You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends
Dorothy Iannone
Edited by Lisa Pearson with an essay by Trinie Dalton
paper 7.25 × 9 in.
320 pages, 95 color and 210 bw
978-1-938221-07-1
published in 2014
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some familiar works in Iannone’s oeuvre but focuses on rarely seen, long-out-of- print artist’s books, drawings and unpublished writings, many reproduced in their entirety or substantial excerpted so that readers can delve into work not easily read in an exhibition space or a catalog.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.
read
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.
about the artist
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.
press
read reviews at BOMB, Bookforum, Entropy, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books and XTRA.
see also
Excerpts
“Culminations” (excerpt)Trinie Dalton
Reviews
Heart, Soul, Mind, CuntReview of You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends by Dorothy IannoneKate Wolf, XTRA Magazine
Excerpts
Editor’s Note: Dorothy Iannone CompendiumLisa Pearson
Books
It Is Almost ThatA Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers
✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:
september 22, 2023 — Every day blue skies, 71 degrees, and a slight, saltine breeze. Away from the ocean, into the city: heat that melts tar and soaks the concrete while waiting for a bus that seems to have evaporated. And then the ascension up the hill above the slow ooze of traffic on I-405 to the Getty Research Center where—shoed, socked and sweatered—our publisher delves into the Jean Brown Archive, a wholly other climate.
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