Kim Gordon

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story—a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith's Just Kids. Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon opens up as never before in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her family, growing up in California in the '60s and '70s, her life in visual art, her move to New York City, the men in her life, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her music, and her band, Girl in a Band is a rich and beautifully written memoir. Gordon takes us back to the lost New York of the 1980s and '90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, and the Alternative revolution in popular music. The band helped build a vocabulary of music—paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. But at its core, Girl in a Band examines the route from girl to woman in uncharted territory, music, art career, what partnership means—and what happens when that identity dissolves. Evocative and edgy, filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a transformative life, Girl in a Band is the fascinating chronicle of a remarkable journey and an extraordinary artist.

A Memoir

Girl in a Band

Ranging from neo-conceptual artworks to cultural analyses, the writings

Selected Texts

Is it My Body?

An illustrated portrait of the life and work of Kim Gordon, one of the great musical icons of the last forty years and a founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women. Kim Gordon is best known as the bassist, vocalist and founding member of the legendary rock band Sonic Youth, one of the most influential and successful bands to emerge from the post-punk New York scene. Although her artwork is not as well known as the band, Gordon is also taken seriously in the art-world, exhibiting in museums and galleries worldwide. This illustrated scrapbook is an edgy and evocative portrait of Gordon's life, art and style. Spanning from her childhood surfing in California in the 60's and 70's, to New York's downtown art and music scene in the 80's and 90's where Sonic Youth was born. Depicted through unpublished personal photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, fashion editorials and advertising campaigns, interspersed with Gordon's song lyrics, art works, private objects and ephemera, theoretical art writings and even a handful of her favourite recipes.

No Icon

In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story. She writes frankly about her route from girl to woman and pioneering icon within the music and art scene of New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as marriage, motherhood, and independence. Filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a remarkable life, Girl in a Band is a moving, evocative chronicle of an extraordinary artist.

Sinéad Gleeson

Essays on Music

This Woman's Work

Chronicles Vol.1

Hilton Als

Jutta Koether

A limited-edition artist reference by a founding member of Sonic Youth is a treasury of watercolors, photographs, and texts that offer insight into indie-underground culture while drawing on insights from a range of media to create an extension of the artist's portfolio.

Performing/guzzling

Dan Graham

Rhea Anastas

Bennett Simpson

The first comprehensive survey of a pioneering artist, encompassing photographs, film and video, architectural models, pavilion installations, conceptual projects for magazine pages, drawings and prints, and writings. Dan Graham is one of the most significant figures to emerge from the 1960s moment of Conceptual art, with a practice that pioneered a range of art forms, modes, and ideas that are now fundamental to contemporary art. The thrust of his practice has always pointed beyond: beyond the art object, beyond the studio, beyond the medium, beyond the gallery, beyond the self. Beyond all these categories and into the realm of the social, the public, the democratic, the mass produced, the architectural, the anarchic, the humorous. Graham's early work, Homes for America—a series of snapshots of suburban New Jersey tract housing accompanied by short parodic texts, made as a page layout for Arts magazine—announced a critical art grounded in the everyday, and it merged the artist's interest in cultural commentary with art's most advanced visual modes. His 1984 “video-essay” Rock My Religion traced a continuum of separatism and collective ecstasy from the American religious sect the Shakers to hard-core punk music. This volume, which accompanies a major retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, offers the first comprehensive survey of Graham's work. The book's design evokes magazine format and style, after Graham's important conceptual work from the 1960s in that medium. Generously illustrated in color and black and white,Dan Graham: Beyond features eight new essays, two new interviews with the artist, a section of reprints of Graham's own writing, and an animated manga-style “life of Dan Graham” narrative. It examines Graham's entire body of work, which includes designs for magazine pages, drawing, photographs, film and video, and architectural models and pavilions. Essays: Chrissie Iles on Graham's performance work • Bennett Simpson on Graham's interest and works in rock music • Beatriz Colomina on Graham's architectural pavilions • Rhea Anastas on Graham's early formation and short-lived operation of the John Daniels Gallery • Mark von Schlegell on Graham's interest in science fiction • Mark Francis on Graham's Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) •Alexandra Midal on Graham's conceptual works for magazine pages and magazine design • Philippe Vergne on Graham's puppet opera Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty (2004) • Kim Gordon interview with Graham on their collaborations and music • Rodney Graham interview with Graham on jokes and humor in art

Beyond

Richard Phillips

Liam Gillick

Karl Holmquist

Sinead Gleeson

Edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson, this powerful collection of award-winning female creators shares their writing about the female artists that matter most to them. This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music is edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson and features an array of talented contributors, including: Anne Enright, Fatima Bhutto, Jenn Pelly, Rachel Kushner, Juliana Huxtable, Leslie Jamison, Liz Pelly, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Megan Jasper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Simone White, Yiyun Li, and Zakia Sewell. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story—like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship. This Woman’s Work also features writing on the experimentalists, women who blended music and activism, the genre-breakers, the vocal auteurs; stories of lost homelands and friends; of propaganda and dictatorships, the women of folk and country, the racialized tropes of jazz, the music of Trap and Carriacou; of mixtapes and violin lessons.

Matthew Higgs

Christian Marclay

Jennifer Gonzalez

Christian Marclay is a New York-based, Swiss American artist who emerged in both the contemporary art and music scenes during the 1980s. He works across numerous visual media - sculpture, installation performance, found objects and collage - along with music and its artifacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art. Also a respected composer and DJ. he has collaborated with John Zorn and Elliott Sharp, among many others. In his visual works he sometimes simply evokes the memory of music, as in The Beatles (1989), a pillow crocheted out of Beatles audio tapes. Elsewhere he examines the cliched images of music-making, for example those found on LP record covers, charismatic, classical music conductors, smiling Easy Listening girls and sultry rock stars. These are then carefully sewn together to form hybrid figures echoing the splicing of the music itself (Body Mix, 1991-93). Marclay has presented his unique sound-and-vision works at the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1991 and 2002, and at the Venice Biennale, 1995 and 1999, among many other key international exhibitions. A major travelling retrospective of his work originated at teh Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2003 and ended its tour at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2005. The highlight is his tour de force, Video Quartet (2003), a four-screen installation largely combining Hollywood film clips associated with music, edited together with virtuoso precision.

Kim's Bedroom

In the early 1980s, Kim Gordon, along with her future husband, Thurston Moore, and guitarist Lee Ranaldo, formed one of the most innovative, influential, and prolific bands of the American independent music scene, Sonic Youth. Girl in a Band is the first-person account from one of rock's greatest female icons, a woman who, like Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, or Marianne Faithfull, fought to find her place in an overwhelmingly masculine and often sexist world. This book critically explores the point of view of a woman who forged a path for herself in a world where testosterone still rules.

La Chica del Grupo

Simbolo di un’intera generazione di donne, in Girl in a Band Kim Gordon ci fa rivivere il suo percorso da ragazza a donna, da musicista ad artista. Fondatrice, insieme al marito Thurston Moore, dei Sonic Youth, iconica band che ha costruito un nuovo vocabolario musicale – aprendo la strada a Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins e molti altri tra cui, in Italia, ai Marlene Kuntz – Kim Gordon ci regala un memoir che racconta, con profonda sincerità, la sua storia pubblica e privata: dagli anni di formazione nella West Coast alla schizofrenia del fratello maggiore Keller, fino all’incontro con il mondo dell’arte, della moda e del cinema. E ai rapporti con gli altri musicisti, fittissimi: da Kurt Cobain, raffigurato come un fascio di furia e dolcezza, a Jeff Koons e Billy Corgan, che «non piacciono a nessuno», passando per Neil Young e il suo chitarrista Poncho Sampedro, che invece sono «ok». Girl in a Band è il racconto in parole delle immagini e dei suoni di un mondo colto in un momento di profondo cambiamento: il viaggio straordinario di un’artista e con lei di un’attitudine che sta ancora influenzando la nostra cultura.

Kim Gordon

About

Books

Join the club