Kim Gordon’s Body Part 2: Kool Things
Kim Gordon grinds handrails with a Jazzmaster, vacuums in MNZ heels, and sings of capitalism’s end while modelling for its tastemakers. Object of Projection channels the aesthetics of resistance, but is it rebellion or just another symptom of “conservative cool”?
In Los Angeles June 6, 2019, another video performance work presented as a part of Object of Projection, Gordon uses her Jazzmaster as a skateboard, grinding handrails, benches, and cornices of downtown LA’s municipal architecture. In interviews, Gordon mentioned she was inspired by the way the Dogtown skaters “repurposed corporate buildings.” Craig Stecyk called Dogtown’s Z-Boys “urban guerillas” in 1976, and their illegal activities in the concrete playground of Santa Monica and Venice eventually made them “rock stars” in their own right. By 1970, the area had become a “seaside slum” and a mecca for the DIY culture of disenfranchised youths.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Kim Gordon’s Body Part 2: Kool Things by Audrey Schmidt is featured in full in Issue 2 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
Amid Barry Humphries’s stage parody and Max Robinson’s near-perfect forgery, Nolan’s Glenrowan Siege lays bare the frailties of provenance, authenticity, and auction authority.
Archie Moore’s “impoverished aesthetic” transforms memory, class, and race into immersive, unsettling worlds. Rejecting the tidy self-disclosure of trauma narratives, his work lingers in ambiguity—neither confession nor critique, but something in between.
