Do Not Go Genitally

For a long time we were in the dark about Dorothy Iannone. Her work was expunged, censored, and withdrawn from exhibitions on more than one occasion; after a healthy career in the 1970s, and despite a vantage as an American émigré at the heart of European Fluxus, she didn’t show much or sell much. The graphic, celebratory sexuality and spiritual bent displayed in her paintings, books, and multimedia pieces endeared her to neither second-wave feminists nor the artworlds that began coagulating in the 1980s. With the new millennium, though, the pendulum swung: in recent years Iannone has found large audiences and great acclaim. From 2005 to 2006 alone, her work appeared in the Berlin Biennial, the Wrong Gallery’s inaugural show at Tate Modern, the Whitney Biennial, and a pairing with fellow iconoclast Lee Lozano at the Kunsthalle Wien. And yes, she dated Dieter Roth. Melissa Logan, a founding member of Chicks on Speed, could be Iannone’s doppelgänger. Some 40 years the latter’s junior, Logan too emigrated to Germany; makes provocative artwork with gender at its core, as part of CoS; and refuses boundaries between art mediums, and between art and life. The two met in Iannone’s home in Berlin on Thanksgiving Day and again two weeks later to discuss sex, motherhood, being a foreigner, being a woman artist, and the evolution of their work. As a fly on the wall, I was amazed to see how much two people could have in common—and get along—yet see things so differently. —DA

Melissa Logan: When did sexuality enter your work?

Dorothy Iannone: It took off when I followed my heart to Iceland in June 1967, but in New York I had already exhibited a few hundred wood cutouts of figures whose genitals were painted in, even when they were fully clothed. I made the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Norman Mailer, the Kennedys, copies of Botticellis and Japanese woodcuts, circus freaks, everyone I could think of.

ML : Was anyone else depicting sexual organs at the time you were doing it?

DI: I wasn’t aware of anyone. When Chrissie Iles saw my video sculpture I Was Thinking of You, from 1975—where I’d painted a man and a woman making love and in the space of the woman’s face integrated a monitor with a video of my face showing the stages of sexual arousal, including orgasm— she remarked that this was quite early for that kind of material. She mentioned a Vito Acconci piece, which I wasn’t familiar with.

ML : Yah, Seedbed, 1972. He was in the gallery, lying under a platform built into the floor, jerking off. You could hear him talking through loudspeakers, fantasizing about the people walking above him.

DI: The difference with my piece is that when I made it, I was completely alone. I set up the camera, positioned my face in the monitor, and filmed.

ML : Exactly. With you, it is the most private part of oneself being exposed. Acconci gives it this twist of the perverse, taking on the persona of the flasher/ crazy artist. Because he is a guy, it makes it more aggressive. I see I Was Thinking of You as a platform for going into another place.

DI: The sculpture is not a platform for going someplace else; it is someplace else. That work embodies my longing for ultimate union with the beloved. The painted part of it shows a woman giving herself completely to the man she’s making love with. Their genitals are painted in luscious colors, their environment is sparkling, birds and plants are flourishing. It’s the morning of the world. And in that brief moment when the soul passes fleetingly over the face at the moment of orgasm, the woman shows, through the video, her readiness to give everything. In the text painted on the box, she tries to persuade him to surrender himself, too, so that they may achieve complete intimacy, or, as I later came to call it, “ecstatic unity.”

ML : Your paintings remind me of Carol Rama’s, with snakelike forms coming out of sexual organs, but the theatrical order of yours makes hers seem spastic and in a psychedelic dream state. I love I Have Got Such a Marvelous Cock [1969/70]. The sexual partners are very confident and sure of themselves and what they are up to, but you don’t lose playfulness or humor. I see orgasm in your hands, so to speak, as having a metaphoric relation to truth. It’s something that occurs outside time and space, and it’s a synecdoche for the way that you share everything with the viewer in all your work. I love how the female is so happy, because the guy is really rubbing her happy spot on the painting, in I Was Thinking of You. His dick is so nice and hard, and, yes, this looks like paradise, and makes me very happy and want to jump on something in the not too far future.