Iannone's image-text works celebrate a joyful sexuality and
spirituality
For over five decades, Dorothy Iannone has been making exuberantly
sexual and joyfully transgressive image-text works. Karen Rosenberg
wrote of her in The New York Times: "High priestess, matriarch, sex
goddess: the self-taught American artist Dorothy Iannone has been called
all these things and more. Since the early 1960s she has been making
paintings, sculptures and artist's books that advocate 'ecstatic unity,
' most often achieved through lovemaking." Beginning with the famous "An
Icelandic Saga," in which Iannone narrates her journey to Iceland (where
she meets 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. Reproducing
several previously unpublished or long-out-of-print works in their
entirety (such as Danger in Düsseldorf, The Whip, "An Explosive
Interlude"), as well as longer excerpts from rarely-seen works like A
Cookbook and Berlin Beauties, this volume gives readers the chance to
read her work with sustained attention, and enjoy the sophistication of
the stories she tells and the visual-textual embellishments that make
them so irresistible.
Associated with Fluxus through her close friendships with Emmett
Williams, Robert Filliou and Ben Vautier, as well as most well-known for
her relationship with Dieter Roth, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933)
nevertheless has her own distinct aesthetic style and substantive
concerns. Her first major museum show in the U.S. came when she was 75
in 2008 at the New Museum, shortly after her "orgasm box" titled "I Was
Thinking of You" was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2006, and she
has recently attained more recognition with solo shows at the Camden
Arts Centre, Palais de Tokyo and the Berlinischer Galerie.
