M HKA Ensembles

Book, paper 7.25 × 9 in. 320 pages, 95 color and 210 bw.

Collection: Collection M HKA / library (Inv. no. B 2030/907).

Edited by Lisa Pearson ; with an essay by Trinie Dalton and interviews with Dorothy Iannone by Trinie Dalton, Maurizio Cattelan and Noa Jones.
Published by siglio

For over five decades, Dorothy Iannone has been making exuberantly sexual and joyfully transgressive image+text works, often drawing on autobiography and incorporating lovers and friends into her stories. Beginning with An Icelandic Saga in which Iannone narrates her journey to Iceland (where she meets artist 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. Iannone’s work—exploring sexual liberation and self-realization in a different but no less radical way than her feminist contemporaries—is rich with provocative inversions of muse and maker, sacred and profane, male and female, submission and dominance. Ever-flowing from a fertile confluence of art and life, her work is inflected in surprising ways with equal parts Tantric metaphysics and Fluxus avant-garde.

You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends reproduces some familiar works in Iannone’s oeuvre but focuses on rarely seen, long-out-of- print artist’s books, drawings and unpublished writings, many reproduced in their entirety or substantial excerpted so that readers can delve into work not easily read in an exhibition space or a catalog. This selection features the complete 80-page fever-dream Danger in Düsseldorf (originally published by Hansjörg Mayer), the lover’s ode The Whip, as well as almost half of A Cookbook in which she narrates the exultations and tribulations of her life between the lines of recipes. With wit, visual delight, irresistible erotic candor and heart-felt generosty, Iannone invites readers into an intimate world that speaks to the liberating potential of love.