Kim Gordon’s Body Part 1: The Body

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Contemporary dance discourse can be boiled down to a rather rudimentary concept: “The Body.” It is the definite article that defines a discipline. The X Body (the virtual body, the performative body, the gendered body, the collective body); The Body as a site of Y (production, decolonisation, lived experience, difference, resistance); The Body as Z (subject-agent, object, document, archive, image, screen). Spice it up with a few other lexical mainstays like embodiment, disembodiment, bodies in space, corporeality, gesture, distantiation, mediation; or, for a little philosophical jazz, The Body without Organs. Whichever way you approach the equation, contemporary dance is tediously and unavoidably preoccupied with The Body.

Kim Gordon’s survey Object of Projection at the Substation, is all about “the Body.” The media release gave prominence to a “special presentation” of Proposal for a Dance (2012), a triptych video installation featuring “two female performers wielding electric guitars and wearing Rodarte dresses.” The marketing copy describes their “experimental choreography” as “a gesture towards anti-pop ideals and their implications for the female body.” But the hero image recalls another familiar variable: The Celebrity Body. It is a still from Picture Window (2022), a video work made with Manuela Dalle, featuring Gordon “sleeping” with a Fender Jazzmaster (AKA “the hero of the underground”) draped across her body. She is lying on her side under a Swiss military wool blanket in a room with all the “neutral” and depersonalised signifiers of an Airbnb.

Gordon revisits here a figure of the sleeping artist that has been endlessly rehashed by artists since Chris Burden’s Bed Piece (1972): Susan Hiller’s Dream Mapping (1974), Bruce Gilchrist’s Divided by Resistance (1996), Marina Abramović’s The House with the Ocean View (2002), Emilia Telese’s Life of a Star and Sleepwalking (2005), Chajana denHarder’s Sleep (2012), Taras Polataiko’s Sleeping Beauty (2012), and Zhou Jie’s 36 Days (2014). These performances centre on the gap between the phenomenal (lived) and semiotic (interpreted) body by way of “problematising” the spectacle with the vulnerable non-performance of sleep.

The trope is quite popular among celebrities whose semiotic bodies are the exemplary products for public consumption. Perhaps the most influential example of the sleeping celebrity is Tilda Swinton’s 1995 performance work at Serpentine Gallery in London, The Maybe. For seven days, eight hours a day, Swinton slept in a raised glass vitrine in the gallery with up to twenty-five-thousand voyeurs. She was exhibited alongside installations by renowned artist Cornelia Parker made up of celebrity memorabilia from London collections such as the half-smoked cigar of Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria’s stocking, and Napoleon’s rosary. In Lady Gaga’s 2012 Sleeping with Gaga, coinciding with the launch of her inky new perfume “Fame,” the pop star “slept” in a giant replica of her eau de parfum bottle, allowing partygoers to reach in and touch her hand. She closed the performance by posting iPad portraits on Instagram, getting a tattoo, and getting naked.

Gordon’s take on the “celebrity body as public object” was probably best expressed in her 1993 catalogue essay “Is It My Body?” written for Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes at the Whitney Museum of Art. She writes about Kelley’s stuffed animal portraits Ahh … Youth!, one of which appeared on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Dirty album the year prior, likening them to rock stars — as “something to be projected upon.” She writes, “the body’s not theirs anymore, it’s a public domain and public perception.” The Rock Star Body is the Object of Projection.

It would be too easy to accuse Gordon of simply “putting a dancer on it” — the classic criticism of out-of-ideas artists who need a little extra entertainment at their openings to get the champagne sipped. Gordon is a multidisciplinary artist with a long history in the world of “expanded dance.” She is old friends with Jutta Koether and describes performance art luminary Dan Graham as her NYC mentor. It was Graham who encouraged her to write her downtown debut piece for Real Life, and she wrote one of his obituaries published in Texte zur Kunst. Even next-gen Erdman is a Graham fan who performed a work about Martha and Dan Graham’s late ’70s punk shows, Two Grahams, in 2007 at Reena Spaulings. In fact, Gordon is so deeply indebted to Graham’s ethnographic approach to rock stars, subcultural ideals, and suburbia that a quick glance at his collection of essays between 1965 and 1990, Rock My Religion (1993), illuminates the conceptual underpinnings of Gordon’s entire oeuvre. You just have to dig past Alice Cooper to discover Kim Gordon’s body.

In Picture Window, the domestic rock goddess vacuums and rinses the bathtub, all with the Jazzmaster hanging flaccid at hip height. There is no dialogue, just the diegetic sound of the amplified guitar as it clashes with the fridge door or cutlery drawer and reverberates about the staged domestic scene. Towards the end, Gordon makes a supermarket-magazine-ready sandwich and salad, eating it in awkward silence with her daughter, the poet, actress, and model Coco Gordon Moore. They are recognisably themselves, but they lack “personality”; they go about their pleasant, pretty, and idle days on autopilot, weighed down only by Gordon’s underground accessorising. At the Substation, Picture Window is played on a loop with 12341 Branford St. Sun Valley (2022), in which Gordon walks around a wrecking yard ethereally rubbing her amplified phallus on the exoskeletons of car carcasses. When Picture Window starts back up, it’s as though “it was all a dream.”

We get to the kernel of Gordon’s interest in “staging the home” in the final chapter of Girl in a Band. Here, she describes escaping her “huge, three-floor house” in New York to a hilltop Airbnb in Echo Park, free of “McMansions or wall-to-wall office buildings.” Shortly after this passage, she writes that she wanted to give Coco the most normal, middle-class life possible. As a holiday or escape, Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere” blandness is also an “object of projection.” A middle-of-the-road, middle-class, live, laugh, love blank canvas that anyone can inhabit. From the dead-end dude of “I’m a Man” to Chantal Akerman’s housewife, the bodies that Gordon wants to inhabit these days have something else in common.

When Sonic Youth started out in the 1980s, Gordon admits, “all I was trying to do was dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair” and “to lose any and all associations with my middle-class West LA appearance and femininity.” In fact, being middle class is a recurring theme in Girl in a Band. She laments that the English punk scene (which was very much a product of the class system) saw Sonic Youth as “a bunch of middle-class brats who probably lived in lofts right above art galleries, who were putting on an act that wasn’t real, wasn’t authentic, wasn’t earned.” And to be fair, Sonic Youth did cop a bit of criticism for being, as Ray Brassier put it in a conversation with Mark Fisher, “vaguely bohemian / arty middle-class urban professionals,” or as Fisher called it, “avant-conservatism.”

Of course, Kim Gordon is no longer middle class. In the US, she’s on the lower end of the 1%. As it turns out, Picture Window’s setting looks much the same as one of Gordon’s real homes in Franklin Hills, Los Angeles, so perhaps the interior design and performances are more authentically staged than the Airbnb obsession might suggest. While her immersion in the honest world of the middle classes may spill over into real life (after all, it’s rooted in her upbringing), her creative endeavours generally aim a little lower. Take the “Sketch Artist” music video from No Home Record, where Gordon morphs into a ride-share driver, or the #MeToo-inspired “Hungry Baby” clip.

Kim Gordon’s Body Part 1: The Body | Memo

Kim Gordon’s Body Part 1: The Body

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