Judith Barry

Making the Nature Scene

Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub Danceteria, which served as the setting for a short film Gordon made sometime around 1985. Now, as Dangerous Minds points out, said video has surfaced online thanks to filmmaker/designer Chris Habib (a.k.a. Visitor Design). “Excellent video I found in my Sonic Youth archive,” Habib writes on the clip’s Vimeo page. “I digitized it for Kim during her [early 2000s] CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s old space in the West Village.”

Casual Shopper

Informed by conventions of Hollywood film and television commercials, Judith Barry’s Casual Shopper (1980-81) presents a female protagonist wandering through a seemingly endless array of product displays. The woman both follows and is followed by a male figure, who appears to exist somewhere between reality and fantasy, within a carefully structured and intoxicating elevator-music-filled department store. The piece conflates romantic desire with consumer desire, as both figures perpetually search.