ISSUE’s benefit concert series honoring artist Kim Gordon closes with performances pairing Gordon for the first time with I.U.D.— a ferocious female industrial unit of Lizzi Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance) and Sadie Laska (Growing, Extreme Violence)— and with Jutta Koether, acclaimed painter, writer, and member of the artist band XXX Macarena. Having collaborated in the past in performances, installations and videos, the duo of Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon share an unabashed pleasure in disregard for technique. The result is physical, fierce and free.
I.U.D. is a power duo of Lizzi Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance) and Sadie Laska (Growing, Extreme Violence) , who infuse industrial noise with abrasive screams and inventive drum work. Called “minimal, contagious noise" (Artforum), their last album, The Proper Sex, is a creepy, relentless and varied listen, calling on diverse influences ranging from Sparks to Einstürzende Neubauten.
Known as one of the central figures in contemporary painting, Jutta Koether is more than a painter and works actively as a performance artist, musician, writer, and theoretician. Her role as an artist was long reduced to being regarded as a feminist response to a specific scene of the late 1980s in Cologne, Germany. With her translucent color fields, the gestural brush stroke, drawings of female bodies, and the lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she frequently seems to assume positions in contrast to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, and Albert Oehlen. As critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex and as performance artist and musician, however, Koether did not fit the typical image of the art scene of that time. Since the start of her artistic career Koether has sought to make expansion her program. At the same time, it has always been important to her not to take an unequivocal role as an artist, but always to work from several positions. Since coming to New York in the 1990s, she moves in an expanded field of experiment and improvisation, literature and theory in the New York scene. Cooperation with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) often provides her with more important inspiration than the work of other visual artists. It is specifically through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself, which enables a reevaluation of the medium of painting and its potential that is so urgently needed in today’s situation.
Benefit Committee
Matthew Higgs – Director/Chief Curator, White Columns
Branden Joseph – Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University
Charlotta Kotik – Independent Curator
Jay Sanders – Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Dustin Yellin – Artist / Founder, Pioneer Works
Board of Directors
Tom van den Bout, Board Chair, Jeanne Lutfy, Vice Chair, Tony Conrad, Artistic Chair, R. Luke DuBois, Karen Auster, Marianne Berry, Marcus Brauer, Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Forde, Sarah Garvey, David Grubbs, Jeremy Hurewitz, John Latona, Robert Longo, Stephen Maine, Steve Wax.
