Burroughs and Brion Gysin, while drawing directly from diverse literary sources including Georges Bataille, Charles Dickens, Marguerite Duras, Euripides, Arthur Rimbaud, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as pulp detective and pornographic novels. As Acker’s work shifted from poetry to primarily prose, she was influenced particularly by the cut-up works of William S. The performance of the written word – particularly at readings held at New York’s downtown arts venues – formed a significant part of Acker’s practice, which included collaborations with musicians on live performances and recordings, and with artists and filmmakers on films and video works. Her early writing positioned her within an experimental literary scene that emphasised disjunction and the materiality of language. Courtesy the estate of Kathy AckerĪcker’s output as a writer spans from the late 1960s to her death in 1997. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, 1978 (p88, 89). She provocatively confronted the strained relationship between desire and reality within culture, sex, patriarchy, the body, war, money, the family, mythology, colonialism, sickness, and the city in ways that remain critically relevant to our current times. Acker’s work addressed language as a site of contestation from which meaning and identity are both constructed and splintered. Through her prolific writing, Acker developed experimental textual methodologies as she distorted language, hybridised fiction and autobiography, ‘plagiarised’ the work of other authors, and introduced maps, drawings and diagrams.įor Acker, the use of the first-person singular was, in fact, plural, as she utilised the ‘I’ in her writing to inhabit different identities from her own life, fiction and history, acknowledging her complicated relationships with family, friends and lovers. The exhibition is accompanied by a small guide that offers an extensive insight also on her literary timeline.The guide is reprinted in full below (copyright ICA, London).Īcker is an exceptional figure in late-20th-century Western literature who moved between the avant-garde art and literary scenes of New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Paris and London.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker is an exhibition and series of talks, discussion groups, performances and screenings built around the written, spoken and performed work of American writer Kathy Acker (1947–1997).

Kathy acker great expectations