Opening Friday march 17, 20.00h

In Kim's Bedroom, conceptualizer and guest curator Kim Gordon (SonicYouth) introduces the spectator to an extraordinary, personal world in which visual arts, photography, film/video, fashion and music have come together. The project includes an exhibition, a music performance, a film night and a publication with CD.
The artists Gordon invited are either active in more than one domain or at the crossovers of the disciplines mentioned before. The layout of the exhibition is a striking interplay of the distinctions between public and private, inside and outside, fantasy and reality. The MU space has been transformed into an interior referring to a film set. A curved wall leads the spectators via a succession of works by Jessica Wood, Jutta Koether, Kim Gordon, Rita Ackermann, Spike Jonze, Sophia Coppola, Richard Kern and Raymond Pettibon to the focal point of the exhibition. In this intimate space, the bedroom, one of the artworks is an installation by fashion designer Susan Cianciolo.
In this 'homely' environment, the audience is invited to see themselves - and obviously to be seen - in the Cianciolo designs. In the bedroom, the audience can make their own selection from video films by Tamra Davis, Sadie Benning, Cameron Jamie, Tony Oursler, Dave Markey, Lisa Rinzler, Kathleen Hanna and Kim Gordon.
With the presentation of Kim's Bedroom, MU has realized an exciting project in which recent developments in contemporary art are shown in juxtaposition. The majority of the participating artists have come up with new works for the exhibition.
During the opening of the exhibition, the publication designed by Purple in Paris will be presented. This publication contains works by most of the artists participating in Kim's Bedroom, and includes a CD. The music performance will start at 9pm on Saturday 18 March 2000 in Cultureel Centrum De Effenaar. Participating musicians are Quix-o-tic, Steve Malkmus, Jim O'Rourke, Ikue Mori, DJ Olive, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. On Sunday 19 March, from 8pm onwards, films and videos by Raymond Pettibon, Dave Markey, Cameron Jamie and a selection from the video recordings of the exhibition will be shown in the Rembrandt Cinema.
The images don't show the work that is presented at MU.

CD
The CD, which will be part of the Purple Book, is to contain material selected by Kim Gordon. The selection will be made up of music and sounds created by participating artists, as well as feature contributions by musicians deemed fit within the atmosphere of the project as a whole. A choice is going to be made form contributions by the following artists: Loren Mazzacane, Chan Marshall, Julie Cafritz, Michael Morely, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, DJ Olive, Ikue Mori, Kim Gordon, Rita Ackermann, Jutta Koether, Kathleen Hanna, Yoshimi (Boredoms), John Fahey, and Adris.

Purple Book
The publication will contain material by most of the participating artists. It will be designed and published by Purple.
Purple is a magazine that was founded in 1992 by a group of young critics, artists and curators. Their program was to create a new kind of space for artists to present their work and express their ideas; and to design a network through which people working in different disciplines, could easily access new information and each other.
14 issues later, Purple continues to evolve and refine its original program. A typical issue features interviews, articles and presentations covering a wide range of topics and disciplines which include; film and video, politics, fashion, architecture, sexuality, science, photography and music. Each issue is built around a loose theme which serves to create a link between subjects--past examples have been: Indian Summer, Violet Violence, Post-Sex. Since its inception Purple has expanded to include the Purple Fashion, Purple Sexe, and Purple Fiction modules. The texts are written in roughly equal parts French and English, without translations.

Kim Gordon
Kim Gordon was born in 1953 in Los Angeles. She has been living and working in New York since 1980. She graduated form the Otis College of Art and Design in LA She worked for several Soho art galleries in the early 1980s. At Jo Bear’s request she compiled an exhibition for his new White Columns gallery in 1982. Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler were among the participants in this show. Dan Graham invited her to join in a performance of am all female rockband, which marked the start of her first bang CKM. Together with Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo and Richard Edson she formed Sonic Youth in 1981. Kim has been a member ever since. With Sonic Youth she has made numerous albums and has performed in all major rockclubs and festivals in Europe, Japan, Australia and America. In 1992 together with Julie Cafritz she founded Free Kitten. Kim Gordon directed videos for The Breeders, she co-produced Hole’s album Pretty on the Inside and in 1994 she started the clothing line X-girl. In 1996 Gordon was involved in an exhibition entitled Baby Generation at Parco gallery in Tokyo. This November Kim Gordon is releasing a record with DJ Olive and Ikue Mori.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1968, Ackermann currently lives and works in New York. Ackermann is best known for her paintings of young female characters. Richly painted these works explore issues of sexuality, danger, and ambiguity. The paintings resist definition, and are often times described in contradicting terms. They at one moment pursue an utopianism, while in the next moment carry an edge of cynicism. More recently Ackermann has explored the use of murals. However, she still remains committed to the complication of meanings in these large scale works. Ackermann has exhibited in the US and Europe. She has had solo exhibits at Andrea Rosen Gallery and the Swiss Institute in New York. And in Europe she has had solo shows at Interim Art in England, Rebecca Camhi Gallery, Athens, Greece, Bartok 32 Galeria, Budapest, Hungary and Peter Kilchman Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland.

Film- and video director Sadie Benning was born in Madison, (Wisc.) in 1973 and is currently living and working in New York. Among her best know works are the Judy Spots (1995 15 min.), German Song (1995 6 min.) and Flat is Beautiful (1998 50 min.). Flat is Beautiful explores with great depth and sensitivity, the emotional and psychological life of an eleven-year-old girl. This girl faces the challenges of living with a single mother and her gay roommate in a society that can be less than forgiving about sexual orientation. In It Wasn’t Love (1992) Benning stages her own Hollywood movie in her bedroom at home. Using a Fisher Price toy camera, Benning achieves a quality of cheap, low-tech, and immediacy in the film. Her videos have an intense eerie dream quality. Benning also made a series of narcissistic self-portraits where she assumed both male and female personae.

Best know as a fashion designer, Susan Cianciolo is also a successful film director. Her film Pro Abortion / Anti Pink was awarded critics choice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1997. Her fashion work is very different from pret a porter. Her creations are all handmade and her use of cutting, folding, and pasting onto existing clothing produce an almost gathered quality. Her hallmark is the knitted, embroidered or crouched patch stuck almost involuntarily on or between her designs. Cianciolo also leaves part of the design process up to her buyers; having them complete the creations. Her denim skirts, part of the Run Collection, must be cut to the desired length by the wearer herself. Cianciolo’s shows have proven controversial. Her latest collection was shown by sleeping models.

Sofia Coppola was born in 1972 in Los Angeles. In 1994 Coppola started her own fashionline Milk Fed. She also co-hosted the TV show Hi Octane with Zoe Cassavetes. For the past 6 years Coppola has been photographing teenage girls. The style in which Coppola takes the photographs create a post Calvin Klein mood. Most recently Coppola has immersed herself in film. Her short film Lick the Star premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1998. And her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides, starring James Woods and Kathleen Turner, was shown at the 1999 Cannes Film festival. It is due for release towards the end of this year.

Film director Tamra Davis, (1962, LA) has made three films: Guncrazy (1993), CB4 (1993) and Bill Madison (1995). She has directed a number of videos for Sonic Youth. Davis’ has also made several short documentaries. One of which investigates women in the music underground.
back next

Mark Gonzales is a 30 year old artist / poet from Los Angeles, CA who currently lives and works in San Francisco. His colorful paintings and child-like drawing style are both comical and deeply profound. The work Gonzales produces reflects the raw energy of youth along with a deep sense of spirituality and razor sharp wit. Gonzales utilizes a vast array of materials to create his works. Various types of paints and markers, photocopy collage and his unique miss spelled text come together to produce his signature style. His peculiar influences and the topics discussed in his work reflect a wide variety of contemporary issues. The themes of love, religion, the media, fashion, sex and basic human emotion are repeatedly referred to in his creations.In addition, Gonzales maintains a strange obsession with American millionaires. Portraits of, or references to people such as Howard Hughes, Warren Buffet and Malcolm Forbes are commonly featured in his works. Ironically, Gonzales maintains that most things he creates are taken form personal experience or from television shows he used to watch when he was younger. A great deal of Mark Gonzales’ early popularity was based in the fact that he was (is) one of the most famous professional skateboarders in history. The maneuvers he created and the ease in which he performed them have achieved legendary status within the skate world. In fact, the designs he created for the bottoms of his skateboards were where his career as an artist really began. Mark Gonzales has mounted exhibitions of his artwork worldwide. His has had solo exhibits at Alleged Gallery, Inc., in New York (1994, 1995, 1996), X-Large in Los Angeles (1994), Galerie Analix in Geneva Switzerland (1998) and Parco Gallery in Tokyo (1998). Gonzales’ artworks and writings have established a solid reputation and huge following in both America and Europe and his works are widely sought after by a diverse and dedicated group of collectors.

Cameron Jamie is momentarily living and working in Los Angeles. He has mounted solo exhibitions in LA and Bordeaux and has taken part in many group exhibitions in the US and internationally. In the past Jamie’s work focused on sequential interpretation and an amusing / disturbing morphing of portraiture. For his one person show in Los Angeles, for example, Jamie’s commissioned a series of portraits which originated with the pastel sketch of a cartoon character or toy. With each rendering, the commissioned artist (who ranged from a caricaturist to a ‘Stoner’ artist) accentuates or completely deletes certain physical features. In one series, a sketch of the artist posed with a Bart Simpson Doll, is turned, through Jamie’s process into a portrait of a mother and son by the last rendition.
Cameron Jamie’s fascination with apartment and pro wrestling inspire his latest series of videos and photographs. Apartment wrestling was a movement of pictorial soft core pornography that became popular n the 60’s and early 70’s. It depicts people wrestling in their homes. Although apartment wrestling was a well known adjunct to the S&M scene, it is comparatively innocent
Using average residences instead of sets and stages, viewers fetishized not only the wrestling poses and the depiction of ‘play fighting’ but the domestic interiors which became the arena. Viewers watched as intently for a piece of dirty laundry caught in the frame, as they did for an incidental show of flesh. Like the genre he emulates, Jamie’s matches are set in ordinary homes. The documentation of these matches are never done by professionals.
Instead, Jamie collaborates with whomever happens to be around, lending a suprisingly refreshing amateur ‘home video’ perspective. There are, however, peculiar innovations. For the series, Jamie traveled to Mexico City, drew a self-portrait and commissioned a mask maker for Mexican pro-wrestlers to fabricate a mask from it. The result is a theatrical, androgynous, abstraction of the artist likeness that conceals/reveals his identity. Wearing long johns that emphasize his thin, gangly frame, Jamie transforms into a nameless, animated character, inverting the process that began with the previous portrait series. Participants are asked to improvise dialogue while the match goes on. The resulting videos flip back and forth between documentary filmmaking and a ritualized, staged performance.

Born in 1969 as Adam Spiegel. His fame and popularity are due to his work as a filmmaker in the skateboard streetculture. Jonze’s childlike pleasure and imagination are widely renowned. His brilliant way of watching and filming, his use of color and his way of editing make him a very popular music video director. Jonze’s credits include videos for Ween, Dinosaur Jr., REM, Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers. His clip for the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage is widely considered a classic. Jonze has also made commercials for the likes of Levi’s, Nike, Nintendo and Coors. Jonze recently completed his first feature film, Being John Malkovich. It is due to premier in November 1999. Besides workings with mega budgets he keeps on making low budget videos such as The Rockefeller’s skank by Fat Boy Slim. In addition to his work in film and video, Jonze writes and photographs. He is never without his camera and is know n for his guerilla style snaps. Spike Jonze’s stories and photos appear in the Beastie Boys’ Magazine, Grand Royal and in Juxtapoz.

Richard Kern
For more information see : www.richardkern.com

An artist and critic, Koether is originally from Cologne Germany and now lives and works in New York. Her work is both spiritual and deeply intellectual. Her earlier work is know for its incorporation of literary sources. At times illegible, Koether places quotations from Freud, Walter Benjamin and René Char on her canvases. Some of her canvases appear to be heavily layered, while others take on the quality of a water color. Her work also often references her dual cultural identity. She expresses observations of an artist originally from Germany living New York. In Koether’s latest solo New York show, "sun / / ny" her work explored the idea of the sun. She researched the beliefs and interpretations of the sun cross culturally.Koether discovered that common between cultures is a belief in the power of the sun. It is a creator, generator, inspirer and a destroyer. In the colors and materials Koether chooses, she maintains this pull between the different and often opposing forces of the sun. As in much of Koether’s earlier works, her paintings defy closure. They are loaded with material, eclecticism and open-endedness which is crucial to our understanding of them. Koether has had six solo exhibitions at Pat Hearn Gallery, in New York. She has had solo exhibits at Daniel Bucholz Galerie, Galerie Sophia Ungers and Galerie Monika Spruth in Cologne, Germany, Bruno Brunnet Galerie, Berlin, Germany and Galerie Bliech-Rossi, Graz, Austria. Koether has been included in group exhibitions throughout the US and Europe.

Tony Oursler's (New York, 1957) work in the mediums of video, sculpture, installation, performance, and painting has been exhibited extensively in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, including Metro Pictures, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and Documenta, Kassel.

Dave Markey

For more information see : We Got Powerfilms

Born Raymond Ginn in 1957, he adopted the nickname Pettibon given to him by his father. He graduated from UCLA in 1977 with a BA in economics. His drawing career began in 1975 when he became a political cartoonist for the UCLA newspaper. In 1978 Pettibon self-published Captive Chains, the first of over 100 raw, scrawled, 20-30 page zines dealing with sex, violence, drugs and hippies. Other titles of his zines are Pig Cupid, Selfishness and Tripping Corpses. Pettibon began to mix and match graphic styles around 1983.
His first solo show in New York was in 1989 at Feature. By the early ‘90’s, his tone had gone from acetic to omnipotent-reflective. His following slowly grew form ragtag cult to high muck-a-muck. Pettibon it the apotheosis of so-called ‘bad’ drawing:
once people thought it sucked, now connoisseurs line up for it. Pettibon’s starkly black and white drawings have an aggressive and atonal look. His greatest accomplishment is the aggregate way he fuses words and images on paper, turning them into something new – not cartoon, illustration, illumination or literature but an obtuse art born in the amniotic fluids of poetry, philosophy and dissent. The words and the pictures are inseparable. Pettibon deploys numerous graphic styles and visual sources, among them Hollywood noir, pulp-fiction covers, comic books, TV and album cover art. Amongst Pettibon obsessions are: President Kennedy’s love life and its connection to the Mafia, surfers, baseball, the bible, J. Edgar Hoover, Joan Crawford, Elvis, Charles Manson, the letter A, mushroom clouds, trains and a lot of dicks.
Pettibon has produced more than 7000 drawings and mounted solo exhibits. He designed covers for Sonic Youth, and numerous flyers and posters for music events.

Lisa Rinzler works mainly as a cinematographer outside of Hollywood. Her credits include Wim Wenders films, the Hughes Brothers’ "Menace to Society", and Tamra Davis films. Rizler recently completed work on a short film documenting three adolescents in a mental hospital. Each youth wrote and performed their own story. The outcome is extremely emotional and thought provoking. The film succeeds in capturing a truth and beauty inside each kid as their story unfolds.

Jessika Wood was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. For the past 19 years she has resided in the United States. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Wood has always taken part in art. Her work has been shown at Galerie Martin Suppan in Vienna, Austria, Spanish Kitchen, Los Angeles, CA and Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Kim Gordon (US), Rita Ackermann (HU), Sadie Benning (US), Susan Cianciolo (US), Sofia Coppola (US), Tamra Davis (US), Mark Gonzales (US), Cameron Jamie (US), Adam Spiegel (US), Richard Kern (US), Jutta Koether (DE), Tony Oursler (US), Dave Markey (US), Raymond Ginn (US), Lisa Rinzler (US), Jessika Wood (US)