Since its inaugural “Elephant Fayre” in 1981, the grounds of the late Peregrine Eliot, the 10th Earl of St German’s estate in the sunswept depths of Cornwall have been home to the annual knees up that is Port Eliot festival.
Attracting swathes of arts buffs, foodies, ex-headbangers and and their newborn children, the festival — situated at the foot of the twinkly neo-gothic Manor house — bears more relation to an extravagant summer garden party than a traditional Glasto-esque festival; the day starting with naked swimming in the muddy creek and ending by dancing till sunrise to Andrew Weatherall’s techno set in a disco in a hedge. Throughout the day there are hundreds of talks, workshops and classes — with everything from Noel Fielding waxing lyrical with a slightly sloshed Bruce Robinson (director of Withnail and I) to Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy pop up tent.
And then comes Kim. This weekend the “Godmother of grunge” and founding member of now-disbanded Sonic Youth (coincidentally founded the same year as Port Eliot) — a band that spearheaded the underground music scene of 80s New York — wandered contently through the Cornish fields. Appearance wise she seems to be unchanged, and there is a quietly unrelenting honesty about her — choppy bleached blonde hair, dark sunglasses and leather ankle boots mirroring the 30-odd years spent stamping the beat into black floored stages. She is instantly recognisable, yet she seems to slip with ease into at least one of the various middle class archetypes that frequents the festival. However, would many of these punters writhe around on the floor playing a howling, wailing guitar solo in a white calico literary tent in front of four hundred Guardian readers? I think not… that said her performance at the festival was eagerly anticipated as one of the highlights.
Followed by a discussion with writer Jamie Brisick, the piece itself – Guitar Performance 2 – was a 10 minute long art-dance piece originally performed in 2007 for the launch of Maggie Nelson’s book Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions and attempted to deconstruct male guitar heroics. And that it did, here are three things we learnt:
1. Kim Gordon never wants to play Teenage Riot ever again
No longer will Kim’s mouth utter the words to define so much of a generation, that kicked off Sonic Youth’s 1988 magnum opus Daydream Nation; “Hey, you’re really it.”
“Certain things you’ve done,” is how she sums it up. We’ll never have our teenage egos stroked by Gordon’s wavering mumur again. Apparently the spirit desire is no longer.
2. Kim Gordon is now a visual artist. Death to the musician label.
On the topic of things dead and done we can say “bye-bye” to musician Kim Gordon and “hello” to Kim the visual artist — an idea that actually has always been at the root of her music career. As described at the very beginning of her “anti-rock” memoir Girl In A Band (2015) she set out to be an artist before deciding to take up the bass, and thus was born Sonic Youth. So now that she is no longer comfortable as a musician it seems almost organic to take the cyclical path back to art — her emotive performance pieces evoking the ideas of the fluxus movement and the early 60s happenings of feminist performance artists like Carolee Schneemann.
3. Rock and roll is a feminist pursuit.
In the talk following her performance, Kim (a pivotal feminist role model for a number of generations of women) explained her piece — talking about her poses and physicality and how she uses them to deconstruct the arrogant heroism of male guitarists. It is often thought that women in bands use their guitars and stature as a way to embody masculinity and to gain power — but Kim, a woman in an otherwise all male band, entirely disagrees. In her piece she rubs the strings of the guitar on the heads and bodies of the male audience members — creating a visceral reverberating subversion of male rock — bringing to mind Hendrix and Pete Townshend’s phallic pyrotechnics. In her eyes rock and roll allows men to behave like women exerting their own inherent femininity — in her own words “the girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience”. Kim Gordon certainly is that girl. All Hail.
Credits
Text Rachel Fleminger Hudson