Girl in a Band (25 page)

THE FIRST TIME
Jutta Koether and I met, she was an editor and writer at
Spex
magazine. She was interviewing Thurston and me during our European tour for
Daydream Nation
and seemed confounded by the fact that Sonic Youth, known as a sort of punk rock band, would use the Gerhard Richter candle image for our album cover. In Germany, Gerhard was and is their biggest contemporary artist, but it felt to Jutta as though we'd made a banal, status-quo-oriented artistic decision. After weeks of doing interviews where for the most part journalists asked the same three or four questions, it was great having someone challenge us. To me, Gerhard's cover was an aesthetic Trojan
horse decision—disguising subversion under a benign exterior, just as the Reagan eighties concealed torment and volatility.

Jutta and I became friends. A day after she'd moved to New York, I bumped into her as she was walking down St. Mark's Place, and the two of us started hanging out. She was practicing art but also doing music and art performances.

Over the years Jutta and I began what would become a series of collaborative installations and performances. The first was called
Club in the Shadow
at Kenny Schachter's gallery in the West Village, an unconventional space designed by Vito Acconci. The location was made funnier to me for being situated in an alleyway next to Richard Meier towers filled with multimillion-dollar Hudson River–facing condos owned by people like Calvin Klein and Martha Stewart.

We also did performances—one-act plays, we called them—where we combined text and improvisational noise music. Recently we collaborated on a show at PS1 in New York, for the last night of Mike Kelley's retrospective, and again at the Geffen Contemporary, where Mike's show was opening in L.A. In 2012 Mike was found dead in his home in South Pasadena, an apparent suicide. At PS1, we showed one of Mike's videos behind us in the big dome tent alongside the PS1 buildings. Early on in his career, Mike formed a band with Tony Oursler and others called the Poetics, whose songs boomed from a cassette player onstage, and Jutta and I improvised around them. The text we used came from an old interview Mike once did with me, and Jutta and I switched off being Mike and being me halfway through the performance. It was a pleasure to be able to riff off something Mike had done. It helped make his death seem less final, more a continuation of a dialogue with his work and his ideas, and his sense of humor. It's difficult to think of Mike so defeated and giving up, when for all his life, he never gave up, always wanted to succeed.

I started another band, too. From the beginning, Body/Head, the group I formed with the musician Bill Nace, was a strange concept.
Most people have a really hard time with the idea of improvisation, believing it must not be any good or that it doesn't mean anything. A year after my marriage, and the group, ended, Coco left to attend art school in the Midwest. There were still people living in our house, but it was time to do other things. Starting a new group seemed like an interesting thing to do.

Bill had played in a duo with Thurston, and the three of us had played together a few times. Later, Bill and I started playing in our basement as a duo, recording ourselves on cassettes. The second we came up with a name, we knew we were a band instead of some one-off. I wasn't necessarily trying to get away from Sonic Youth, and I sometimes used Sonic Youth guitar tuning, but as soon as you omit the drums, everything sounds different. I had no desire to do anything that sounded explicitly rock. I'd taken the rock musician thing as far as I could take it. It was more about creating what Bill and I wanted to hear—modern music, noisy, dynamic, emotive, and free. We gave Sonic Youth's label, Matador, the right of first refusal, not really thinking they would want to put it out. But they did, and it was a double LP.

One of our tracks, “Last Mistress,” was influenced by Catherine Breillat's 2007 film,
Une vieille maîtresse
. Breillat had wanted to go to Paris to attend film school, but as a woman they wouldn't let her in. Thinking,
Well, Robbe-Grillet wrote a book that turned into a movie,
she wrote a book. I thought:
How does a girl who came out of a super-strict Catholic-school upbringing in the French provinces develop that level of sophistication? Maybe it was an avant-garde Catholic school.

The best kind of music comes when you're being intuitive, unconscious of your body, in some ways losing your mind: the Body/Head dynamic. But what Bill and I did together didn't necessarily come across as improvisation. Since we played together so much, Body/Head's music was crafted, and inevitably we repeated certain elements in the course of performing. I still considered it music, though—eccentric noise/rock music, as opposed to, say, performance art, which is a term I loathe.
Whenever we performed, we showed a film behind us in slow motion, a collaboration with Richard Kern. It was music as film, as if the audience were observing a film soundtrack. It meant that the crowds we played to brought in fewer expectations. They knew, for instance, I wasn't all of a sudden going to burst out with a Sonic Youth song.

COMING BACK FROM
three weeks in California this past winter made me realize how heavy New York and Northampton now make me feel. In the East, the snow is gray and high and melting, and everyone looks pasty. The memories I have, and the house I still own, are both filled with stuff adorning a life I no longer live, feelings that I no longer have.

I would never have bought our house, or decorated it the way I did, if I weren't trying to create a home. I wanted to give Coco the most normal life possible—something close to the middle-class stability that Thurston and I both knew growing up. The Northampton house is boho
and messy, filled with art and books. But I frankly never felt that a house as big as ours, with all its dark squeaking wood and professorial comfort, was to my taste. It was a compromise, far from the New York sensibility of modern juxtaposed with history, and the L.A. sensibility, that light, transitory, bungalow-like feel.

To get away from the ice and the snow, I spent part of this past winter on top of a hill in Echo Park. My Airbnb host and landlord lived next door, in a similar-looking, similar-feeling house. To live in an almost-unfurnished house was invigorating. I could see the Hollywood sign, all of downtown, and, if the day was clear, almost to the ocean. It was old L.A., no McMansions or wall-to-wall office buildings. Two thousand miles back East I had a huge, three-floor house filled with artifacts relating to a life that no longer felt relevant, but in the glorious L.A. light, I could turn that idea away. Maybe this was how Thurston felt, living, as he was, in London, a hipster boho life unencumbered by any responsibility. He had returned to the life he had back in New York when the two of us first met, although the woman is still with him, and Thurston hasn't really been single, not emotionally, not attentionally, for, as he told someone in a recent interview, six years.

The older I get, the smaller the world seems. Larry Gagosian came back into my life—this time sponsoring a show of my artwork at a house atop Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. Who would have thought I would end up showing with Larry Gagosian?

Last fall, Mark Francis, a well-respected curator who works for Larry in London, put me in a group show with a lot of my favorite painters—Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Chris Wool. The show was named after a Wool painting entitled
The Show Is Over
. Afterward, Mark asked if I wanted to do a small exhibition in L.A., and I said yes. Originally I was hoping to do it at some small, anonymous ranch house—model-home communities have always fascinated me—but the Schindler house in Laurel Canyon turned out to be a perfect location and frame for a series of two dozen wreath paintings I'd been doing, an exhibition I called
Coming Soon
.

To me, wreaths were symbols of pure suburbia—a low form of decoration that could somehow be transformed into something else. I liked the idea of how a wreath, an everyday object, could be, or mean, nothing at all, an object onto which others project whatever they want. Mine were centered, lopsided, Yves Klein blue or multiple ocean blues, copper, silver, gold chrome. I wanted to reframe the idea of staging a house, the way you see on real-estate reality TV shows. The Schindler house had a great indoor/outdoor relationship with nature, a lordly quiet, the light creating drama with its proportions, making it ideal mid-century-modern “house porn.” Nearby on Mulholland, real drama was happening: fire engines, helicopters, and traffic zooming up and down the canyon on a thruway in and out of West Hollywood to Studio City and beyond. Mulholland Drive has more filmic and real-life drama than any other road in L.A., as well as being the favored route of the Manson family for crosstown travel and creepy crawling exploits from their place near Calabasas to Hollywood.

I used the beautiful basement to make all the paintings. A thin layer of clear plastic was placed on the cement floor, plastic so transparent it looked as though I was painting directly on the floor. The wreaths were then layered on top of the canvas on the floor, spray-painted, then removed, the wreath becoming a masking, delineating blank, or negative space, where it had been placed on the surface. As part of the house installation, I flung a pair of leggings on the bedroom floor. Aaron, the Gagosian rep, was free to move them around if he wanted to.
Kim Gordon Design Office
is the way the show was credited, carrying on the name
Design Office
that I started back in the early eighties.

A few days after the show opened, Lisa Spellman asked me officially to join her 303 Gallery in New York, and I said yes to that too. But as much as I'm always trying to move away from performing, music keeps pulling me back in—because in the middle of everything else, I got another invitation to which I also said yes.

Early last spring I took the red-eye from L.A. to New York for several days of practice with Nirvana band members Dave Grohl and Krist
Novoselic. Nirvana was being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the first year of their eligibility, and Dave and Krist decided to ask several women to sing with them, to represent Kurt's voice: Joan Jett, Annie Clark (otherwise known as St. Vincent), Lorde, and me. It was a bold, extremely un–Rock and Roll Hall of Fame gesture, but I was incredibly flattered they asked me and so happy to be with the surviving members of Nirvana, sharing a moment that was taking place almost twenty years to the day after Kurt died.

Dave and Krist had also invited all their old drummers and crew members, most of whom had also worked for us when Nirvana toured with Sonic Youth in the early nineties. The same management, the same record people—they were all at the Barclays Center that night, too. The only people missing the reunion, really, were the other members of Sonic Youth, Kathleen Hanna, and Tobi Vail. As for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame itself, Kurt would have hated being a part of that, but I also think he would have been happy having four women sing his songs.

Onstage I was reminded that Kurt was the most intense performer I'd ever seen. During the show all I could think of was that I wanted to get that same kind of fearlessness across to the audience. I sang “Aneurysm,” with its chorus, “
Beat me out of me,
” bringing in all my own rage and hurt from the last few years—a four-minute-long explosion of grief, where I could finally let myself feel the furious sadness of Kurt's death and everything else surrounding it. Later that night when we sang more songs at a small Brooklyn club and I looked down into the pit and saw both Carrie Brownstein and J Mascis, whom Kurt at one point had asked to join Nirvana, it was like I was home. It was a true nineties reunion for all of us who were there back then. After the Hall of Fame show, Michael Stipe, who had officially inducted Nirvana, came up to me and said, “Your singing was the most punk rock thing to ever happen, or that probably
will
ever happen, at this event.” The best part of the night took place later, at a small metal club in Brooklyn, at an after-
party, where we all performed more Nirvana songs along with J Mascis and John McCauley from Deer Tick.

Then I flew back to L.A. Back to art.

I can still feel in my mind the sensation of making out with someone parked on a hill in front of the Echo Park house. The guy and I had remet at a party through friends the night before. He was charming, and I was super attracted to him, too. Later he gave me a ride home, parking in the middle of my street, on a hill, the motor still running, emergency brake pulled tight. He was a player, I knew that full well, and our good-night kiss turned into a full-on grope. I had to pull away, since I was catching a flight in two hours. He looked shocked, as if to ask,
Gee—you don't want to fuck me right here in the car?
I know, it sounds like I'm someone else entirely now, and I guess I am.