Free Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon Page A

early twenties. Rick lived in Westwood Village, which during the early seventies was the only place that had any kind of a scene, a hive for creativity. Rick introduced me to another resident of Westwood Village, his friend Larry Gagosian.
    Larry was hanging out in Westwood, dealing art books in the street. Entrepreneurs always exhibit signs early on of who they’ll become, I guess. Larry had rented an outdoor space, which he subleased to other vendors, in order to create a sort of mini-plaza. There he sold schlocky, mass-produced prints of works by contemporary artists—the kind that appeal to teenage girls or women in their twenties who think of themselves as dreamy romantics—in cheap, ugly metal frames. Marge and I were looking to make money—I was trying to be as financially independent as possible, having watched Keller rely on my parents for years, and being unemployed, and stressing them out, which I didn’t want to add to—so we started working for him.
    Frame after frame—I must have assembled thousands of those things, and the dimensions twenty-four by thirty-six inches are still carved in my brain. It would have been straight-ahead, decent grunt work if Larry had been a good boss, but he wasn’t. He was mean, yelling at us all the time for messing up, being too slow, just plain being . He was erratic, and the last person on the planet I would have ever thought would later become the world’s most powerful art dealer. Larry had abull terrier named Muffin that he was always trying to get rid of, and he once told me that whenever a woman slept over at his place, Muffin would get jealous, and go under the bed and tear up the woman’s clothes with her fangs.
    Eventually I quit working for Larry—I just couldn’t take it any longer—but our paths would keep mixing up again and again.

11
    SOMETIMES I THINK we know on some level the person we’re going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information. I find it strange when people don’t know what they want to do in life. Because even when I was a young kid pushing around clay objects at the UCLA Lab School, I knew I wanted to be an artist. Nothing else mattered. I cringe when I recall Andrea Fraser, the performance artist and one of the most fearless artists I know, using that line in one of her performances to critique art institutions and artist myths: “The exact words are, ‘I wanted to be an artist since I was five.’” Because that was my line.
    My mother always thought I’d become a graphic artist someday, even though I never showed any interest in graphic design (I was a painter/sculptor—all sloppy work, no graphics in sight). Then again she sometimes also told her friends that I’d end up as an interpreter for the United Nations—“She’s so good with people,” she would tell them, though it still confuses me why she’d say something like that about someone so obviously shy and uncommunicative. Eventually both my parents, especially my dad, supported the idea of my pursuing a creative life. Keller’s breakdown might have eroded their expectations, setting the bar that much lower: Kim can do anything she wants as long as she doesn’t go crazy.
    I remember a friend’s older brother interrogating me when I was a teenager: An artist? How are you going to be an artist? What are you going to do if you don’t make it as an artist? What if you fail? Do you have a backup plan? It never occurred to me I would fail. “Your art is very personal,” Danny said to me once. “So it’ll be popular.” Personal is something I still equate with Sunday painters. I still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually—art based on some overriding idea—and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.
    In 1972, I started attending Santa Monica College. By this point, Rick, my then boyfriend, had