Identities, Kathy Acker
From New York, where she was born in 1947, to Mexico, where her life ended in 1997, Kathy Acker’s long wandering quest led her to follow the example of those who are always on the move. Her life was made up of writing, which she explored at an early age with the poet David Antin of whom she was a student. In the fractured
New York of the 1970s, the avantgarde fed on Gertrude Stein met with the post-punk of the clubs, with dirty sidewalks, and with the chronic poverty of a city which self-declared bankruptcy in 1975. This very particular ecosystem nourished Acker’s multifaceted writing which explores the themes of sexuality and the body. Elisabeth Lebovici traces back the career of the American writer, on the occasion of her show at the ICA London.
The writer’s body is what fascinates first. Before going further and entering the body of her writing, it is perhaps in this way that we first enter “into” Kathy Acker: by the physical power of a woman with short or shaved hair, sometimes dyed platinum, with taut muscles and the sort of abundant tattoos one sees on bikers, in reality shows or gyms. But in the culture of bodybuilding, on which Kathy Acker has written, language is used as little as possible, if at all. Breaths and dumbbell repetitions are counted, but speech is not used: it is a “geography of the non-verbal” (Bodies of Work, 1997).
Kathy Acker, however, speaks. She reads her texts aloud. She makes the fragments of her books resound with her voice, which seems made for this task – and vice versa: her works also seem made to be performed. For the iconic fever that surrounds Kathy Acker (photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, De La Grace Volcano, and Kaucyilia Brooke, among others) is nothing compared to the intensity of her public appearances. They have inherited a modern American poetic tradition, Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers, black jazz musicians, which also saw the birth of rappers and slammers. Kathy Acker was one of the (rare) women to practice Spoken Word. Many videos show how her voice is part of a violently sexual writing, with its rhythms, breaths, and intonations taking shape in her literary productions. Her voice is what you take everywhere with you. From New York to the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco, from Paris to London, from Germany to a Mexican alternative clinic, the life of Kathy Acker (born Karen Alexander, New York, 1947—Tijuana, Mexico, 1997) is marked by the nomadism which we find in those who are always “on tour”: music hall actresses, for example, of whom the French writer Colette spoke so well. Born in New York into a rather wealthy Jewish family, she was the student of the poet David Antin (and also, apparently, of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse) at the University of San Diego, and she embarked on a project of self-publication (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, 1973, was sent by post) under the pseudonym Black Tarantula. This was to be her first mode of publishing. Returning to New York with a lover, marrying another (the musician Peter Gordon in 1972), none of which prevented occasional boyfriends or affairs, she immersed herself in a city that officially declared her bankrupt in 1975, and whose dirty streets were at the same time the breeding ground for chronic poverty and creative possibilities, in communities if at all possible. In 1978, just one entry in her diary mentions Vivienne Dick, Lydia
Lunch, Brian Eno, David Wojnarowicz, The Wooster Group, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith! In order to survive, she occasionally earned her living as an exotic dancer, and was determined to write—which she did prolifically—permanently, while traveling.
In New York, the methodologies of Gertrude Stein’s conceptual avant-garde met the anarchist energy of post-punk clubs and their sidewalks. Kathy Acker’s writing is the activation of this cultural crossing—or wandering—constantly jumping from an autobiographical point of view to an experimental form, from a fictional literary character to the re-use of real correspondence (with the English theorist Peter Wollen, for example), pushing the limits of good grammatical taste to emerge as a zombie at the heart of sexuality, which is, if there is one, its favorite literary object. Language is a virus, says writer William Burroughs, one of her mentors. Between the East Coast, Seattle and San Francisco, Paris (where she discovered Les Écrits de Laure and Georges Bataille) she wrote Great Expectations.
It was a book where one punctuation mark reigned supreme: the colon, which acts as an emotional vector to signal the work of family mourning; her mother suicided, her grandmother died. As in all her books, fragmented, hybrid, featuring drawings, Arabic typography or cards, shreds of notes and recovered letters, it feeds on intertextuality, copying and plagiarizing other texts, in this case those of “Charles Dickens, Pierre Guyotat, Pauline Réage, Ben Jonson, Propertius, Marcel Proust”, and more. Kathy Acker was a voracious reader, as her highly annotated library testifies. The same is true for her twenty-two books: drawing notably from Jean Genet and Mohammed Choukri for the extraordinary Blood and Guts in High School (1978-84), for Algeria (1984), Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986), Empire of the Senseless (1988). Kathy Acker copied by hand, photocopied, cut and glued texts from fiction, philosophy, with Robespierre meeting “my grandmother” and Arthur Rimbaud analyzing the texts of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Like all marginalized figures, subalterns... women, Kathy Acker knows that the deeds of property, especially in the field of cultural creation, go hand in hand with a patriarchal system in which one can only break in, like a pirate (Pussy, King of the Pirates, 1996). In her literary framework, the French Monique Wittig has also appropriated, in the body of her books, quotations without quotation marks. Both foreshadow the most
everyday uses now of the internet and of the politics of hacking. Who is writing ? The identity of the author becomes in this way far more flickering and plural. In Memoriam To Identity, a work published in 1990, enounces this indeterminacy and contingency of an unstable “I”, located in times and places that are equally unstable. “I can be anyone one day, and the next day anyone else, including the same” (Don Quixote). In After Kathy Acker: a Biography, the impossible biography that the writer Chris Kraus devoted to her twenty years after her death, the former emphasizes that Kathy Acker, “like many of her friends, had changing identities—or maybe she did not have any. In the same way, to invent a plot and to create plausible characters seemed absurd. She replaced these requirements by her openly plagiaristic technique, working over the ‘found’ text in a burning and scathing prose that, for a time at least, was strikingly original.”
It was during her six-year stay in London (1983-89) that Kathy Acker became terribly famous. An anthology of three of her books was published and sold out in three weeks, at the same time as she embarked on processes of body modifications and, more profoundly, in the thrills of BDSM (Bondage, domination, sadism, masochism). In London, she interviewed the writers William Burroughs and Alasdair Gray, played chess with Salman Rushdie, performed with the group Psychic TV or with the performermusician Genesis P. Orridge; she went on TV; she was defended by the writer Jeanette Winterson... According to the critic Michael Bracewell: “She did a huge thing: in London, she alone reconciled the people who bought records with the people who bought books.” All of this offers a favorable terrain for the exhibition that opened on May 1 at the ICA, a cultural venue with which Acker always had a very strong connection (she was interviewed there in public, in 1987, by Angela McRobbie). This event, conceived and planned for London, attempts to situate itself outside of a purely nostalgic and fetishist bias, limiting the archive to the presentation of a part of its library and to a certain number of video and sound recordings. It is not the image of Kathy Acker, nor her supposedly transgressive “character”, that the heart of the exhibition articulates, but rather a dynamic of power, incarnated in language, which lives in power and denounces it at the same time.
The exhibition is structured in eight facets: fragments borrowed from her books, with which the audio-visual or textual documents are presented with a plethora of people: those from New York or London in the years 1980-90, but also those born in those same years, invested today in a queer and decolonial reading of performance. With its title “I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker”, from a page of Blood and Guts in High School, the exhibition also investigates this identity and “topological” stories, as Richard Birkett has defined them, in perpetual mutation in a network-writing, as in the intertextuality at work from one title to another.
It is not trivial that an exhibition should be dedicated today by a “contemporary art” institution to someone who, even if she spent her time “undefining herself”, is nonetheless associated with books, and not with traditionally visual arts. In London, in schools as prestigious as Goldsmith College, it is true that artistic education has opened up to the practice of writing as creative production in the same way as other more classical forms. “One no longer defines oneself as ‘painter’, as ‘videographer’, as ‘performer’, but rather between these different modes of presentation in the world,” says Richard Birkett, chief curator at the ICA. “This is the big problem of institutions. The ICA wants to ask this question. What does it mean for these institutions and their visitors to have to deal with forms of practice that are not recognized in the traditional hierarchies of presentation of works of art? Kathy Acker also interests us for this reason. Moreover, in the 1980s, the ICA already had a permanent interaction between readings, performances, cinema and experimental theater.” Far from hagiography, a new chapter of institutional experimentation is thus mobilized through the name of Kathy Acker. https://www.ica.art/exhibitions/i-i-i-i-ii-i-kathy-acker, from May 1 to August 4, ICA, London. With work and contributions from: Reza Abdoh, Sophie Bassouls, Kathy Brew, Paul Buck, Ellen Cantor, Barbara Caspar, Julien Ceccaldi, Jamie Crewe, Jimmy DeSana, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Carl Gent, Leslie Asako Gladsjø, Bette Gordon, Penny Goring, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Hedva, Caspar Heinemann, Every Ocean Hughes, Bhanu Kapil, Ghislaine Leung, Sophie Lewis, Candice Lin, Stephen Littman, Rosanna McNamara, Reba Maybury, The Mekons, D. Mortimer, Precious Okoyomon, Genesis P-Orridge, Raúl Ruiz, Sarah Schulman, Nancy Spero, Alan Sondheim, Patrick Staff, Linda Stupart, Atalia ten Brink, Kate Valk, VNS Matrix, Isabel Waidner, Robin Winters, David Wojnarowicz, X&Y (Coleen Fitzgibbon & Robin Winters), and others still.