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Kim Gordon’s Other Life

The art star queen of New York cool has started afresh in the creative
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Sandy Kim for The New York Times

By Alex Williams

Published Sept. 14, 2019 Updated Sept. 16, 2019, 11:45 a.m. ET

LOS ANGELES — Kim Gordon is synonymous with New York.

It was in New York that Ms. Gordon helped found Sonic Youth,
probably the most influential New York art-rock band since the
Velvet Underground.

It was in New York that Ms. Gordon became a fashion influencer,

blending 1980s thrift store campiness with 1960s Anita Pallenberg
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But that Kim Gordon does not exist anymore.

Nearly a decade removed from a rancorous split from Sonic Youth

and her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, Ms. Gordon, 66,
is a solo act in every sense of the term: an ex-rock star, an ex-wife
and, yes, an ex-New Yorker.

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Ms. Gordon is now a full-time artist and sometimes-musician,

living in a four-bedroom house in the Franklin Hills section of Los
Angeles, some 2,800 miles from the city that enshrined her.

Sonic Youth backstage at the Paradiso music hall in Amsterdam in 1986. From left,
Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Kim Gordon.
Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty Images

Her handsome hillside home is decorated in a tasteful West Coast

style, with tattered Moroccan rugs scattered on blond oak floors,
midcentury furniture and artwork by friends like Christopher
Wool, Rita Ackermann and Richard Prince.

Her house is also filled with framed photos of her daughter, Coco
Gordon Moore, 25, an artist and poet living in the Bedford-
Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

What’s missing — aside from a footstool emblazoned with the

black-and-white illustration from Sonic Youth’s 1990 major-label
debut, “Goo” — is any visible reminder of the band that made her
famous. Or the man she became famous alongside.

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The truth is worth it.

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On a recent visit to her Los Angeles home, a few weeks before her
first solo album, “No Home Record,” drops, she summarized her
thoughts on Sonic Youth and Mr. Moore, in three short words.

“I’ve moved on,” she said.

Lost Angeles
“California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because
they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they
want,” Ms. Gordon writes in her 2015 autobiography, “Girl in a
Band.”

That may sound like a rather gloomy New York take on sunny Los
Angeles, but they are notes of a native daughter. Ms. Gordon grew
up in Los Angeles, and on a cloudless August morning, with
temperatures pushing 90, she was steering her black Toyota Prius
through eastern Hollywood on a tour of her reclaimed city.

“I always feel like wherever I am, I sort of take that energy on, and
I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be motivated enough in L.A.,”
Ms. Gordon said, as the Prius lurched through weekday traffic.

She was dressed in an earth-tone blouson dress with hints of tie-

dye and shimmery gold sandals that showed off her lemony toenail
polish, but it would be a stretch to call her “sunny.” Yet neither was
she the aloof subject that came across in piles of magazine
interviews during the Sonic Youth years, in which she tended to
defer to her professorial husband, standing by like a rock ’n’ roll
sphinx.

Now, she smiled easily and in Southern California fashion, tended

to punctuate sentences with a girlish giggle, even when no joke
was uttered. But she was vastly more comfortable talking in
abstraction, particularly about art, than about herself.

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“There was no center, so there was no gravitational pull,” she said,

as her hybrid car fell silent at a stoplight. “In New York, you can
just feel the buzz of activity around you. Even if you’re not yet
participating, you kind of feel like you’re doing stuff. It was sort of
comforting to me as a sort of restless soul.”

Ms. Gordon at her home in the Franklin Hills section of Los Angeles.
Sandy Kim for The New York Times

Born in Rochester, she moved to California when she was 5 after

her father, a sociology professor, took a job at the University of
California, Los Angeles.

Coming of age when the age was Aquarius, she recalls sitting
around in her suburban-like bedroom painting, smoking pot and
listening to Joni Mitchell as she dreamed about the creative
ferment of Laurel Canyon, the Valhalla of Los Angeles rock where
Ms. Mitchell, along with the likes of Cass Elliott (Mama Cass) and
Neil Young, lived.

But New York was where the art was, and Ms. Gordon, who
graduated from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, knew she had
to be there. “I felt painfully middle-class,” Ms. Gordon said. “I hate
the phrase ‘reinvent yourself,’ but it was kind of like I had to live in
New York to become who I always wanted to be.”

She arrived at an auspicious time. In 1980, New York was still

chaotic and dangerous — even TriBeCa was a little dicey — but if
you made it to the Mudd Club on White Street in one piece, you
could rub shoulders with Lou Reed, Debbie Harry or Jean-Michel
Basquiat.

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Ms. Gordon shopped for Warhol superstar outfits at the Patricia

Fields boutique on Eighth Street and learned to play bass from
artist friends like John Miller. She worked in the office of Larry
Gagosian, when he was starting out as an art dealer, and once,
when she was at Jenny Holzer’s apartment, a woman she just met
gave her a beat-up Drifter guitar.

Not long afterward, a very tall musician named Thurston Moore,

whom she knew vaguely, dropped by her Eldridge Street
apartment and said, “I know that guitar.” Her life as an artist was
about to take a very long detour.

Ms. Gordon and Mr. Moore in Memphis in 1995.

John Zich/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

But that was a different time in her life, and after Giuliani,
Bloomberg and a tsunami of Wall Street money, that New York is
no more. As she writes in her book: “That city I know doesn’t exist
anymore, and it’s more alive in my head than it is when I’m there.”

The Los Angeles she has returned is also very different from the
one she left in 1980: For one thing, the city is awash with expat
artists and designers from New York who are seeking a creative
paradise under the sun.

After touring her hillside home, she wanted to head over to

MacArthur Park to visit a space shared by the art galleries Reena
Spaulings Fine Art and House of Gaga for a show featuring works
by Jill Mulleady and Larry Johnson.

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But as she drove down Normal Avenue, she pulled the Prius over
in front of a Virgil Normal. It calls itself a “gender fluid lifestyle”
boutique and sells skater-inflected clothing by indie designers.
With its ironic sweatshirts, designer baseball caps, and kitschy
1970s curios, it feels like a 2019 update on the funky boutiques of
the East Village in the 1980s.

“It’s quintessentially L.A., in the best sense,” Ms. Gordon said. “It
supports a lot of young people in their endeavors with free-form
small events that don’t feel commercial. It feels spontaneous.”

“New York,” she said, “feels like one big shopping mall.”

Seeking Bohemia
Her breakup with New York was not the only reason she left.

Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Gordon and Mr. Moore were
bouncing between a loft on Lafayette Street in SoHo and a house in
Northampton, Mass., where they moved to raise their daughter
away from New York pressures.

The end of their marriage came quickly.

As she recounts in her memoir, she grew suspicious that her

husband was seeing another woman when a friend noticed that he
had switched cigarette brands. Before long, Ms. Gordon was
finding intimate text messages. She confronted him. They tried
counseling. It was not enough.

Ms. Gordon says she does not spend much time thinking about her rock ’n’ roll past.
Sandy Kim for The New York Times

By late 2011, in what would turn out to be Sonic Youth’s final

concert, the stage in São Paulo, Brazil, reminded Ms. Gordon of a
kitchen where “the husband and the wife pass each other in the
morning and make themselves separate cups of coffee,” she writes,
“with neither one acknowledging the other, or any shared history,
in the room.”

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A marriage of alt-rock’s first couple was over.

(“Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” wrote Jon
Dolan, a rock critic for Grantland, capturing the collective angst of
Sonic Youth fans.)

Her memoir, a highly out-of-character tell-all, was in part an

attempt “to figure out how I got to where I was in my life,” she said.

But there was a more practical reason. “I had to find another way
to make money,” she said, “because when the band broke up, it was
my primary source of income.”

After the book came out, she considered that chapter closed. She
would not be talking about her husband anymore. And indeed, over
the course of that day, she mentioned him only once, albeit rather
affectionately, in a conversation about wearisome questions from
journalists.

(“People doing interviews would always say, ‘So the name is Sonic
Youth. You’re how old?’ Thurston always had a good comeback:
‘Well, the Rolling Stones aren’t literally ‘rolling stones.’”)

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With her marriage and the band over, and her daughter out of
college, there was a lot less keeping her on the East Coast. A move
to Los Angeles would provide a clean break and a new adventure.

She considered Venice Beach, where she had lived in the early
1970s, but it was losing its bohemian edge, she said (“You have
tech companies taking over.”) After an Airbnb stay in Echo Park
(“a little too hipster-ish”), she settled on Franklin Hills in Los Feliz,
where she bought a 1930s “mullet style” home (one story in front,
two stories in the rear).

She redid the kitchen and front garden, added two rear decks with
views of downtown Hollywood, and furnished it with new items. “I
didn’t want to bring stuff,” she said.

Los Angeles also offered a blank canvas to create art.

Ms. Gordon is tired of being called an “icon.” Sandy Kim for The New York Times

Although Ms. Gordon has worked as an artist since the 1970s (her
first solo exhibit was at White Columns in New York in 1981), she
showed sporadically throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and is now
represented by 303 Gallery in New York.

A solo show earlier this year at the Andy Warhol Museum in

Pittsburgh, “Lo-Fi Glamour,” featured graffiti-like paintings
scrawled with gut-punch slogans like “#You Don’t Own Me.” It
closed this month.

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And currently on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in

Dublin is “She Bites Her Tender Mind,” which uses Ms. Gordon’s
recent Airbnb stays in Los Angeles to meditate on the meaning of
home (a subject she also explores on the new album with her song
“Airbnb”).

“People are looking at this utopian weekend getaway as trying on a

different lifestyle,” she said. “It appeals to a fantasy. It’s like a clean
slate.”

After the detour at Virgil Normal, Ms. Gordon parked the car near
MacArthur Park in Westlake a neighborhood that has seen the
arrival of luxury lofts, restaurants and, yes, galleries.
Gentrification is a topic that figures prominently in her work.

“It’s unfortunate that artists are often on the front lines of

gentrification, because they’re looking for cheap places, too,” she
said. “There really isn’t the money here,” Ms. Gordon added, as she
perused works by Juliana Huxtable and Reynaldo Rivera in the
soaring brick-walled gallery. “Hollywood money is not Wall Street
money, to be quite crude about it.”

Indeed, artists in Los Angeles are freer to flourish, and fail —