shelflife by visitor

The nineties weren’t bad. When people collaborated on projects, nobody slapped the presently ubiquitous X between collaborator names. They shoved that X right up there in the only name that matters–the singular brand-name. Executives at companies like Nike enjoy staring robotodreamily out their windows, surveying little fish-bowls like Portland and scheming up new ways to force-feed the notion that they’re not only relevant, but, get this–iconic–down culture’s consumption-addicted blogschlong-worn throat.

Manipulating your perception keeps their cool-consultants, marketing, advertising, publicity and street-team resources busy. Brands today are as iconic as their pockets are deep, their publicists are connected and everyone’s favors are owed. Beyond that, their products are what they are–the same crap they’ve been churning out for the past 20 years in a new colorway on another blog. There’s not much mystery there. There’s no sincere, primal cachet. There’s little style. There’s nothing to merit a glance back 15 years from now accompanied by the single-note sonata of a heartfelt pang of nostalgia for the story of why something was. In the nineties, the dotcom-induced virus of chronic entrepreneurial masturbation was neither as accessible nor pervasive as it is today. Creative people did creative shit because they were creative and they could. They had style to say, and damnit–that saying was gonna be said.

A few organizations came to epitomize merit-based brand-cachet in those years. X-girl was one of them. Kim Gordon, Daisy von Furth, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Chloé Sevigny, Mike Mills, Free Kitten, Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys–they didn’t just wear the stuff–they were all involved in it. They packaged it their way. The shop was their shop. The cuts were their cuts. The visual vernacular was their vernacular. They sampled wisely from a disparate past and a pop-then, but the wells they pulled from were of their personalities–as opposed to the pong-like tedium of the inter-brand quoting so pervasive today.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of old catalogs scanned. I’m making animated gifs of them. This first one is a xeroxed/stapled mini-zine they did in 1994. I’ll post the others in the future if this one goes well. If it’s not animating for you, shut off your fucking iPhone and get on a real computer.

Kim and Jutta curated a radically organic project at Kenny Schachter’s conTEMPorary in the far West Village–the Club in the Shadow. I had a ton of films on a loop upstairs. Kim and I collaborated on a series of videos of artists dancing in the spare, curved steel-mesh, Vito Acconci designed gallery. I shot Alan Licht, Jutta Koether, Karen Finley and Kim each performing to music of their choosing and cranked out a hyper-slow, meditative abstraction of those performances as an edition for the show. Double Leopards, Charalambides, Magick Markers, Alan Licht and a number of other phenomenal bands did sporadic sets. Electrophilia played what I seem to remember being one of their final shows before Steve Parrino’s fatal motorcycle accident. The space was more about sitting on the cold concrete floor and enjoying the ephemerality of whatever it was that would soon no longer be contained within it than it was about absorbing the few things that remained inside it as constants.

Kim printed up a box of membership cards for the club. I think Kenny was giving them away. Maybe they were for sale. I can’t remember. The image on the front is of Monica Lewinsky shuddering at the girth of Thurston’s tip-nibbled, unpeeled banana. It was taken in a trailer backstage at one of the Central Park Wilco/Sonic Youth shows. I have video of this…going down…somewhere. Somehow, though–neither the tropical cock, nor the gash at the end of the Clinton Administration are what make that picture. Thurston’s shirt… The thing people who’ve never been in or toured with a band don’t understand is that the access you gain to incredible t-shirts by driving thru every po’ dunk town in the many armpits of this globe is a luxury few torso’d mortals can really fathom.

These are stills from a video I shot for Rita during an Ecstatic Peace showcase one balmy evening at the Learning Alliance. Rita wrote the story and designed the puppets/sets. Susan Cianciolo designed the puppet clothing. Kim narrated. I’ll write more about this later. I’m a little hurried to finish up some other work.

Kim and I were doing the Free Kitten video for Teenie Weenie Boppie. It was for a Kill Rock Stars VHS video comp. The video’s hilarious, but I’ll save it for another post. I was actually reminiscing about it last night while Monika and I were at a screening of Godard’s Breathless. The scene in Breathless–where Seberg interviews an artist for the Herald Tribune–there’s an off-handed homage to that in the Kitten vid. That scene had me thinking about the video. The video had me thinking about something Kim had given me after we submitted it to KRS. That something got me to searching and then finding led to this post.

So, Fama & Fortune Fanzine–it’s what Kim had given me a copy of shortly after we finished the Teenie Weenie Boppie video. I still have little idea as to what the hell it is. Kim and Mike Kelley put the zine together in 1991. The text is all in German. I haven’t the foggiest as to what any of it means. There are some great photos of tough, beautiful women woven amongst the interviews.  One of these days I’ll remember to ask someone for a translation–or at the very least, the Clif’s Notes.

Kim’s a compulsive omni-maker. A lot of people know her band. Some remember X-Girl. A few remember her role in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Fewer know of the books, columns and articles she’s written. Then there are the exhibits she’s curated, the theater actions she’s directed, the films she’s made and that dancing she did for our film in the pink wig and school girl skirt. There’s also the point of this post–the portraits she’s painted.

I think the first time I noticed her paintings was during a mind-numbing afternoon of troubleshooting an old Apple Performa she had in the Gordon/Moore apartment in NYC. I had this non-functional, artifact of prehistoric computing dismantled on the floor of her office and stood up to refocus my eyes thru the window to Crosby St. Looking back down at the dust-bunny ravaged components on the floor, I caught a glimpse of a basket boiling over with canvases.

“Oh shit. So this is where the cover for Sentimental Education came from.” I guess I hadn’t realized she’d painted that image. I flipped thru the paintings in the basket and shouted across the living room to ask Kim about them. “They’re just something I’m working on. I’m not sure what’ll happen with them. I’ve been giving ‘em to people as gifts. You want some more tea? Hey, Thurston–you want to order some Indian? Chris, you want Indian?” It was like that–just this one-more-thing she was doing.  

I dug back into the eviscerated machine, repaired the power supply and got it all back together and running. The three of us sat down for some Baluchi’s and pondered the direction the internet would ultimately take. It was ‘96 or ‘97, so it was anybody’s guess. Turns out we were all right in our theories of meta-expansion/collapse, content-as-king entertainment hub and advertising-dense wasteland. We finished our meal. I packed up my tools and laptop and headed out to the elevator. Kim popped open their door with a painting in her hands. “Here. You liked this one, right? Take it. Thanks, Chris.” A kiss on the cheek, a salutory wave from Thurston and the elevator dinged.  

Since then, my little collection of Kimstuff’s expanded substantially. Here’s that first painting, side-by- side with one of the others she painted on vinyl a couple of years later.