KIM GORDON'S HIGHWAY TO YR. SKULL
Posted on: 2nd November 2007 | Posted by:
John-Paul Pryor
As one quarter of the legendary avant garde rockers
Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon has been spitting fire at the mainstream for nearly thirty years, producing genre-defining albums like Goo, Dirty and Daydream Nation. Less well known, however, is her prolific output as an artist. Her creative life began a decade before Sonic Youth even formed, when she studied art at UCLA in the 1970s. Over the years that followed, whether on the road, in the studio or at home with her husband Thurston Moore, she has continued to create and exhibit her singularly powerful work. We met her to talk about her latest collection of watercolours, a series of abstract portraits as seen from the stage that were recently exhibited at the Zoo Art Fair.
Dazed Digital: Are these portraits meditations on identity?
Kim Gordon: I guess so… I was just trying to paint something really ghostly and in some cases taking that out as far as I could, into abstraction. In a sense I was trying to place the audience on stage and turn the light on them.
DD: Do you think people in crowds lose their identity?
KG: Well, there’s a certain coming together in that moment, like you are all basically agreeing on one thing and that’s why you’re all there, but it is sort of momentary, as soon as you leave you’re all off to something else,. But I guess all those people project their own experiences on to a song, so in that sense, they retain their individuality.
DD: It's such a unique phenomena, that relationship with the audience.
KG: Yeah, I mean when somebody comes up to me and asks me for an autograph or something, I feel like it's really hard for me to feel like… maybe I’m supposed to feel? I don’t know, it feels like the person has more power than me. If I go up to someone and ask for an autograph I kind of feel more in control. It’s kind of like the person asking has more power.
DD: That must be quite uncomfortable…
KG: It is, because you can’t feel what they might think of you. I mean I’m not as excited about myself as they might appear to be.
DD: Is there something you get from the relative isolation of painting that you can’t get through music?
KG: Well, you do it by yourself, but if things are going well you still get really excited, there’s just nobody around to share it with and that’s kind of an odd feeling.
DD: Would you ever exhibit anonymously?
KG: That’s an interesting idea. It is kind of a hurdle to get over always being known more for one thing. Originally I always wanted to keep the two worlds separate but then I realised that I had a lot of material, I mean not about myself, but more from the point of view of the stuff I’m interested in, stuff that has to do with being in and around the music world and the audience/performer relationship. It’s kind of the same stuff I was writing about in the eighties. I mean that’s how I got into music. I was writing about male bonding and I wanted to be more than a voyeur because I felt like asshole writing about it from the outside.
DD: What was it about the male psyche that interested you at the time?
KG: That was kind of the only way that men could really come together, aside from in sports where they pat each other on the butt, The only way they could really show their female side was by being on stage. Now, of course, there is the odious emo thing that is taking it way too far! But, you know, before that there was Mick Jagger.
DD: Is there any more freedom today from ‘male white corporate oppression’?
KG: I don’t think things have really changed, I mean if you look at most mainstream female performers then women’s image in the mainstream has probably never been at a lower point. The only thing that is exciting out there is that there are a lot of women who are playing experimental noise music right now, a genre that is mostly known as a male-dominated record-collector genre. But in the workplace alpha males are being overtaken by alpha females.
DD: Maybe in a few decades we won’t even think in terms of male and female…
KG: I don’t know, I mean in music it’s still all about artificial brats, the Spice Girls are back! We haven’t gone that far…