Lecture | Branden W. Joseph – Art and Dirt: Kim Gordon’s Aesthetics of Impurity

Art and Dirt: Kim Gordon’s Aesthetics of Impurity

Branden W. Joseph

Before embarking on her path-breaking career as singer and bassist in the band Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon was a key artistic and critical voice in the New York art scene, close to such celebrated figures as Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, John Knight, Robert Longo and Laurie Anderson. Throughout the early 1980s in artist-run publications such as Real LifeZG, Journal, and FILE, Gordon contributed a series of astute analyses of the artistic practices of these and other figures, as well as of the crossovers between art and music. At the same time, she was producing exhibitions and installations under the moniker “Design Office”. In this lecture, Branden W. Joseph, editor of Is It My Body?, a collection of Gordon’s early art writing published this year on Sternberg Press, will discuss the little known range of Gordon’s aesthetic practices and critical views from that time, as well as certain continuations of Gordon’s artistic practice to the present day.

Branden W. Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008) and Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003), which appeared in French translation on Éditions (SIC). His writings have appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art JournalCritical InquiryOctober, Texte zur KunstParkett and Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, as well as in a number of edited volumes and catalogues. He was a founding editor and is currently editorial board member of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by the MIT Press since 2000.

Date: 6.30–8.00pm, Tuesday 1 July 2020

Venue: Old Arts Theatre D, University of Melbourne, Parkville

Presented by the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, in association with Discipline journal, Gertrude Contemporary, and Liquid Architecture.