadpan singing always has a physicality about it, but she felt especially present last night. Her performance was imaginative, tangible, and free; earlier, people had cheered. "What do you think this is," Gordon asked, "a rock show?"
This year, Gordon seems to have worked in nearly every medium but a conventional rock setting. Most visibly, she has performed abrasive, bluesy noise with Bill Nace as Body/Head, releasing a double album on Matador. She also began writing a memoir, filmed an episode of Lena Dunham's HBO show "Girls", and exhibited her first visual art retrospective at Manhattan's White Columns Gallery—a thrilling survey, Design Office, that ranged from early writings, avant-garde video work, and her X-Girl clothing line to rather illuminating "modern landscapes" of spray-painted tweets by the likes of Dunham and Stephen Malkmus.
Above: Kim Gordon, "Design Office"
Last night's performance with Koether was part of a two-night tribute to Gordon at Issue, benefitting the 10-year-old experimental art space. Maybe the greatest surprise of the night was just how much spirited laughter—on and off stage—their set allowed. Among blasts of aggressive guitar and hellishly overdriven electronics, the duo reenacted a 1991 conversation, printed in Interview magazine, between Gordon and Mike Kelley (his own work is currently being honored with an inspiring multi-floor retrospective at MoMA Ps1). "I met Kim Gordon in the late 70s and she was still a California girl, still an artist, and still a 'librarian type,'" that interview went. "Now Kim's the hot and steamy female member of Sonic Youth!" The questions sarcastically dealt with Gordon's "transformation into a sex symbol"; "Did you leave art to chase rock gods?" Kelley asked. The performance was full of subtext, recalling the parts of Gordon's White Columns show that illustrated unfortunate interview questions she'd been asked in the past, like "What's it like to be a girl in a band?" (a line also found on Sonic Youth's 2009 single "Sacred Trickster".) In more direct moments of Gordon and Koether's gripping spoken word, Gordon mused about prioritizing music over art. "It's hard to get hot over a painting, there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness," she said. "Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music."
Earlier Gordon performed for the first time with I.U.D., a noise power-trio including multi-instrumentalist Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance and drummer Sadie Laska of Growing. "Did anyone else go to the Lou Reed memorial today?" Bougatsos asked of New York's late punk godfather. Mike Kelley was not the only lost friend in the air. "It was really nice," she added, "I have to say." Indebted to him in audible ways, their slow, expressive dual drumming swelled, like a ritual, to more bodily percussion. At a point Bougatsos, who sat on the ground and provided vocal texture, stretched her arms as if flying, only to end the set with a megaphone and police siren, to accent the vibe of lawlessness. Gordon, meanwhile, explored the possibilities of her bright drone guitar, the deconstructed soul of the music. It conjured a potent urgency. Even with all the night's allusions to the past, Gordon, as ever, makes you want to rip it up and do something new.
Above: Sonic Youth Bandname Sculpture (Kim Gordon, 2013)