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: Yes, some of them: Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, George Brecht, Robin Page, Ben Vautier. They were all either so witty, so humorous, so radiant, or so knowledgeable. I wouldn’t describe my work as vulnerable, though. The women I painted are self-assured, mighty beings who are in one way or another calling the shots. Anyway, my friends were very supportive of my work. We had wonderful times together. It was like a golden age in Düsseldorf when several of us were living there—Robert and his wife, Marianne, and their daughter, Marcelline; Robin and his wife, Carol; George; Erik Kietman; and other Swiss and German friends. Dieter Roth and I were there because he was teaching at the academy.

ML : Oh yes, Kunstakademie. I studied in Munich at Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1994 to 1998. One of the professors there made crude comments to us chicks, and I guess it was funny and perhaps complimentary. It’s hard to really laugh, though, when there isn’t one female professor on the payroll. So I was lucky enough to study with Ben Willikens, who was very anticollaboration and threw me out for my Chicks pieces—which were not the strongest, but compared with the noncontent being generated at the time . . . Anyway, we knew from that point on we were on the right track. Dilettantismus und Unprofessionalität. The Assault on Culture, by Stewart Home, became our bible.

DI: When I got married, I gave up a fellowship I had received to study for a doctorate in English literature at Stanford. It never occurred to me after that to go to art school. I must have known intuitively that only I could discover what I wanted to do.

ML : Do you see your work, which can be so personal and narrative, as resisting dominant forms of art history?

DI: My book The Story of Bern (or) Showing Colors [1970] has been described as a new form of art history. It tells the story in drawings and text of how my work was censored at the “Friends and Their Friends”[“Ausstellung der Freunde,” 1969] exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern and how in protest Dieter removed all his work the morning after the opening and Harry Szeemann resigned as director. What arose from the personal became mythological. In an interview with me, Hans-Ulrich Obrist remarked that in my work I had anticipated docufiction. So if you invent new forms, you might even help shape the history of your own period.

ML : But in terms of history, it is funny how a certain 50 percent of the residents of the planet are traditionally quite overrepresented, and strange how it took me so very long to see that fact, because, I thought, It can’t be true. First in interviews we were asked if we were feminists, and we thought that was very random: we were just doing what we wanted to do and happened to all be girls. Later we realized that this doing what we want is a privilege, and that this right is the real politics. My father asked me years ago what my driving force is for creative work, and I said, “Cheekiness.” Now I think that is a real motor. Our group is on a mission. Let’s throw ourselves into the machine, because we have to see the world from the inside. We are not becoming what we hate; we are trying to know what we hate so we can love all the better!

DI: I always thought it was the nature of my work that caused me to have so many difficulties, not that I was a woman. Although I was aware that painting the phallus, for instance, was unforgivable.

ML : Yes, I like the dicks; they are very to the point. Do you know Rock My Religion [1982–84], Dan Graham’s film? A beautiful collage examining religious and sexual sides of culture through music. There’s a section about how the Doors’ downfall is blamed on the fact that Jim Morrison “exposes himself” twice onstage—the mystery is killed, and with that his sexual power. Oh the humble flaccid flesh . . .

DI: The women’s movement in the US made me aware of how cheaply women were held in our culture, and I was sympathetic toward their efforts to gain equal rights, but I never considered myself a feminist, because I go my own way all the time. I did, though, make many works that can be described as feminist. The triptych Follow Me [1977], for example, contains a video of my face while I’m singing a song I wrote that recalls the glories of matriarchal times. Or there are silk-screen prints like The Next Great Moment in History Is Ours [1970], which is a variation on the wonderful title of an essay by Vivian Gornick that I saw in the Village Voice [“The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs” (1969)]. But I did also make a print called Human Liberation [1972], showing a woman with both arms raised—ONE ARM FOR WOMEN, ONE ARM FOR MEN, WHO ALTHOUGH THEY NEED IT LESS, NEED IT TOO.