by Kim Gordon
15
WRITING ABOUT NEW YORK is hard. Not because memories intersect and overlap, because of course they do. Not because incidents and times mix with others, because that happens too. Not because I didn’t fall in love with New York, because even though I was lonely and poor, no place had ever made me feel more at home. It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
I drove east with Mike Kelley. Mike had decided to accompany me cross-country, and maybe peel off and visit some friends. Late at night, exhausted and borderline delirious, we detoured into New Orleans, a city that held out so many mythical, clichéd promises of good times that Mike kept describing it to me as a haven for pleasure.
Every single hotel in New Orleans was booked, which is how Mike and I ended up staying in some flophouse in a sleazy business area, about as far from the thrill and romance of the French Quarter as anyone can get. We woke up the next morning to images of the New Orleans city sidewalk snaking and swirling around the walls of our crappy room. Upside-down secretaries and businesspeople flared around us like an alphabet on fire. It seemed someone had painted over the room window with black paint, leaving only a tiny dot in the center, turning the entire room into an oversized pinhole camera—to my mind, a near-perfect art installation. Mike and I may have been captive in a dank room in a rundown hotel, but the images on all four walls were crisp, fresh, almost like a revelation. It was a moment whose weird sorcery was impossible to explain to anyone, but Mike and I lay there for a long time, staring and giggling at it.
A few days later, we arrived in New York. We stayed at Cindy Sherman’s place down on Fulton Street. It was the first time I’d ever seen Cindy’s work—those early eight-by-ten photos of herself in character on her wall. Mike then drove back home to L.A., and I was officially on my own. I had no money to speak of, which meant I couldn’t even begin looking for a long-term living situation, so for the first few months I stayed with assorted friends and loose acquaintances. I spent two weeks on Fulton Street with a good friend’s younger sister, Elena, who graciously let me stay in her big, beautiful space with its wraparound windows and big loft bed. Elena, who worked in fabric restoration at the Metropolitan Museum, was a sweet, extremely quiet girl who’d somehow managed to maintain her bohemian Mexican-influenced Southern California style of shawls and moccasins even in the harsh wind tunnels of downtown.
New York was in crumbling shape in late 1979 and 1980. During the day, Wall Street bustled with secretaries and other business types, but at night it turned into a postapocalyptic hell, with rats, wrappers, and cans interspersed every few feet with piles of stinking trash, thanks to what felt like a continuous garbage strike. Wherever I walked I kept a good distance from the sides of buildings, fearing rats might come out and attack me. Mysterious graffiti had taken over the doors, garages, and buildings of Soho, with a single word, SAMO, in big block letters everywhere you looked. It turned out later that SAMO was the pseudonym of two graffiti artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz. Jean-Michel was working at the time for the Unique Clothing Warehouse at 718 Broadway. When he and Diaz had a falling-out in the late seventies, Basquiat left his last entry, SAMO IS DEAD, scrawled here and there across the city landscape.
It was all incredibly stimulating. Since I’d lived in Hong Kong, downtown New York, and especially Chinatown, felt familiar. I used to wander through Chinatown with a pork bun in one hand, the smell and the uproar of the city wafting around me, everything new to my senses but familiar, too.
Tabloid newspapers screamed from every city corner—the New York Post, the Daily News, both foreign press to a girl from Southern California. Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen were still dominating the headlines. Nancy had been found stabbed in the bathroom of the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-Third Street. Sid claimed he didn’t know what happened but was arrested anyway, and later released on bail. Four months later he OD’d. The story was dramatic and pulpy, with new tidbits squeezed out every morning and blood-lit from the siren covers of those rags. And then it was over, gone, the newest, latest things taking its place—MOB BOSS HIT, MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME EXPOSED, WOMAN PUSHED ONTO TRAIN TRACKS, CAR CRASH KILLS BEAUTIFUL VIOLINIST.
In contrast to always-new L.A., where everything had its place, New York was a jumble, all colors, shapes, angles, altitudes. The city seemed to care less about money, at least the showing-it-off side, than L.A., where the symbols of wealth surrounded you at all times: a BMW to your right, a Porsche hanging a left, a tall driveway gate, shrubbery concealing someone’s estate. Of course this was before Soho and the art scene exploded, and New York itself turned into a kind of moated kingdom.
After leaving Elena’s on Fulton Street, every couple of months I’d find a different short-term living situation. January, I’d be staying in some Chinatown walk-up with fragmenting plaster walls. February, I’d drag my stuff uptown to apartment-sit for a friend of a friend who was traveling. I crashed with Michael Byron, my old high school boyfriend, and later sublet from Peter Nadin, a friend of a friend, who lived on Chambers Street in a combination gallery and living area. Peter’s space was incredibly dusty, and people who stayed there had to make their way around whatever exhibit was going on that month. The gallery had an overriding concept: every new artist who entered was asked to add something to the artwork on display. Daniel Buren wall stripes topped with someone else’s. A sequence of peepholes placed into a built-in secret passage around the walls. The gallery was almost never visited, making it a kind of silent installation, unseen by anyone except Peter and whoever happened to be passing through. At the time Peter was going out with the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, who later sublet me a corner of her loft.
It was at Jenny’s that I met Mary Lemley, a party girl who owned a guitar that her boyfriend had given her. When Mary and her boyfriend broke up, inexplicably Mary passed that guitar on to me. It was nothing much—a funky, beat-up instrument with the brand name the Drifter on the neck. Still, wherever I went from that point on, the Drifter came with me. When Thurston visited my apartment on Eldridge Street for the first time, he caught sight of the Drifter leaning against the wall. “I know that guitar,” he said.
At the time we barely knew each other. Thurston had been living in New York for four years, since 1976. He’d moved there from the suburbs of Connecticut when he was nineteen and was in a band called the Coachmen, made up of guys from the Rhode Island School of Design. “How can you possibly know that guitar?” I said.
“I know it, and I’ve also played it,” Thurston said. It turned out that he too had crossed paths with Mary Lemley. Later, he would jam drumsticks inside the Drifter during the Sonic Youth song “Eric’s Trip.”
It was a weird, instantaneous connection between us, not that we needed another.
Though I’d never made it to the Sunset Strip as a teenager, I always had a feel for the seediness and sadness there—underneath anything, for that matter, that’s new, flashy, and fresh. I had always loved Andy Warhol, the Strip-like aesthetic that showed up in his movies and in the spray-painted Factory in New York—the use of tacky, impure elements like metallic material and glitter, the lo-fi glamour of it all. Taking a tree branch, covering it over with black glitter, and painting over it to make it crusty and brittle has always reminded me of L.A. architecture. One day I caught a glimpse of Warhol himself crossing West Broadway—the blond-white wig matching the white of his face, the black-framed glasses. It amazed me how in New York celebrities felt free to roam around the city with no one ever hassling them, in contrast to L.A., where famous people hid out in hidden gated hilltop communities. New York felt so much more real. Later when people would ask Thurston or me why Sonic Youth’s music was so dissonant, the answer was always the same: our music was realistic, and dynamic, because life was that way, filled with extremes. The first time we played with Richard Edson, our first drummer, Thurston cut his finger on a piece of unsheathed metal sticking out of his guitar,
where the knob had fallen off. Blood began spurting all over the place, but Thurston didn’t seem to mind or even notice. Richard stopped playing. “God, what are you doing?” he said. “This isn’t civilized.” Thurston heard him and just laughed.
In 1980s New York, there were no Starbucks, no Pret A Mangers, no Duane Reades, but every few blocks you’d run into a Chock Full O’ Nuts, a chain of countertop diners that sold doughnuts, muffins, bagels, and coffee that tasted like hot black water but kept you awake and alert. One of the few things I could afford to eat was Chock Full O’ Nuts corn muffins, grilled and buttered. They didn’t have corn muffins on the West Coast, and the concept of a “regular” coffee, meaning one with milk, was alien to me.
With no money, I had to find some way to make a living. My first job was in a bookstore, the Marlboro, on Fifty-Seventh Street, near the old Horn & Hardart Automat. Over the years Horn & Hardart would morph into Shelly’s New York steakhouse, the Motown Café, and the New York Deli, and today it’s been taken over by the Hilton hotel chain. I was living downtown at a friend’s, and I remember walking the fifty blocks uptown and back to eat, since I didn’t want to spend what little money I had on subway tokens. I also worked as a bus girl at Elephant & Castle, a Greenwich Village restaurant that is one of the few remaining from those days, as well as the graveyard shift at an all-night restaurant on the corner of Twenty-Third and Tenth in Chelsea.
The overnight gig was by far the worst job. In 1980 Chelsea was a dead zone, empty and desolate at night and hardly better during the day. Weirdly enough, I had company at the diner: my old friend and crush from Venice Richie O’Connell—the one who had introduced me to Bruce, the CSNY roadie. Richie was a busboy at the diner and we pulled the overnights together. Richie’s was the first familiar face I saw in New York but not the last.
Even after Sonic Youth’s first two albums came out in the mid-1980s, I kept my day job, working at Todd’s Copy Shop on Mott Street in Little Italy, an area now known as Nolita. Even with a band and a record deal, I still needed a regular source of income. Todd, the owner of the place, was an unofficial Friend to Artists, and his store was a hub for all the local creative types. If you went there, or worked there, you knew which grant everyone was applying for or what art they were making. Jim Jarmusch’s girlfriend, also a filmmaker, worked there with me and would make copies of his scripts for free, and Thurston would come in and make copies of his zine, Killer.
It was thanks to Larry Gagosian, of all people, that I got my first job in the art world, as an assistant in an office Larry shared with Annina Nosei, inside a loft on West Broadway in Soho. Needless to say I couldn’t type, or, for that matter, do much of anything, except Larry knew I was interested in art. Annina was Italian, extremely flamboyant, and had once been married to the art dealer John Weber. Dan Graham always told me it was Annina who discovered John Chamberlain, one of my favorite artists. She was also Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first dealer, infamous for having Basquiat make paintings in her Prince Street gallery basement, which some people found exploitative.
It was kind of Larry to help me out, but it also meant I had to deal with him. He would show up at the loft and try to hug me and I would kick him in the shins. “You fucking asshole,” I would say, and he would just laugh. I just couldn’t take Larry seriously, ever. Over the years I gave him the hardest possible time about exploiting the art world and about his complete absence of credibility as an art dealer. I never, ever dated him, but Larry has made it a point over the years to go around telling people I used to be his girlfriend, which was and is a complete untruth. I’m totally surprised by what Larry became, and just as surprised that he would go around telling people we were involved.
A couple of years ago I ran into Larry at a dinner honoring the artist Richard Prince in Los Angeles. As usual Larry’s hug was unnecessarily long and hard. “You’re the best employee I ever had,” he said, adding, weirdly, “I’ve gotten so much out of you,” and then laughed. His gallery director came up to him then and said, “Oh—you should have her play at your wedding, Larry.” “Oh, are you getting married?” I asked him, and Larry said, “No.”
The Annina Nosei Gallery was a small apartment loft within a West Broadway co-op, across the street from the Leo Castelli and Mary Boone galleries. For most of the downtown art world, West Broadway was New York’s Boardwalk and Park Place. Annina was the public face of the new gallery, with Larry working behind the scenes as her silent partner. Since the gallery was located in a co-op building, by law it couldn’t be used as a commercial space, which is why interested buyers had to make an appointment before they were buzzed up.
I was probably the least qualified person ever to hold down a part-time assistant job, but Annina herself was a portrait of inconsistency as to when, and until what time, she and Larry needed me to be there. I was a disorganized person pretending to be an organized one. I couldn’t type or file. I’d deliberately never learned in order to eliminate the awful possibility of ever toiling nine to five as some guy’s secretary or gal Friday. I could barely get it together enough to answer the phone. The first show at the Annina Nosei Gallery was an exhibition by the artist David Salle. It was Salle’s debut as a picture maker, and it caused a sensation. Salle’s paintings were reminiscent of Picabia, single-color fields with outlines of women appropriated as line drawings, taken from pages of sex magazines, and they sold out almost immediately. One day I picked up the phone to hear a middle-aged female voice asking if there were “any green Salles” left; she wanted to match Salle’s art to the color scheme of her living room furniture. It’s all such a joke, I remember thinking, the cliché of it all.
Years afterward, a friend of mine who sat next to David Salle at a formal dinner party reported that Salle told her I was the worst assistant he’d ever met in his life. I was so surprised he even remembered me with my Swedish clear glasses, bad clothes, and short blond-brown hair—the East Coast weather had sucked away most of the blond. I couldn’t help laughing.
It was a strange time in the New York art world, the beginning of what would eventually become a commercial feeding frenzy, with the artists themselves becoming overwhelmed by their own exaggerated early success. If the 1970s art scene was about politics and justice, the 1980s had brought back painting. They had also created an investor’s market. Galleries, not museums, were the go-to destinations and overnight, art buying became an investment, linked to fashion, money, and the good life. Money was in the air, but so were AIDS and the controversy of politicians quarreling over National Endowment for the Arts funding. No collector wanted to be left behind or left out. Graffiti taggers were suddenly seen as both cool and collectible, and art gallery owners were becoming almost as well-known as the artists they exhibited. Mary Boone started trolling for the hottest young downtown stars. Launched by two employees from the Castelli Gallery and Artists Space, Metro Pictures opened up a big gallery in Soho, and their first exhibition included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Richard Prince. Later, when the galleries got priced out of Soho, Metro Pictures would be the first gallery to move to Chelsea.
Women artists were making waves, too. The feminist artist Barbara Kruger, who had a background in design, layered images and texts centered around what the commercial world was telling everyone about power, sex, consumerism, and identity. By combining black-and-white magazine photos with stark white words pressed against red—Your Body Is a Battleground or I Shop Therefore I Am—Barbara faced down the viewer, and it could be uncomfortable, too, which appealed to me. Her art was all about blowtorching clichés, and so was the work of Jenny Holzer, an artist who started with posters as a format, and then later projected LEDs against giant buildings and billboards, with fiats like You Are My Own, or just My Skin. There was also Louise Lawler, who took on what was happening in the art world—the commerce, the fact that some in-demand artists now had waiting lists, the phenomenon of beauty becoming the object of a supply-and-demand market—and turned it into photographs of artwork on mus
eum walls or inside the homes of rich collectors, and others of spectators shuffling past sculptures or installations in galleries and museums.
At some point Annina started asking my advice and opinions on art, and whether she should take on this or that new young artist. I began visiting the studios of artists I met through the gallery, people like Michael Zwack and Jim Welling. A couple of years ago, a painting by the abstract painter Brice Marden was auctioned at Sotheby’s for nearly eleven million dollars, but in 1980 Larry would ask me to walk one of Marden’s fragile paintings, completely unwrapped, across the street to 420 Broadway. I began to entertain the fantasy of someday becoming a legitimate gallery curator, especially when Annina told me she would let me curate my own show once she moved to her new commercial gallery space on Prince Street.
One day, a young artist named Richard Prince came into the gallery with a portfolio of rephotographed watch ads. Aesthetically the pieces were way too conceptual to be a good fit with the gallery, and what stuck out immediately were the familiar generic metal frames enclosing them. I joked with Richard, giving him a hard time for using Larry’s signature awful frames, and the two of us began hanging out.
The hot artists’ hangout at the time was a place called Mickey’s, at One University Place, started by the same Mickey who owned Max’s Kansas City. Mickey’s vibe was utilitarian chic—low-key tables and chairs, nothing fancy, but at the same time intimidating to me as an art-world outsider. At Mickey’s I would see the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, friendly, charming, and always fun to talk to, and his wife, Alice, an eternally refreshing contrast to the art world’s general free-floating pretension and angst. Before his career took off, Julian Schnabel worked at Mickey’s as a cook—Schnabel later became the very symbol of the gathering, spinning tornado of artistic commercialization. One night Richard and I found ourselves at Mickey’s with an up-and-coming artist named Jeff Koons. With the exception of Richard, pretty much no one liked Jeff. In an era of appropriation without consequences, Koons had a show at the Mary Boone Gallery made up of standing vacuum cleaners behind plastic, and a lot of people hated it. The artist Sherrie Levine would eventually get sued when she re-represented Walker Evans photos in her work, whereas Jeff, it seemed, got away with serving up Duchamp.
