karaj:

“gritty scene, mostly male and white” is perhaps the most feminist nyt headline ever. the piece rightly calls out the fales library for the lack of women in its archive and in “downtown pix” (its new show, through april 3). but i am psyched that nyu is ameliorating this, a bit, with its expanding riot grrrl collection. and i am psyched for this show, which features artists like carolee schneemann and kathy acker.

acker is someone i should write about this semester when im talking about abjection, the politics of radical vulnerability, other feminist performance studies stuff. she is so pre-emin. some of the best online articles about her:

interview by r.u. sirius with the best quotes ever, throughout. like: “writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do…so writing was really associated with body pleasure” and “bikini kill is cool!” Plus she talks about her search for “what might be called a body language” and her love of the anti-freudian bataille, who “looked for models for people to have totally great existences.”

a piece in coilhouse that presents her as a post-structuralist feminist “aunt” who is “right up there with Anais Nin, Anne Magnuson and Dorothy Parker in terms of pussy power quotability.”

a village voice piece by c. carr (who is awesome—i recently interviewed her for a piece in bitch about second wave feminist art.) here, she calls acker “a riot grrrl ahead of her time” and says “her female characters always struggle with dependence on two things they can’t trust: language and love. acker is part of a century-long tradition of writers, from dadaists to deconstructionists, who rail at the limitations of the word.”

an obit in salon by richard kadrey that says “she gave a fuck…about the subliminal politics of everyday life — where the brittle edges of gender politics and class would come into sharp focus — and, mostly, about the power of words to define the world and shape our thoughts” and that “kathy’s whole art was based on the idea of plagiarism — the appropriation and reworking of existing texts…she talked openly about appropriation as a way of putting existing texts into a new context, revealing subtle meanings that were inherent, but hidden, in the original.”

sf gate article on the acker documentary that breaks down why i am interested in her: jewish/new yorker/sex worker/artist/punk/feminist. of course.