Guest Post: Lauren Fournier's photos from the Kathy Acker ICA exhibition

Knowing I was going to neglect the blog for at least a month while moving, I asked my friend Lauren Fournier if she would share her thoughts on I, I, I, I, I, I, I: Kathy Acker at the ICA, which she visited earlier this summer. She will be publishing a full review of the show in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, edited by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, but below are some of her images of the exhibition, which closes tomorrow.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I: Kathy Acker is the first UK exhibition dedicated solely to Kathy Acker and her work. Rooted fervently in publication and the material culture of books and texts, the ICA exhibition was at its best when focusing on Acker's work as a writer, and the relationship between her writing and her visual art. The grounding wall at the entrance showed a chronology of Acker’s publications: colour photographs of each cover are affixed the wall as vinyl, alongside a similarly-flat vinyl of the publication year. Web-like spiral lines of black vinyl connect the texts – a nod, perhaps, to Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1978). Viewers can see the scope of Acker’s monographs and the formative avant-garde publications she contributed to – from Semiotext(e)’s Schizo/Culture (1977) to FILE Megazine (1979). Sometimes the actual book is displayed a few inches from its photographic copy, the play between the mimetic and the real activated only so far as the museological allows (the aura of the first edition printing).

In addition to books, other aspects of material culture were present including, perhaps unsurprisingly for the fashion-forward Acker, clothing. If bibliophiles were indulged by the aura of the first edition print, fashion-philes were indulged by Acker’s real Vivienne Westwood jacket on view, hanging on a regular wooden hook and exposed to air and human touch – in contrast to the books and pages safely enclosed in vitrines. There is a resonance, here, with Dodie Bellamy’s essay ‘Digging through Kathy Acker’s Stuff’, which focuses on Acker’s many designer clothing items left behind in her death, or the decision, by Semiotext(e), to feature Acker’s iconic leather jacket as the sole cover image on Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker (2017). In doing so, this exhibition does not so much chart fresh ground, but extends prevailing views of Acker as a historical figure.

Lauren Fournier is a writer, curator, and artist from Treaty 4 lands, Saskatchewan who currently lives and works in Toronto. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, and teaches sessionally in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She regularly contributes to publications like Canadian Art and C Magazine. www.laurenfournier.net