look inside$45.00

paper 7.25 × 9 in.
320 pages, 95 color and 210 bw
978-1-938221-07-1
published in 2014

PDF Press Release

Dorothy Iannone, 1933-2022

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some familiar works in Iannone’s oeuvre but focuses on rarely seen, long-out-of- print artist’s books, drawings and unpublished writings, many reproduced in their entirety or substantial excerpted so that readers can delve into work not easily read in an exhibition space or a catalog.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.

editor Lisa Pearson’s December 2022 remembrance of Iannone, as well as excerpts from the book—Iannone’s biography and Pearson’s foreword as well as a section from the essay “Culminations” by Trini Dalton, a critical appreciation of Iannone’s work.

DOROTHY IANNONE (b. 1933) has been making artist’s books, paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound pieces and video installations in relative obscurity since the 1960s until The Wrong Gallery featured her work at the Tate Modern in 2005, followed by The Whitney Biennial in 2006 with the work “I Was Thinking Of You,” (1975/2005) colloquially known as “the orgasm box.” Her first solo exhibition at a U.S. museum, “Dorothy Iannone: Lioness,” took place in 2009 at the New Museum in New York when she was seventy-six years old. The New York Times wrote at the time: “High priestess, matriarch, sex goddess: the self-taught American artist Dorothy Iannone has been called all these things and more.” More here.

read reviews at BOMB, Bookforum, Entropy, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books and XTRA.