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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ML : Feminist is still a swearword in Germany. Here they just have one outdated tabloid-heroine feminist, Alice Schwarzer. Yes, please talk, dear Alice; but no one person can represent all emancipated females in Germany. Girl gangs are all too seldom found here, as are females in good positions with loads of recognition and piles of cash. It’s underestimated how good that can make society.

DI: When I began working in the ’60s in New York, there were very few well-known women artists: Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Marisol, Louise Nevelson . . . Probably I could name a few more. Yayoi Kusama did exhibit on 10th Street, across from my gallery, before I left New York. Only now since I’ve had a show with Lee Lozano at the Kunsthalle Wien have I gotten to know her work.

ML : You were making abstract paintings at that time—so different from what you soon began doing, with graphic sex and personal detail and text. How did your style develop?

DI: I plunged right in with oils around 1959, although at first I painted with my fingers and then with a palette knife. I don’t think my paintings looked like anyone else’s, but it was Abstract Expressionism. At the same time I was making very intricate felt-pen black-and-white drawings with plantlike forms. I loved Matisse and Léger and classical Indian erotic art, Stuart Davis, too. Over the next few years, figures began to emerge amid the abstraction. The very first time a man and a woman appeared together, they already had prominent sexual organs. They represented my husband and me. After that I began including lines from writing that I loved, like Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” or from Shakespeare. This was the point I was at when I fell in love and almost overnight left my husband. Fortunately we didn’t have children; otherwise, I don’t think I could have left.

ML : It is a responsibility.

DI: Since I was so inspired and even obsessed with the high love of Antony and Cleopatra, I think that if I’d had a child before realizing my own aspirations, I would have passed all my longings on to my child.

ML : Actually, I love having a kid and being an artist. The roles seem to work well together for me, especially because my husband and I share child-care duties. With our kid, Sid, we have a fifty-fifty deal, we like to say. We each adapt our lives 50 percent toward each other. He has to adapt to our lifestyle, not just us to his. How did you make the move into multimedia?

DI: At the beginning of the ’70s I started making “Singing Boxes.” They were painted on the outside and contained an audiocassette player, with a recording of my singing. For a year or so, I also sang with Ralf Hütter from Kraftwerk at their studio one night a week. It was just a small step to building bigger boxes that incorporated a video player and monitor into the sculptures.

ML : Do you think living far from where one comes from forces a person to be more self-sufficient?

DI: In a way, I was really on my own in Europe, and I didn’t have to answer to anyone who might have felt a right to interfere with my work. How has living in Germany affected you?

ML : I also think living in a foreign country with a different language is mentally freeing. Even for someone who is free-spirited, there are always, way in the back of one’s mind, thoughts like, What will my mom think, the kids I grew up with, whoever? These boundaries are not there when there’s no chance Dad is going to see a video of you masturbating or a painting of you fucking a Chanel shoe.

DI: I sent my mother an invitation to my first show in Germany, which had a reproduction of two of my cutouts, a man and woman in very sexual positions. She later showed me where she had kept it hidden for years. It’s nice, though, that she didn’t throw it away.

ML : The survival factor is more dangerous as well. You really are forced to be very serious in terms of a career, because there is less of a buffer to catch a fall. That tension has forced me to be less compromising, and even aggressive about what is the right direction for the group or myself.