‘During a Q&A session, the artist described the circumstance in which she was in: “to be existing as an object of projection”^’‘[1]

Kim Gordon’s depiction of her place as an artist, as an object of projection, comes across as peculiar in an exhibition where the elements are not entirely coincidentally mostly based on video installations and projections. Asserting herself as the main character in everything she presents here, Gordon focuses the camera on herself, her music, her journeys and the performative act itself.

Kim Gordon’s Object of Projection exhibition at gnration occupies the entire venue, spread across gallery one, gallery zero, room zero and the inner courtyard. When entering gallery zero, we find two objects where the circular figure, based on a mirror in Wreath Mirror and on the floor in Black Glitter Circle, indicates a sense of journey, of place, a sign of a presence. These elements are supplemented by the piece Proposal for a Dance, offering the viewer signs of a performative act not directly presented on a piece of paper. The latency of the artist’s figure central to the entire exhibition builds a presence through the trail and material influence left behind. This non-figurative preface is materialised in the next room where, as a complement to the text, there is an installation of three video screenings that show the artist in a hectic gig with backing musicians.

Kim Gordon’s work and the sound we hear in this exhibition instantly interrogate the contextualisation of her musical production, framing her sound work within a noise output that materialises the transgression of the barrier between the musical and the non-musical, the artistic and the non-artistic experience. As defined by Paul Hegarty: ‘ Noise is negative: it is unwanted, it is something else, it is not well-ordered. It is negatively defined – which means by what it is not (it is not an acceptable sound, it is not music, it is not valid, it is not a message or a meaning), but it is also a negativity. Simply put, it does not exist independently, as it is solely in relation to what it is not. It also helps to structure and define its opposite (the realm of meaning, law, regulation, goodness, beauty, etc).‘[2]

Musical production’s embrace of a transgressive act, of constantly questioning the nature of the musical, is echoed in feminism’s appreciation of that which is defined only negatively. If Kim Gordon’s music attempts to promote a constant re-evaluation of our musical perception, it becomes an object of projection throughout the exhibition, offering visitors the opportunity to find their private side. The latter, far from being characterised by abstract music, is embedded in the material transformation it has undergone. This is precisely why, in line with the elements already described, we find large digitally labelled pictures of hotel rooms in the inner courtyard, drawing paths that resemble invisible movements through these spaces. Kim Gordon’s constant interaction, always carrying her guitar with her and using it as repeated interference, is also evident in room zero, featuring a video piece in which the artist walks around and sonically interacts with the spaces she goes through, mostly large skyscrapers or locations associated with prosperity and wealth. Representative of this transgressive movement, Kim Gordon’s musical production seems to literally invade and contaminate the spaces and objects. In opening up the musical to the non-musical, this movement removes artistic agency from human exclusivity, handing it back to the machine, to the non-human.

This defying of human agency’s purity and translucency, using noise, the random, the mechanical, intersects with the decentralisation of humans as the defining figure of patriarchal society. Sadie Plant writes that ‘like women, any thinking machines are accepted under the understanding that they have a duty to honour and obey the members of the species to which they have been made slaves: the members, the males, the man’s family. But self-organising processes multiply, connections are continually made, and complexity becomes incrementally intricate.’[3] The act of stripping non-human agency of the trappings of human enslavement liberates noise from its quality as noise. This movement not only seems to be associated with Kim Gordon’s musical/sound production, but also with the way in which her very presence as an object of projection highlights the conflict between women and their ontological dependence on the figure of man. Amy Ireland writes: ‘Like Dionysus, she is always looming from the outside. The condition of her admission to the game is the mute confinement to the negative expression in the dialectics of identity that reproduces Man as the master of death, desire, nature, history and his own origin. Women are defined beforehand as a shortcoming. (…) Machines, women – demons, if at all – line up on the dark side of the screen: the inhuman surplus of a black circuit.”[4]

This relationship is particularly visible in the last major video installation in gallery one, where we see a film that, referencing Chantal Akerman ‘s Jeanne Dielman in a clear way, shows Kim in long static shots going through her domestic routines, always with a guitar around her neck, constantly struggling and interacting with her surroundings, making noises. As a legacy to Chantal Akerman’s film and its feminist potential, the invasion of spaces by Gordon’s noise is not intentional; it is imposed on her daily life, as a woman still subject to the society in which she operates. As Plant says, ‘The phallus and the eye stand in for each other, favouring light, vision and an escape from the dark, damp matters of the feminine. (…) Whereas the woman has nothing to be seen where the man thinks the member should be. There is only a hole, a shadow, a wound, a ‘sex that is not one’.‘”[5] A constant conflict between work and home life, music and non-music, man and woman. All that remains is for the woman to be the noise.

The exhibition is open at the gnration until April 5.

[1] Lawrence English on the exhibition sheet.

[2] Hegarty, P (2007). Noise/Music. p. 5.

[3] Plant, S. (2000). On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, p. 329.

[4] Ireland, A. (2017). Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come, p. 2-3, 4.

[5] Plant, S. (2000). On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, p. 327. Tradução livre