KRIENS.- The Museum im Bellpark invited Kim Gordon to conceive an exhibition especially tailored to the setting in the former industrialist’s villa. As the exhibition title, Kim Gordon for Design Office, already suggests, the artist masquerades as if she’d be commissioned by a fictitious design office – a label that Kim Gordon has repeatedly employed since her early exhibitions in order to renounce her identity and authorship as an artist. Within this constellation, the relationship between the exhibiting institution and the artist assumes a prime focus, whereby the evolution of the exhibition and the collaboration become themselves the topic.
An important trajectory in the exhibition revolves around the issue of privacy and publicness. Based on a series of so-called Bedroom Paintings and a video work showing Kim Gordon and her daughter Coco Gordon Moore in their everyday surroundings, the exhibition points to the fact that the private should also be thought of politically.
As suggested by Kim Gordon, the exhibition project also involves the artist Josephine Pryde. What they share in common is the unusual way in which they approach the topics of real estate development, gentrification and urban upgrading. A year ago Josephine Pryde photographically staged Kim Gordon’s canvases – adorned with real-estate-branch advertising slogans – against a background scenery of empty apartments and offices in Kriens and Lucerne. These photos, created using purely analogue techniques, evoke a disconcerting and remote atmosphere. From a different perspective, the photos also refer to the question of how works of art can be documented by photography.
- Ralf Keller
Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director).
Gordon’s artworks include the ongoing ‘Noise Painting’ series, depicting the names of experimental and noise groups; a series of paintings depicting the names of contemporary galleries and gallery owners; works from the untitled ‘From The Boyfriend’ series – Rorschach-like images painted on used denim skirts; ‘Twitter Paintings’ sourced from the Twitter streams of ‘GIRLS’ producer Jenni Konner, critic Jerry Saltz, and artist Richard Prince among others; and her ‘Wreath Paintings’, which employ the decorative folk forms as stencils to produce vertiginous color abstractions. An insistence on dismantling the hierarchical sanctity of the object has become a through line in Gordon’s practice, and in her most recent work, canvases are treated with direct application of paints, resins, glitters and fiberglass, as well as physical manipulation. Performing a painting becomes its own medium, as finished works are crumpled, overturned and flung. Fixed between states of de- and re-composition, battle scars from past performances become gestural abstraction via mischievous punk irreverence.
