This volume is an intimate consideration of musician Kim Gordon’s brother’s life and art featuring personal photographs and pages from his journals. Following Keller Gordon’s death in 2023, his sister collected mementos—relics from a shared existence spent dipping in and out of one another’s lives over decades—including drawings, photos, poems and the diaries he kept at various stages of lucidity. The Sonic Youth frontwoman also authored a diaristic essay about their childhood, the complexities of family dynamics and the double-edged sword of creating and maintaining legends about those we love and admire. “I know exactly when the myth of my brother started,” she writes. Designed to evoke the format of Keller’s diaries, this volume features facsimiles of his writings, offering insight into the complicated figure of Keller Gordon as well as his sister’s life. Through Kim’s prose and Keller’s own words, Keller extends and destabilizes the form of the biography, foregrounding the fragmented and the imperfect, echoing how memories themselves dissolve and take new shape over time. Kim Gordon is an artist and cofounding member of the bands Sonic Youth and Body/Head, and the author of the memoir Girl in a Band.
Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. Edited by Karen Marta. Foreword by Dakis Joannou. Text by Paul Chan, Frank Guan, John Miller.
Kim Gordon's noise paintings and sculptures blur the boundaries of the page, the stage and the gallery. “I approach music and visual art in different ways; I consider them utterly separate art forms,” says Gordon. “This book brings them together.” Her work embodies a musical subculture, juxtaposing authorship, visualization and the reciprocal influences of multidisciplinary poetic communication. By scrawling their names on white canvases, her series of Noise Name paintings pay tribute to bands such as The Stooges and Pussy Galore. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens organized by the DESTE, this limited-edition volume includes a vinyl record of the performance of Gordon and Bill Nace as Body/Head, which took place on the museum's rooftop, as well as a book with essays by Paul Chan, Frank Guan and John Miller.
Kim Gordon: Noise Name Paintings and Sculptures of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up