Capital and Colonialism (and Cock)

Photograph of Kathy Acker by Deborah Feingold, 1984

From The New York Review of Books:

A file of young women in décolletage-baring black cocktail dresses and wobbly stilettos makes its way through the mêlée of Trafalgar Square, dense with football fans. They kick aside the empty beer cans that litter every passage. At their tail is a slightly bedraggled woman in white. A beauty queen’s sash across her chest spells out “Bride-to-Be.” As I walk down the Duke of York Steps and turn into The Mall with its stately Nash Buildings, their stucco whiter than the bride-to-be’s frock, I imagine a smile on the iconic face of the New York writer, performer, and member of the 1970s and 1980s Manhattan downtown avant-garde whose work has now inspired a show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), “I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker.” The hen-party scene elevated to a surreal extreme could have come out of one of her books.

Acker made London and the ICA—the cultural center founded in 1947 by Roland Penrose and others as an alternative to the stuffy confines of the Royal Academy and, since 1968, situated somewhat incongruously on The Mall just down the road from Buckingham Palace—her sometime base from the mid-1980s before her too-early death at the age of fifty in 1997. Acker liked subverting bridal white and other tropes of female submissiveness, alongside conventional forms of female desire. All the while, she inquired into the power of capital and colonialism (not to mention cock) that had established them.

It’s no surprise that Acker, who had the aura of a punk star and performed her readings with a slow, flat earnestness that utterly belied their often shocking content, felt at home at the ICA, an arts institution where the various forms—music, writing, dance, theatre, visual art, comics philosophy, film, high culture and popular—crossed over and mixed and mingled, as did their audiences. I worked there through the 1980s, initially programming the literature and ideas side of things. At once or in sequence, we might have had Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Stuart Hall in the building, or Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, and Kazuo Ishiguro, plus, say, an early theater piece by the innovative Théâtre de Complicité, DJs presenting the hottest new groups, and a seasonal show of New York artists.

“Kathy Acker: A Study in the Sadeian Woman”, Lisa Appignanesi, The New York Review of Books