Institute of Contemporary Arts, London until August
4th
“If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you” declaims
Kathy Acker towards the end of a video recording of Pussy, King of the Pirates,
performed in 1996 alongside Leeds-sired post-punk-folk agitators The Mekons, “I
want everything.”
This was a year before the American post-modern
provocateur and polymath’s death aged fifty after a lifetime of extreme literary
adventures. Despite Acker’s impending demise, such a statement of intent remains
possessed with a hunger to be heard and a lust for life that never quite seemed
sated. Acker seemed to absorb experience with every tattoo that turned her skin
into a work of art, buccaneeringly alive to the last.
This is the case however much ‘in character’ a
manuscript-wielding Acker may be in this DIY music-theatre staging of her final
novel. It’s a spirit captured throughout this remarkable and at times
overwhelming exhibition cum documentation of Acker’s life and work, as well as
her influence – accidental or otherwise – on a new generation of artistic
outlaws.
With contributions from more than forty fellow
travellers, there are moments moving through the exhibition’s nine rooms across
two floors that you don't know which way to turn. Like one of Acker’s books,
form and content seem to collide into each other before exploding outwards,
picking up other influences en route and inviting them along for the ride.
As you zig-zag your way through a maze-like sprawl
of TV monitors, headphones, vitrines and wall-hangings, it’s possible to listen
to recordings of Acker reading excerpts from one of her books while watching
1970s film footage of her her fellating a male colleague. At the same time as you
do both, if you angle yourself just-so, you can absorb another of her texts
emblazoned monumentally the full length of the wall opposite.
The effect is of a living cut-up, a noisy collage
of references, regurgitated ideas and explicit, warts-and-all auto-biographical
purgings. These are laid bare in such a way that life and art are inseparable
if terminally antagonistic bedfellows.
I first heard Kathy Acker in November 1982 when she
read at Michael Horovitz’s Poetry Olympics event at the Young Vic in London.
Possessed with punky-Beat attitude and outsider cool a-plenty, she had yet to
acquire the buffed and tattooed biker girl pirate image that would give her work
such visual as well as literary power over the next decade and a half.
Here was a proto riot grrrl plundering ideas from
all sides, then remixing them with consciously plagiaristic élan. Her
relentless barrage of ideas read like diary entries reimagined as
self-mythologising montages plundered from her voracious and sponge-like absorption
of counter-cultural classics her work is now seen alongside as an equal.
With a bibliography of her books and assorted
journals she contributed to lining the downstairs wall, Acker has now been
historicised and contextualised into the canon. Far from neutering her, in
terms of a new wave of gender-fluid identity explorers who echo her
taboo-busting, gauntlet-throwing and attention-seeking craving for validation,
this seems to point to a future which only now seems to have caught up.
For all the sprawl of poetry and polemic laid bare,
from telling tales of the world’s first female pirate on Channel 4, to reading
Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell in a BBC documentary on photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe, the real Acker, if such a terminally reinvented beast exists, comes
through the exhibition’s quieter moments.
Look, and she’s there in Penny Goring's 1991 black
and white photographs of a peroxided and leather jacketed Acker with a
motorbike. Like stills from some girl gang reinvention of a Kenneth Anger
flick, sexual subversion swaggers from her core. But this is a calculatedly
fearless front. She is there most of all in a 1977 photographic portrait by
Jimmy DeSana. Again taken in moody black and white, Acker peers at the camera,
her face half in shadow. She may be hanging tough, but it’s what’s going on in
the dark that drives her.
MAP, May 2019
ends
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