Thurston Moore: The Music Lover’s Artist

Thurston Moore is forty-nine years old, and still cool. The Sonic Youth frontman recently announced the release of his latest album exclusively on iTunes. Recorded from his appearance at the tastemaker Apple store in New York on October 17, Thurston Moore Live from SoHo features music from Trees Outside the Academy and Psychic Hearts. When he’s not making groundbreaking music, though, Moore focuses his energy on art.

Last spring, around the same time he was recording his first solo album since 1995, (Academy), in Amherst, Massachusetts, Moore was also exhibiting his first solo art exhibit, Street Mouth, at KS Art in New York City. Even when making art, though, it is clear that Moore is a music lover.

Moore the devoted rock fan creates large (24 x 21 1/4 inches) collages that showcase New York’s underground scene. He shows how the subterranean elite united, riffing off each other’s work and inspiring each other. Nodding his head to the fact downtown musicians the Ramones, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop hung out with the great writers and artists of their era, he pairs rock iconography with photographs of Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Kathy Acker. Moore says he is “utilizing some kind of punk Photoshop method” to rip up vintage newspapers from the 1970s and fasten clippings alongside press photos and personal letters.

“I am basing the work on exercises I did as a teenager cutting out pictures from Rock Scene, Creem and Circus magazines and collaging them as an obsessive diarist,” says Moore. You can almost picture a pre-Sonic Youth Thurston Moore rifling through stacks of magazines for the latest pictures of his favorite bands in hopes of someday making his own rock-star dreams come true.

Now, all grown up and a legend himself, Moore says, “I can actually drop myself and other referentials into the pieces.” The Sonic Youth clippings and personal letters that Moore pastes into his collages are humble, not self-promoting. They seem like pages torn out of the collage-filled diary from his teenage years. He comes across as trying to sound cool in his letters but actually being just another pimply faced kid: “I’m going to the rodeo. I just had some fried grits, bacon and root beer… . I’ve been doing some boss water skiing.” Even placing Sonic Youth within the context of such legends as the Velvet Underground seems more like a kid sticking his unknown, local band’s bumper sticker on his guitar case next to famous acts’ professional stickers than an egotistic display of stardom.

Moore is also a curator. In 2007 he, along with musician Dan Donahue and writer Eva Prinz, curated Radical Living Papers: A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press, 1965-75, at New York’s Passerby Bar. The exhibit showcased the same sort of zines that inspired his own collages, yet have a more political edge to them. Beyond the scope of pure entertainment they cover:

politics, revolutions, evolutions of the planets, freak-outs, love-ins, support of green politics, gay liberation, power to the people, the peace parties, protests, the Panthers, peyote, LSD, pot, fiction, music, poetry, prose, prayers.

It was the type of exhibit that provoked thoughts on freedom of the press and the arts.

Stepping off the stage and into an art gallery may seem like an odd move for a rocker, but in fact Thurston Moore is coming full circle to his own experiences. He told the BBC, “we cut our teeth with Sonic Youth by playing galleries and loft spaces.” Interviewed in a bookstore in the Serpentine Gallery in London, he said, “I love this place because artists interest me as much as rock stars do.”

Maybe that’s why Moore fell in love with his wife. Kim Gordon is the best of both worlds. She graduated from Los Angeles’ Otis College of Art & Design and went on to exhibit her works worldwide, curate exhibitions at galleries, and write for Artforum. During her exhibit Kim’s Bedroom in the Netherlands, she too blurred the lines between music and art by including live music at the gallery. When Moore and Gordon began dating they started the band Sonic Youth.

The creative couple isn’t alone—many musicians are temporarily putting down their guitars and picking up paintbrushes. Art, after all, refuses to be tied down to any one medium. Whether in the form of music, collage, or painting, creativity will find a way to be expressed.