Kim Gordon and Karen Kilimnik share an opening aglitter with starpower (and plain old glitter)
Kim Gordon's 'Black Glitter Circle.' Melissa Smith
5:47 pm Sep. 10, 2012
“Excuse me ... I’m sorry ... you can’t walk here!” said a young man, grabbing a young woman who was about to walk into a large ring of black glitter set on the floor of 303 Gallery on Friday night.
Black Glitter Circle, a piece by artist and former Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon, was easy to miss, and the young man spent the evening making sure people didn't walk right through it. Yet the subtle work was the centerpiece of Gordon and Karen Kilimnik’s new show at 303. Described in the press release as “an imagined piece of evidence of the rock trance,” the glitter ring representing the circumference of Gordon’s arms “in-spin.” Gordon’s outstretched arms are, apparently, 66 inches in diameter.
Also aglitter were the bevy of contemporary art stars who strode into the gallery, friends of Kilimnik and Gordon, two very notable downtown personalities. Artforum’s Linda Yablonsky chatted with Art Production Fund founder Yvonne Force Villareal. Roberta Smith quickly darted in and made her rounds. Sofia Coppola, daughter in tow, weaved her way through the crowd to speak to Gordon before retreating to an area behind the bar that seemed to be invisibly cordoned off for VIPs. Half Gallery owner (and husband to Cynthia Rowley) Bill Powers eventually found his way back there, as did Carlos Quirarte, co-owner of The Smile restaurant. Mike D. of the Beastie Boys made the briefest of forays through the crowd and right into that back room as well. Artist and lead singer of Gang Gang Dance Lizzie Bougatsos slipped in and greeted friends.
Along with the glitter ring, Gordon also had a wall painting where she used stockings as paintbrushes. Kilimnik, who came to prominence in the '80s as a "scatter artist" (think frenetic collage only messier and on the floor) and later made her name with gestural pop-culture-inflected paintings, had several of her early-'90s "blood drawings" (riffs on the grisly graffiti left during the Manson murders) in the show; a bloody looking "turkey fork" was lying on the floor near her Helter Skelter wall painting, another item underfoot. Her newer work was represented by an array of crudely constructed glitter flags—of Scotland, France, Norway, "Grand Cayman" (actually the flag of the Cayman Islands), Liechtenstein, the United Kingdom, and more. Their titles all begin with "My Judith Leiber bag...," Leiber being the famed designer of kitschy bedazzled clutches, often in the shape of animals. A handmade, childlike messiness characterizes Kilimnik’s work in the show. The flags are patchy, the glitter spread unevenly, with jagged lines separating the different colors.
Each artist also had a video in the show. Gordon's contribution, Proposal for Dance, was projected on the wall at the front of the gallery. In it, two performers (one of whom is Gordon) are in constant motion on the small stage of the Harlekin Bar in Berlin (the piece was recorded live earlier this year). Their faces are often obscured by the angle of the video, which is shot from three vantage points (two close-ups on either side of an overview) in a wide triptych. The performers move and stretch their bodies toward and away from the camera, both strumming their guitars, banging on the amp, creating a rising and falling squall of noise. A dingy, dim, bordello red dominated the flickering background. The video looks as though the camera was swinging from the bar’s overhead lights. Gordon has been playing with concepts of performance and celebrity, a bridge between her life as a rock star and an artist, since the ‘80s.
Killimnik’s video, “Banarama Guilty,” projected on a monitor inside the gallery, provided the evening's most oft-repeated line:
“Only you can set me free/ 'Cause I’m guilty/ Guilty as a girl can be.”
The line from the English pop duo plays repeatedly as short clips of other videos, like that for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” flash on the screen, muddled and mixed with static, test screens, and other flickering images. The work is a blatant fracturing of familiar pop-culture references, mocking and disrupting them, another take on scatter art. People willing to have fun with the video bopped their heads and sang along:
“Only you can set me free/ 'Cause I’m guilty/ Guilty as a girl can be.”
“It’s so funny,” artist Sarah Kurz, 32, said, after removing her headphones, “It’s so great the distance of the sound that she created.”
As the crowd at the gallery began thinning out, those in the know geared up for the post-opening dinner (Kurz's friend had scored them both an invite) and, as the lights were turned off a young man (not the guard from before) knelt on the ground with a small brush in his hand and put the circle of black glitter back together. A few errant feet had swept through.
