Description
Edition of 270 copies.
Full-colour cover and inner-sleeve by Dorothy Iannone.
“When I was living in France in 1975, I made an audio cassette singing some lines from a famous German song: “Wenn keiner treu Dir bliebe, ich bleib Dir ewig grün, Du meine alte Liebe, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin.” [When no one stays by you, I’ll remain forever true, my old love, you, Berlin will always stay Berlin.]
Maybe the song was on my mind because I had just received the news that I had been awarded a DAAD artist grant for the following year. I was home alone that evening and, after painting for some hours, I decided that, since I still had a lot of energy I would make an audio cassette. and so, i set up my simple equipment on the floor by my bedside. I didn’t have any particular plan when I started to sing, but somehow, as I went along, I began caressing myself and my voice changed according to my feelings. But yet despite what I was feeling, the discipline was to keep singing those same four lines. The voice itself expressed the stages of sexual arousal. Shortly before orgasm, I was almost completely breathless and could hardly continue repeating the lines between gasps, and then suddenly, as the orgasm began, my voice became really strong and loud, soaring into the air for some moments b!efore subsiding as I, very softly, managed to utter the concluding lines.“ (Dorothy Iannone)
Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1933. She attended Boston University and Brandeis University where she majored in Literature. In 1961 she successfully sued the U.S. Government on behalf of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”, which until then was censured in the U.S., to allow its importation into the country. She begins painting in 1959 and travels extensively with her husband to Europe and the Far East. From 1963 until 1967, she runs a co-operative gallery on Tenth Street. New York together with her husband. In 1966 they live for some months in the South of France where she begins a close friendship with Robert Filliou and other artists from Fluxus. She meets and falls in love with German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth during a journey to Reykjavik and will share his life in different European cities until 1974. Two years later Iannone moves to Berlin after receiving a grant from the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program. She still lives and works in Berlin, where she pursues her artistic production.
Since the beginning of her career in the 1960’s, Dorothy Iannone has been making vibrant paintings, drawings, prints, films, objects and books, all with a markedly narrative and overtly autobiographical visual feel. Her oeuvre is like an exhilarating ode to an unbridled sexuality and celebration of ecstatic unity, unconditional love, and a singular attachment to Eros as a philosophical concept. She has had to frequently face censorship problems, in particular in the “Friends’ Exhibition” organized by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. Iannone later recreated the event in her well-known book, “The Story Of Bern”. Her works narrate the artist’s life in intimate detail, transforming somewhat the feminist discourse of the 1960’s, by emphasizing personal freedom and spiritual transcendence through complete devotion to, and union with, a lover.
The New Museum presented “Lioness”, her first solo show in the United States in 2009. Her mixed media work “I Was Thinking Of You” was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2006. She has recently had major retrospectives, notably at Camden Arts Centre in London (2013), the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin (2014) and Migros Museum in Zurich (2014). Her masterpiece and impressive installation “Follow Me” has joined the prestigious collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris. She also recently received the BZ Kultur Preis in 2016.