Athena Tacha
My Adolescent Loves
Oberlin, USA: Self-published, 1976
[8] pp., 14 x 6.5 cm., single leaf folded
Edition of 500
Between 1972 to 2020, the Greek-American artist Athena Tacha produced twenty-seven accordion fold “Pocket Booklet” pamphlets: single sheet productions, often sold in small plastic sleeves.
The booklets contain intimate autobiographical writings, with titles like My Childhood Garden, My Childhood Home, My Mother: A Psychological Portrait, My Fears, My Night Sagas, and the ongoing series The Process of Aging.
My Adolescent Loves strikes a diaristic tone, describing her pre-sexual, amorous feelings towards celebrities and people in her life.
"Each of her series of little “pocketbooks,” produced since 1972, is printed on a different pastel-colored paper (except Little Pleasures, which is unaccountably bright orange) and accordion-folded into a 5 3/4 by 3 inch-plastic slipcase. Different volumes treat such themes as The Way My Mind Works, My Mother, The Process of Aging, and My Adolescent Loves with absolute candor and bone-dry, sometimes childlike language. They often end with a disarming little twist; from Different Notions of Cleanliness: “As for sweeping, unless you do it very carefully, or with a vacuum (which I am lazy to get out every day for a little bit), I don’t believe much in it. All it does is push the dust around.” I have often found that people who are more accustomed to reading literature and its criticism tend to be bored or perplexed by the naïveté of Tacha’s texts. But that quality is only a whimsical vehicle for conveying serious biological and psychological observations."
- Ellen H. Johnson, Artforum
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