There’s a hole in my heart.
There’s a hole in my heart.
There’s a hole.
There’s a hole.
— Kim Gordon, NOT TODAY, 2026
As I crossed through the glass door, I was swallowed by a noisescape, a harsh reminder of the flood I’ve been drowning in for some weeks. In my heartbreak, noise has been my solace and my curse. A method of simultaneous re-living and forgetting, both arousing and numbing. An addiction, surely. I wondered: what is noise to Kim Gordon?
If Amant’s Count Your Chickens reveals anything about interdisciplinary artist and former Sonic Youth member Kim Gordon, it’s the tenderness and romanticism fossilized under her chromey surface. The exhibition looks at her output from 2007 to now, bringing works from multiple series in dialogue with a newly commissioned video work. The whole thing is bewildering, fragmented and confused, though more by necessity than mistake. It paints a raw, unquestionably striking portrait of the artist—or more specifically, it offers a peek into the hole in her heart.
At first glance, Count Your Chickens seems like a lament of the contemporary condition, consumed by cynicism and a pinch of irony. You have the Track Development Community (2021) and Early Suburbs (2023–24) series, which materialize as protest banners marking the names of gentrified LA neighborhoods onto colonial wall fabrics—a seeming middle finger to the dotcom neoliberalism of the Californian ideology. The Proposal for a painting (2022) series, inkjet prints of iPhone photos of nondescript hotel rooms adorned with digital pencil scribbles, embrace the erosion of artmaking in the post-digital age, or perhaps grieve the inability to complete anything in the maelstrom.
Gordon is not satisfied passively exploring this. She finger-points. Seven of her Bonfires (2018), glazed ceramic mini body sculptures of nude women on white-veiled cocktail tables lit by neon lights, populate the galleries. The women are sexualized, their bodies possessed, controlled by the gravitational pull of higher forces, their skin torn between glazed and unglazed. And here we are, circling around them, props for our cocktail tables—art people’s bonfires for network and insipid small talk about the latest art fair, or gossip about this artist or that curator. A waist-high mirror in the corner of the space spotlights our culpability: you can only see as far as your crotch.
Such work could only come from someone who has attended too many meaningless parties, has been too often dehumanized, and has lived too often dislocated from the comfort of home. Gordon seems done with the kitschy, predatory, misogynistic, extractive wasteland of the art world and the music industry.
There’s something more fragile and tender here, however, in the Airbnb Series (2019) and a related body of work: portraits painted on oval-shaped wooden table surfaces. Some fairytale-like wonder that underlies these unsettling visions of women, often partially dissolved, ostensibly imprisoned within their frames. Could these be self-portraits? One of them indeed mirrors a photograph of Gordon’s lower body used as the cover of her 2026 album, PLAY ME. Ladies of the Paradise #10 (2016) emblematizes another facet of Gordon’s soul—a crumbled sheet of fiberglass covered in spray paint, glitter, and aqua-resin: a scintillating heart crushed by the vortex of heartbreak. Portraits of innocence lost, or violently stripped away.
And then there’s Jeanetta and Alex (2026), functioning as the exhibition’s altarpiece.
The video starts with a pixelated close-up of some machine, before cutting to Jeanetta speaking to the camera as if in a confessional. She speaks of a relationship gone awry, drowned by confusion and miscommunication, leading to a loss of desire, romance, play, pleasure, and transcendence. We cut to Alex, the lover, who sits in front of Jeanetta. They stand, both carrying amped-up guitars, approach one another, and start to dance, the rubbing of their metal strings producing a sonic landscape of harsh dissonant noise. It’s a last dance, ambivalently fencing between a tender eulogy to their broken relationship, or a self-destructive restaging of their break-up. They fall into each other’s necks. Their legs harmonize. Their feet touch. They finger the other’s strings. Then bang their guitar bodies. But soon the intensity vanishes. The vortex passes. They grow apart, separate, then sit back down. They can’t bear to look at the other, ashamed and confused. Their hands still cling to the neck of their guitars, trembling.
There’s no irony to be found in Jeanetta and Alex. Just the harsh, uncompromising suffering of heartbreak, plagued by the tragedies of denial, guilt, and the love that remains. The video, to me, both undercuts and enriches the rest of the exhibition. Lost is that sense of mockery or absurdism. In this cathedral of noise, there’s only tragedy.
I don’t know Jeanetta or Alex, but like Gordon, I know a lot about love and heartbreak, and the storm produced when one becomes the other. The video nonetheless illuminated something I’d never asked myself before: why do I gravitate to noise rock in the face of heartbreak? Why do bands like Sonic Youth, Unwound, or Model/Actriz offer a catharsis incomparable to the wisest, tender songs about love and heartbreak? What solace do I find in the noise? I believe noise is the vessel to every facet of heartbreak, simultaneously every stage of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance, not experienced chronologically but all in concert. A bittersweet vortex of contradictory affects, at once numbing and cathartic.
Sonic Youth, of course, is ripe with heartbreak, with the all-too-public separation of Gordon and Thurston Moore playing a significant role in the band’s split in 2011. Much of the work here was produced around that time, likely still in the confusion. I thought about all of the art, writing, Insta stories, and other stuff I created in my vortex. It was never meant to be sensical, or even healing. It was just pure affective discharge. Noise accelerated and intensified it all, that dissociative rupture.
As I drowned in Count Your Chickens, I recognized myself. Everything here seemed now a page from Gordon’s diary of disappointment, articulated in noisy scribbles. The question is: what remains after the noise? When you’re cradled in the noise, it’s natural to dread the serenity of silence. You cling to any kind of presence. But you must learn to live with yourself. How do we unwind from the mess we made together? Count Your Chickens offers no easy answer, and it’s all the better for it.
Kim Gordon: Count Your Chickens is on view at Amant Foundation from March 19 to August 16, 2026 .
