Do Not Go Genitally

Photo by Oliver Helbig

Dorothy Iannone in her home, Berlin, November 2007

Yayoi Kusama Joan Mitchell Helen Frankenthaler Grace Hartigan Vito Acconci George Brecht Pol Bury Robert Filliou

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DI: That was at the Musée d’ Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in Pol Bury’s “Daily Bul” show. Apparently, the president of France at the time, Giscard d’Estaing, visited that exhibition. I was told afterward that my video just happened to be not functioning that day. In general, one could say that, in the past, when my work was not censored outright, it was either mildly ridiculed, or described as folkloric, or just ignored. Now the response is more positive, but one can still sometimes feel the rejection of Eros. I Was Thinking of You II [1975/2005] was shown at Tate Modern. The English tabloids were, predictably, pretty nasty, and I read a review in a major German newspaper that was belittling. A third version [1975/2006] was shown at Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne’s Whitney Biennial. The audience seemed so sophisticated the day I was there, and when Elizabeth Schambelan wrote in Artforum that it was one of the most truly transgressive works in the show, I was extremely happy.

ML : We recently had a show at the CAC Vilnius called “Shoe Fuck!” [2007]. Frieze printed a very superficial review of it, and the image they used, an installation shot, includes the title painting in the background. Blocking the important section of the painting—a Chanel heel penetrating my pussy— is a person. It is a press photo supplied by the museum, but in general I’m suspicious of people’s willingness to explore intense themes; the review mentions feminism ironically, not as a driving force. Advertised in the same issue is “Black Pussy,” an exhibition by Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner. It’s unfortunate the artist is not alive, because I would have liked to talk to him about it. His pussy series is about language? Hmmm. I guess it’s one thing to talk about it, another thing to do it?

DI: My first experience with censorship in Germany was in Stuttgart in 1967, at the Hansjörg Mayer gallery— the police confiscated my entire show the morning after the opening. Then they invited critics and art historians to help determine whether the work was pornographic. Fortunately they said it had connections to ancient traditions of art. On the last day of the show the authorities returned the work. Hansjörg told me that if it had been judged pornographic, it would have been buried in an underground vault for one hundred years, after which time it would have been returned to me. It sounds surreal, I know. At least in that case I got my work back. English customs officials actually burned a few of my artist’s books in 1972.

ML : Do you feel that problems with censorship, or the cooling effect it might have had on people being interested in your work, affected what you were doing in your art?
DI: Censorship in no way caused me to change the nature of my work. However, as a result of it, I did suffer a significant amount of exclusion from shows. And if you are not selling much work, you run out of places to store it! So there was a side effect: I started working on a smaller scale, and I went deeper into my writing and a form I had developed of integrating text with drawings. This was the period of An Icelandic Saga [1978, 1983, 1986] and The Berlin Beauties [1978], for instance.

ML : Because your work is so autobiographical, I wonder what kind of relationship you have to selling pieces.

DI: It’s true that my life—my thoughts, feelings, and experiences—is my inspiration. But once experiences have been transformed through painting, writing, filming, or singing, well, then they become something else. Now it’s a work of art that one is selling, no matter what the inspiration was.

ML : I wanted to ask you about Fluxus, which you were associated with. It seems pretty cool, but the guys come across as rather macho pigs. What was it like making vulnerable work in such a phallocentric scene?

DI: Macho pigs! You wouldn’t say that if you had known them. And I never worked with them on anything. In fact, I began my “Fluxus Essay” [1979], “I am she who is not Fluxus.”