Dorothy Iannone - This book is an explosion of colors and adventures—the irreverent chronicle of the many lives lived by Iannon. With her joyous, pan-sexual energy, Iannone has been endlessly rewriting her autobiography, mixing art history and fairy tales

Dorothy Iannone, You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends. Ed. by Lisa Pearson with an essay by Trinie Dalton. Siglio Press, 2014.

Read the complete PDF Press Release.

For over five decades, Dorothy Iannone has been making exuberantly sexual and joyfully transgressive image+text works, often drawing on autobiography and incorporating lovers and friends into her stories. Beginning with An Icelandic Saga
in which Iannone narrates her journey to Iceland (where she meets artist Dieter Roth and leaves her husband to live with him), this singular volume traces Iannone’s search for “ecstatic unity” from its carnal beginnings in her relationships with Roth and other men into its spiritual incarnation as she becomes a practicing Buddhist. Iannone’s work—exploring sexual liberation and self-realization in a different but no less radical way than her feminist contemporaries—is rich with provocative inversions of muse and maker, sacred and profane, male and female, submission and dominance. Ever-flowing from a fertile confluence of art and life, her work is inflected in surprising ways with equal parts Tantric metaphysics and Fluxus avant-garde.
You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends reproduces some familiar works in Iannone’s oeuvre but focuses on rarely seen, long-out-of- print artist’s books, drawings and unpublished writings, many reproduced in their entirety or substantial excerpted so that readers can delve into work not easily read in an exhibition space or a catalog. This selection features the complete 80-page fever-dream Danger in Düsseldorf (originally published by Hansjörg Mayer), the lover’s ode The Whip, as well as almost half of A Cookbook in which she narrates the exultations and tribulations of her life between the lines of recipes. With wit, visual delight, irresistible erotic candor and heart-felt generosty, Iannone invites readers into an intimate world that speaks to the liberating potential of love.

Dorothy Iannone is a pioneer whose work from the 1960s forward has opened out a space of exuberant, colorful transgression, mixing a canny sense of humor with the gravity of the erotic. Her paintings and drawings, in which she is often the star, are a hybrid mix of high and low references—and represent a crucial piece in the history of female self-articulation. Bizarre, proliferative, and also figurative, her work can be understood as parallel to the taboo-shattering underground comics of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Iannone’s oeuvre, beautifully collected here in this important book, is part of a history of brave—often sexually explicit—expression that we recognize today in contemporary comics. You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends is a revelation.—HILLARY CHUTE

This book is an explosion of colors and adventures—the irreverent chronicle of the many lives lived by Dorothy Iannone, one of the most eccentric artists I know. With her joyous, pan-sexual energy, Iannone has been endlessly rewriting her autobiography, mixing art history and fairy tales.

—MASSIMILIANO GIONI

Dorothy Iannone at the Berlinische Galerie: “This Sweetness Outside Of Time”

DOROTHY IANNONE: YOU WHO READ ME WITH PASSION NOW MUST FOREVER BE MY FRIENDS, a large compendium of exuberantly sexual and transgressive image+text works (drawings, paintings, artist’s books, and writings) that traces Iannone’s decades-long pursuit of “ecstatic unity”—from the carnal to the spiritual, will release from Siglio this fall.

From the exhibition description:
The American Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933) occupies a distinct place as an artist in the second half of the twentieth century. Her œuvre, which now spans more than fifty years, includes painting and visual narrative, autobiographical texts and films. Since the 1960s she has been seen as a pioneering spirit against censorship and for free love and autonomous female sexuality. She continues to go her own way without compromise, artistically and conceptually.

Thanks to curator Dr. Annelie Lütgens and the Berlinsche Galerie for permission to reproduce the following images and essay excerpts.

from “Language of Love” by Michael Glasmeier

Her artist’s books are an extraordinary melding of the literary inspiration of a trained literary scholar and poet with their inherent medium. I’m frequently uncertain which I should marvel at more: the elegance of her texts, which are capable of speaking as easily in the erudite tone of a Sappho, the Bible, or the sonnets of Shakespeare as in the idioms of daily life and of obscenity—or the compositional design in combination with diverse visual worlds. Since Walt Whitman, an alternation among disparate tones of voice can be found in American literature, for instance in the writing of Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg; yet with Iannone, they encounter the congenial mixture of styles in her complex imagery, from concise illustrative forms to transformed iconic citations to visual motifs and superstructures in religious settings. On the textual level, two procedures can be differentiated in general: the painted or drawn sequence of lettering in lovingly designed capital letters, and a handwritten, usually longer text that is concentrated in a panel—whether a frame, a page, or the surface of a box—or proliferates with the ornamentation, as for instance in Sunday Morning (1965), in which the first verses of the “pagan” poem of the American poet Wallace Stevens, whose work unfortunately remains largely unknown in Germany, are interwoven, as it were, with the image. It was Stevens, a friend of Walter Arensberg and an acquaintance of Marcel Duchamp, who in a 1951 lecture analyzed the poetic equivalence of art and literature in interpreting reality at the frontier of mysticism.(1)
Yet, apart from early exceptions, Iannone is her own poet, defining the relations of text and image from case to case, whereby it is necessary to differentiate the kinds of texts and imagery she uses. Poems, free verse, anecdotes, stories (mostly autobiographical), exhortations, prayers, litanies, lists, and parodies come into play. This finely nuanced abundance of linguistic talent, which dazzles in all the registers mentioned above, acts autonomously in relation to the pictorial space, compliantly or defiantly, whereby a more detailed analysis might establish that the text-image-space relations are in each case quite precisely and patiently plotted. Iannone is a master of composition as she equilibrates with this difficult mix of elements. Filling the surface with lettering, image, and ornament may well have ethnological roots, yet this uniting of copying and picturing activity, in her paintings as well, reminds me of the production of medieval monks. It has contemplative, ascetic features that refer back to ideas about of “the art of living” in classical antiquity.(2) Iannone stands out among her contemporaries, for it is not a masterfully sweeping stroke or concept that defines her art, but rather a kind of “self-lessness” in the process of production,(3) which can be described as a form of “spiritual practice”(4) toward an exquisitely illuminated unity; and the apparent spontaneity stands in contrast not merely to the contrarian message of her images. Vive la différence!

from “It Is Not Too Late to Remember Who I Am” by Annelie Lütgens

Dorothy Iannone came to Berlin as a mature and experienced artist. She had an early body of abstract-expressive work behind her, had produced a variety of artist’s books and multiples that established her own original form of storytelling using both text and images and, since the early 1970s, had integrated singing and video into her art.
Despite Pop Art and the sexual revolution in both art and society, the subject matter of her art (to be treated in greater detail elsewhere)—everyday intimate dialogues, longing, desire, idealization of the beloved from the stance of a sexually aggressive and self-confident woman—was new and apparently offensive. Iannone dealt with this with far more assurance that most of her female comrades of the women’s liberation movement who, myself included, went to bed with books like Verena Stefan’s Häutungen or Anja Meulenbelt’s Die Scham ist vorbei, and had begun to bid farewell to “Prince Charming.”(5)
In the German Federal Republic, a reappraisal of historical art and an assessment and appreciation of the contemporary positions of women artists had only just begun. In 1977 West Berlin was the showplace for the first survey exhibition Künstlerinnen [Women Artists] International 1877–1977, which was organized for the NGBK [New Association for Visual Art] by a group of practicing artists and scholars. Dorothy Iannone would have belonged in this show, alongside Judy Chicago, Martha Rosler, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Helen Frankenthaler. But the opportunity was wasted.(6) A similar thing happened in 1987, when Dorothy Iannone appeared—with a graphic work from the Artothek—in just a small corner, figuratively speaking, of Verborgenen Museum [Hidden Museum], an exhibition devoted to women’s art in Berlin’s public collections, which once again was organized by women artists and scholars and which published a companion volume on eleven contemporary women artists.(7) The Museum of Prints and Drawings of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation did acquire a major work in 1987, the 35-part drawing series The Berlin Beauties from 1977/78, but it was only inventoried the following year, in 1988. And in 1990, the Berlinische Galerie acquired the early work Remembered Child from 1961. So much for Dorothy Iannone’s presence in Berlin’s public collections.(8) In the 1992 show Profession ohne [without] Tradition, a survey exhibition celebrating 125 years of women’s art and the 125thanniversary of the founding of the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen [Association of Women Artists], again organized by a team made up primarily of women, Iannone likewise does not turn up in the array of contemporary positions. The exhibition Erzählen [Storytelling], with works by eleven women artists and photographers working in Berlin, was shown at the Academy of Arts in 1994. Dorothy Iannone, whose works embodied the theme like no other, was suggested by the curator, yet due to pressure from a few women artists, she was not included in the show.(9)












FOOTNOTES
1. Cf. Wallace Stevens, “Die Beziehung zwischen Dichtung und Malerei” [Relations Between Poetry and Painting] in Stevens, Hellwach, am Rande des Schlafs. Gedichte, ed. Joachim Sartorius, Munich 2011, pp. 319–333. The poem “Sunday Morning” also appears in this book (pp. 48–57).
2. Cf. Sabine Mainberger, Schriftskepsis. Von Philosophen, Mönchen, Buchhaltern, Kalligraphen, Munich 1995.
3. Ibid., p. 19.
4. Ibid., p. 27.
5. Cf. Verena Stefan, Häutungen. Autobiografische Aufzeichnungen, Munich 1975 [Shedding, Feminist Press CUNY, 1994]; Anja Meulenbelt, Die Scham ist vorbei. Eine persönliche Geschichte, translated from the Dutch by Birgit Knorr, Munich 1978 [Shame is Over, Women’s Press 1980]; Svende Merian, Der Tod des Märchenprinzen. Frauenroman, Hamburg 1980.
6. On the impact of the exhibition and its fall into obscurity see the interview with Silvia Bovenschen and Sarah Schumann and other artist interviews in Frieze d/e, April–May 2013, pp. 92-105.
7. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e. V. (ed.), Das verborgene Museum. Dokumentation der Kunst von Frauen in Berliner öffentlichen Sammlungen, exh. cat. NGBK, Berlin 1987, p. 299.
8. Three works—a painting, a painted table, and a Singing Box, which entered the collection of the Hamburger Bahnhof with the bequest of the Mike Steiner Collection in 1999—augment this meager yield.
9. Cf. Michael Glasmeier (ed.), Erzählen. Eine Anthologie, publication for the exhibition Erzählen in the Academy of Arts, Berlin 1994. - sigliopress.com/dorothy-berlinische-galerie/

The Whole Truth

Since the late 1960s, Dorothy Iannone has displayed a radical commitment to self-expression, portraying herself and her relationships in unabashedly sexual terms

Flora and Fauna, 1973, Colour silkscreen on paper, 60 × 73 cm. Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin; photograph: Hans Georg Gaul

‘There is only one thing which interests me vitally now’, wrote Henry Miller in the first chapter of his 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer, ‘and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.’1 Much of what Miller was intent on recording was of an explicitly sexual nature, resulting in a ban on all of his works in his native US. When Boston-born artist Dorothy Iannone returned from a visit to Paris in 1961 with a copy of _Tropic of Cancer _in her suitcase, it was confiscated by US Customs officials. Together with the American Civil Liberties Union, she filed a lawsuit to sue the government for its return. At the trial vari­­ous intellectual luminaries testified to the literary importance of Miller’s work, resulting in the lifting of the 30-year-long ban on this and the writer’s other works.

Lions For Dieter Rot The Present Lion Master, 1971, Etching on paper, 86 × 95 cm. Courtesy: Air de Paris; photograph: Jochen Littkemann

Miller’s frankness regarding sex can be seen in the boldly declarative work of the now Berlin-based artist. Since the late 1960s, Iannone’s works have displayed a radical commitment to self-expression, portraying herself and her relationships in unabashedly sexual terms. ‘Why can’t we stand up for Eros?’ she asks in her book Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Love and Divinity (1982), in which the Tropic of Cancer episode is described – the first of her many run-ins with the authorities over censorship. ‘Wouldn’t we feel better if we could stand up for this life-long part of ourselves?’2 Iannone’s book will be republished this year to accompany an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Migros Museum, Zurich, which focuses specifically on the issue of censorship. A retrospective of Iannone’s paintings, objects, books and films, from 1959 until now, was held recently at the Berlinische Galerie, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue. In October a further publication bringing together her various writings and interviews will be published by Los Angeles’ Siglio Press.
Why this groundswell of interest in Iannone’s work now, given that its subject matter and methodology have remained more or less constant since the late ’60s? Is it that throughout her works, Iannone has remained vitally present, both as an explicitly portrayed body and a clear and sonorous voice? The uncensored and life-embracing self-portraits are refreshing and rare, despite, or perhaps rather because of, today’s satu­ration of countless modes of online self-presentation, not to mention the Internet’s ocean of pornography (‘that unrelentingly mechanistic substitute for real feelings’, as Iannone calls it).
Iannone’s background was a literary one, completing her graduate studies in English and American literature at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, in 1958. The following year she married the affluent painter and mathematician James Upham and began to make abstract paintings and collages. By the mid 1960s, these had developed into brightly-coloured, all-over patternings with sharp black outlines. In paintings such as Sunday Morning (1965), several scenes spread horizontally across the canvas show small, naked figures in interior settings, interspersed amongst decorative repeating patterns and handwritten excerpts from literary works she admired, such as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (c.1607) or Wallace Stevens’s poetry. The subsequent years saw her develop two of the main features that came to characterize her later work: an exuberant folkloristic ornamentation and a naïve figuration which emphasized genitalia – plump pudendas, penises and testicles – visible even on clothed figures. ‘Looking back at my early abstract work’, said Iannone in an interview in 2010, ‘I see that without any intention whatsoever, the lovers gradually appeared and became more and more distinct and that from the very beginning their genitals were not only present but extremely prominent too. This was surely an unconscious unfolding of what was in my heart.’3

Sunday Morning, 1965, Oil on canvas, 1.9 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: Dorothy Iannone; photograph: Jochen Littkemann

It was in the summer of 1967, while travelling with her husband to Iceland, that a life-changing moment occurred for Iannone: her now notorious meeting with Dieter Roth. A month later, she left her husband in New York to return to Reykjavík to be with Roth. She has remained in Europe since, living in Düsseldorf, southern France and finally Berlin, where she first came in 1976 on a DAAD scholarship. That Iannone is rarely mentioned without acknowledging her relationship with Roth is, in this case, not merely the male artist overshadowing his female companion. It is rather that their relationship itself became the primary subject matter for Iannone, not only during the seven years that they spent together but for many of the years that followed. Declaring Roth her muse, in a reversal of usual gender roles, Iannone pursued a personal quest for emancipation that was equal parts feminist, intel­lectual and sexual.
The works Iannone made during her first years together with Roth were celebrations of monogamous passion but also recorded the accompanying doubts, fights and sadness. Each of the Dialogues I–X, (1967–69) consists of a series of brightly coloured drawings in feltpen on cardboard panels, detailing episodes from their life together in which sex played a central, cohesive role. In a series of eight large canvases from 1970 to 1971, her imagery explodes in scale: the bodies are almost life-size and a variety of sex acts take centre stage. Crucial here are the brief capitalized texts that seem to sub­title each panel. ‘Look at Me’ declares one, as a voluptuous figure displays her body from front and back, her pronounced labia as round as her exposed ass. ‘Suck my breasts, I am your most beautiful mother’ declares another as an obedient male sucks a fat pink nipple. The voice of the artist, with its commanding tone and uncensored script, transforms these paintings from fanciful erotica to compelling statements of female assertiveness and emancipation.

Let The Light From My Lighthouse Shine On You, 1981, Acrylic and gouache on synthetic board mounted on Pavatex, 1.4 × 1 m. courtesy: Air de Paris, Paris; photograph: Jochen Littkemann

While Iannone was developing this revelatory style in Reykjavík and Dusseldorf (where she and Roth moved in 1968), a wave of female artists in the United States were tackling the body and sexuality from a purposefully female perspective, exhibiting in all-women shows organized by artists or feminist curators such as Linda Nochlin and Lucy Lippard. Several took on the still taboo subjects of sexual intercourse or the male nude: in New York, artists like Joan Semmel, Betty Tompkins and Hannah Wilke.4 In Britain, Margaret Harrison, Sylvia Sleigh and Cosi Fanni Tutti were addressing similar concerns. Iannone never aligned herself explicitly with a feminist cause, however, seeing her work more neutrally in terms of ‘Human Liberation’ (the title of a work from 1972, on which is inscribed: ‘One arm for women / One arm for men / who although they need it less / need it too’). The inti­mately autobiographical nature of her work kept it apart from the more politically orientated, analytical or performative approaches of Wilke or Tutti, or the large-scale photorealistic works of Semmel or Sleigh. The explicit idolization of her lover sat uncomfortably with many of the emancipatory tenets of the feminist movement, though in Iannone’s eyes, it too had a feminist component, as she later wrote: ‘the exclusion of Eros from life is more easily accomplished if the woman also is denied her importance in humanity.’ The autodidactic, folkloristic, storytelling manner of presentation, meanwhile, meant that it hovered on the edges of artistic discourse, in a limbo between art and literature that made it difficult to place. Though she was closely linked to many of the (male) artists involved in Fluxus, she did not see her own work as related to Fluxus concerns, and on being invited to participate in a Fluxus exhibition in 1979, described the tokenistic gesture in lightly ironic terms in a text inscribed on the piece she exhi­bited: A Fluxus Essay And An Audacious Announcement (1979).
Despite her distance from the main activities of second-wave feminism in the field of art, she was nevertheless subject to the same censorship that affected many of her peers when it came to depicting the male nude and sexual activity. One of her earliest artist books, The Story of Bern (1970), narrates the events that lead to the censorship of her work in The Friends Show at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, curated by then director Harald Szeemann, in a compelling series of black and white drawings. Concerned about the public reaction, Szeemann, together with some of the participating artists, agreed that the genitals in her works should be covered over with brown tape. Iannone withdrew her works in protest – as did Roth – and subsequently turned the episode into a new work, The Story of Bern. Ironically, a couple of years later this artist’s book itself was confiscated by English customs authorities while being shipped to an English bookshop, and was burned before she could intervene.

The Berlin Beauties or You Have No Idea How Beautiful You Are, Berlin, 1978,Page from artist’s book, 24 × 21 cm. Courtesy: Air de Paris

From the early ’70s onwards, the book form became a favoured medium for Iannone, given its ability to yoke text and image and accommodate the narrative dimension of her work. The Story of Bern was followed by Danger in Düsseldorf (Or) I am Not What I Seem (1973), Speaking to Each Other, With Mary Harding (1977) and Berlin Beauties (1978) which, though also focusing on sex as a means towards ‘ecstatic unity’, replaces the specific identity of the lover with a fictional ‘Danton’. Further series of drawings and prints followed, such as the wonderfully compelling An Icelandic Saga (1978/83/86) in which Iannone tells the fairytale-like story of her meeting with Roth and leaving her husband. These small-scale, text-dense works, many of which are reproduced in full in Siglio Press’s forthcoming publication Dorothy Iannone: You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends, are per­haps the most convincing of Iannone’s oeuvre, effortlessly intertwining drawing and writing, image and voice in their graphic depictions. This diaristic form seems to suggest parallels with the more recent work of American artist Frances Stark, also an artist and writer, who often adopts a similarly disarming confessional tone. In Stark’s recent video works such as My Best Thing (2011), or Osservate, leggete con me (Observed, Read With Me, 2012), subtitles transcribe her dialogues with virtual lovers met in Internet chat rooms, where sexual activity is frankly handled, but becomes just one amongst many different topics in a conversation that moves between politics, work, philosophy and everyday life. Stark too describes the aim of art as one of personal growth, quoting Robert Musil when she says ‘“Art” for me is only a means of reaching a higher level of the “self”.’5 Like Iannone, Stark’s work revolves around herself and her personal experiences; the peripheral elements that surround the making of art are harnessed as its subject matter in order to, like Henry Miller, ‘record the things that are usually omitted’. Coincidentally, Miller was also an early influence for Stark. For Untitled (Sexus) (1992), she presented an edition of Miller’s 1949 novel Sexus alongside her own handwritten, carbon-copied version. Thus Stark’s work was unknowingly indebted to Iannone’s fight against censorship – Sexus was banned a year after its publication until the 1961 lawsuit filed by Iannone resulted in this being lifted. When it was republished in 1968, a New York Times review described how ‘Miller uses licentious sex scenes to set the stage for his philosophical discussions of self, love, marriage and happiness’6 – a description that could apply to either Stark’s or Iannone’s work.

Dieter and Dorothy, 2007, Silkscreen print on paper, 65 × 55 cm. Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin; photograph: Hans Georg Gaul

In 1984, Iannone became involved in the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, and gradually her focus moved towards the discovery of ecstatic unity through spiritual enlightenment rather than sexual union. During the ’80s and ’90s, her works began to show the influence of Tantric art, incorporating mantras or images of herself meditating or as a many-armed goddess, while their texts focused more generally on self-discovery. In these paintings, the heart and mind are depicted as one, in a union of corporeal and mental transcendence. Despite this shift, it is nevertheless difficult to orient yourself chronologically within Iannone’s work. Its repetitive style and subject matter suggest not so much development as a deepening of intention. It pictures a journey of a personal nature that is not determined by linear time, but is in fact more similar to the looping, repetitive, circular patterning that she employs visually. The same elements, figures, ornaments and phrases recur and their meaning accrues in what grows to become a solid, convincing, and deeply personal corpus; the result of a life lived with eyes wide open, constantly searching out and making use of what Miller called ‘those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives.’ - Kirsty Bell

The Darling Duck By Dorothy Iannone

Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933, Boston, MA) has been making artist’s books, paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound pieces and video installations in relative obscurity since the 1960s until The Wrong Gallery featured her work at the Tate Modern in 2005, followed by The Whitney Biennial in 2006 with the work “I Was Thinking Of You,” (1975/2005) colloquially known as “the orgasm box.” Her first solo exhibition at a U.S. museum, “Dorothy Iannone: Lioness,” took place in 2009 at the New Museum in New York when she was seventy-six years old. The New York Times wrote at the time: “High priestess, matriarch, sex goddess: the self-taught American artist Dorothy Iannone has been called all these things and more.” Her most recent solo exhibitions include “Innocent and Aware” at the Camden Arts Centre, London, and “Imperturbable” at the Centre National Édition Art Image, Paris, both in 2013. This year, in 2014, a solo show at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich follows “This Sweetness Outside of Time,” a major retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie für Moderne Kunst, Berlin.