Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker died on this day in 1997, at the age of 50. 

Top Stories Exhibition

Top Stories was a prose periodical featuring experimental writing by women authors and artists. The series included staple-bound booklets by Jenny Holzer, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Pati Hill, Mary Kelly, Cookie Mueller, and others. The series also included visual contributions by artists such as David Armstrong, Joe Gibbons, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, Richard Prince and Leslie Thornton. 

The series was published by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, an artist-run centre founded by Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack in 1974. 

The 29 publications produced between 1978 and 1991 are now the subject of the an exhibition at The Netherlands Kunstverein. Complete sets of the series are somewhat rare, but not too prohibitively expensive that they needed to be displayed as rare objects under glass. This allows the museum to avoid the typical trappings of archival shows, and instead display the works on a magazine rack. The press release invites visitors to "browse, smell, read and touch the material for yourself."

In addition to the publications, the show features a newly commissioned two-channel film by Peggy Ahwesh, unpacking the Top Stories archives. Parallel to the exhibition, is the publication of Tense,  a never-realized publication by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns from 1984. It will be launched during Amsterdam Art Weekend, towards the end of the exhibition.

"As I listen to Turyn speaking to Ahwesh about Top Stories #9: Kathy Acker (1981), I pick up the issue in question and flip through it. In the film, Turyn describes how she took care of the imagery for this issue herself, after Acker wrote her a letter saying that she wanted ‘the photographs to undermine the text’. In response, Turyn walked through Manhattan, from 57th Street to Chelsea, with Acker’s text, New York City in 1979, in mind, taking photos that – while showing no direct connection to the text – similarly evoke the unique social landscape of Times Square. The chapbook is bookended by two photographs of a clothed woman sitting on a chair, with only her lower half visible. On the first page, her legs are closed and, in the last, they are wide open. Turyn initially thought the chapbook should finish with the image of the woman’s legs closed to signify the end of the book, but Acker wanted it the other way around, arguing: ‘Literature should be open-ended.’ It’s something that could also be said of this exhibition, which, through its pared back yet insightful presentation, shows the importance of letting writers speak for themselves, offering an experience that is as open-ended as Acker intended her work to be."

- Julia Mullié, Frieze

Just Another Asshole #6

[Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca]

Just Another Asshole #6

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2018

192 pp., 7 x 4”, softcover

Edition of 2000

My very first curatorial projects were exhibitions of artists’ magazines and artists’ records. Just Another Asshole was included in both.  

The periodical was a No Wave mixed-media publication started by Barbara Ess in her apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1978. It began life as a personal ‘zine of her collages, with the title scrawled in red nail polish on the cover. The third issue changed the format (to a tabloid newspaper) and each subsequent issue the format changed again. Number four was a four page spread in the 1980 issue of Artforum. Number five was a 12” LP: an anthology of seventy-seven very short tracks, by eighty-three artists. Co-published with White Columns, the album was co-edited by Glenn Branca and featured contributions from Jenny Holzer, Carla Liss,  Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Lee Ranaldo, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Thurston Moore, Amy Taubin and others. 

The sixth (and penultimate) issue was a paperback book. Again co-edited by Glenn Branca, this collection of writings included over sixty artists from the early 1980's downtown scene. It includes short stories, performance transcripts, plays, monologues, screenplays, and essays. 

Contributors include Kathy Acker,  Judith Barry, Buczak, Michael Gira (singer for the Swans), Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), David Rosenbloom, Jane Sherry (who co-edited a previous issue of the publication), Kiki Smith, Michael Smith, Wharton Tiers, Lynne Tillman, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and many others. 

Re-issued by Primary Information in November of 2018, the title is already out-of-print. 

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

The Last Days of Kathy Acker

An excerpt from Jason McBride's forthcoming biography Kathy Acker: Her Revolutionary Life and Work can be read at Penguin/Random House, here.

Kathy Acker | I dreamt I became a nymphomaniac! : imagining

Kathy Acker
I dreamt I became a nymphomaniac! : imagining 
San Francisco, USA: Empty Elevator Shaft Poetry Press, 1974.
34 pp. ; 22 cm., staplebound
Edition size unknown

This is the first part of Acker's second novel (and the first published without a pseudonym), released in 1974.  The title was followed by 5 others, in a similar format and with continuous pagination. The authorship varies. Volumes one and two are credited to Acker, the last three are unattributed or revisit the Black Tarantula pseudonym. The third is listed as being by composer Peter Gordon. Gordon and Acker were briefly married in 1976. He went to collaborate with Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, David Johansen, The Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Lawrence Weiner, and Arthur Russell.

The publisher also varies: the first volume is published by Empty Elevator Shaft Poetry Press; the remaining are self-published; the second by "Kathy Acker", and the final volumes by "The Black Tarantula." The title was later released as the complete work  (at 114 pages) by Travelers Digest Editions in 1980 (below). It's available from Amazon starting at $50.00, here.

The original Empty Elevator Shaft Poetry Press edition is $200.00, here.

A near complete set of the originals (lacking volume five) can be purchased for $850.00, here.