Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  ALPERT: Were you literally being fed by her during the show?

  ACKER: At one point, yes. But she was using me, sexually, as her return, her rebirth.

  ALPERT: She’s what, seventy-six now?

  ACKER: Right. And I said, “Well why do I have to be naked, what’s that about?” And she just said, “Well everyone likes a little sex.” I mean I was obviously being totally used…

  ALPERT: Right, as a sex object in someone else’s piece.

  ACKER: Right. And then she opens the piece and says this da da da and this is the Black Tarantula…I mean I didn’t dig her using that name either, because that involves my work. I thought I’d just sit there, I was like an object in something, and suddenly she says, “And she’s the star of the piece.” Okay, so I’m sitting there naked being the star of the piece and I decided the best way to deal with this one is just sit there and look like some queen or something. Like sometimes in bad stripper situations what you do is you play the sadist: it gets you out of it. So I just lorded over everybody. I wasn’t thinking anymore. All the feelings and everything started to work. All right. So Lil said to someone, “Come up and take a sip of something and then spit it out.” So Dieter Froese comes up, takes a sip of something and spits on me.

  ALPERT: Oh, he spits on you.

  ACKER: Yeah. Well that started it. I figure if this is what’s going on…from then on all hell broke loose. What I’m going to do is take these vibes and throw them back at the audience magnified, so everyone will realize what’s going on because I can’t fight it any other way. So I took tomato juice in my mouth and just let it drool all over me. Then Judy Rifka (you don’t know her, she’s a really good painter) comes up to me, takes a sip of something, comes up to me, opens up my cunt lips and spits on my cunt. From then on the audience figures, you know…

  ALPERT: Anything went.

  ACKER: Yes, it was totally weird, like totally weird style. I mean I would call it art…

  ALPERT: Well, you didn’t go after the audience, then. In other words, when you said you drooled all over yourself I thought you were going to say you spit all over the audience.

  ACKER: What I’m saying is by doing that (spitting on me) I was telling them that they could allow themselves to do these things. They’d become conscious of the power mechanism that was going on. I actually walked up to a guy from The New York Times and spit on his camera. I spat at the audience.

  ALPERT: Oh I see. The other act seemed to me to invite their venting of sadistic…

  ACKER: Yeah, well I invited it and then I went back at it.

  ALPERT: I just wondered whether you returned it.

  ACKER: Oh yes. Very much so, but not viciously or anything. I heard afterward that there were friends there of Lil’s who went out and vomited, they were so disgusted. Now all that happened was spitting. I mean, come on…really there are worse atrocities. Getting spit on is not…

  ALPERT: It went on for a long time, too, didn’t it?

  ACKER: Oh yeah, because she wanted to repeat it. After the first time, where I was shaking, we took a break, and then she said, “Kathy, we have to repeat this.”

  ALPERT: Oh. One after the other, then?

  ACKER: One—twenty-minute break—the other. Yeah.

  ALPERT: That was about a two-hour period? I remember seeing you (apparently right afterwards) at the opening of that show Lives.

  ACKER: Oh right, yeah. So it was about two hours. I think it started at four…

  ALPERT: And Lives was ending around seven…Were there many performances before that?

  ACKER: Well I did a lot in California…

  ALPERT: Oh, you did?

  ACKER: Oh, I don’t remember…

  ALPERT: Not too many in New York, then?

  ACKER: I’ve done readings, you know, little readings here and there. I don’t remember, I could look.

  ALPERT: Nothing within the genre of performance.

  ACKER: No no no, that sort of started me off.

  ALPERT: Well didn’t you do another variety of performance (we can cut this out later if you want), but it seemed to me the first time I met you, if I remember correctly, was at Jerry Rothenberg’s uptown place…

  ACKER: I used to live up there.

  ALPERT: At that time I think Rothenberg mentioned being satiated by stories about your experience working as…

  ACKER: I was working in a sex show. You don’t have to cut that out, it’s in my writing…

  ALPERT: Now, did you conceive of that (obviously you were getting paid), did you ever conceive of that as a kind of performance for yourself, or was that just work?

  ACKER: It was work.

  ALPERT: It was always work?

  ACKER: Yeah, except that I’m into it. I don’t draw hard categories, you know.

  ALPERT: Well, you were doing it mainly for the money at that time, is that right?

  ACKER: Totally.

  ALPERT: But it seems that there are topless dancers who are sort of well known…

  ACKER: Yeah, there are some very famous topless dancers.

  ALPERT: No, but I mean in a literary context.

  ACKER: Carolee Schneemann used to…

  ALPERT: I didn’t know she did…

  ACKER: She used to do dirty films.

  ALPERT: Janine Pommy Vega discussed her dancing in relation to a poem she read at St. Mark’s.

  ACKER: Oh Janine did topless dancing?

  ALPERT: Yeah, in San Francisco, and Timotha Bialy.

  ACKER: Yeah, I know Timotha did it, but Frisco’s so light, though. I mean you don’t do anything in Frisco.

  ALPERT: Oh, it’s harder in New York, you think…

  ACKER: Honey! [laughter]

  ALPERT: It’s illegal now, isn’t it?

  ACKER: Well, they still dance. They go back and forth about what you’re allowed to show, that’s all. San Francisco’s very mild. There’s a rough section but you’d never work there. I mean in New York…

  ALPERT: You write about doing…

  ACKER: Topless and bottomless. No, only topless in New York, topless and bottomless in California, San Diego.

  ALPERT: I see. And then live sex acts as well?

  ACKER: Well, I didn’t actually fuck on stage. It was pretend…

  ALPERT: Simulated.

  ACKER: Yeah, simulated. It was a place for voyeurs…

  ALPERT: Well, how much did that stuff pay, I’m curious…

  ACKER: $200 a week. Yeah and I worked with a guy, so he earned $200. So we earned $400 a week.

  ALPERT: Oh, that’s not bad, if you can stand it.

  ACKER: Oh, no! What do you think we were doing it for! Plus, I made unemployment for a year off of it.

  ALPERT: I see. So you lived high on that.

  ACKER: Oh, yeah. I needed a lot of money at the time, I was sick again so…

  ALPERT: I was trying to establish whether there was any connection between that activity and the art-world performances you did.

  ACKER: At Lil’s, yes.

  ALPERT: Obviously the experience gets into the writing, but…I mean when I went to The Kitchen in late November, there was a series of “pornographic” photos…

  ACKER: Right.

  ALPERT: That was a rather shocking…

  ACKER: Lynda Benglis’s?

  ALPERT: That was Lynda Benglis? I didn’t know whose work that was. It was really outrageous, I thought.

  ACKER: Oh, no, you saw Ralph Hocking’s probably. Did you see color or black and white?

  ALPERT: Black and white. All around the front room.

  ACKER: Yeah, Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller. It was excellent, it was really the best I’ve ever seen.

  ALPERT: I’ve never seen that blatant a tone in an art context.

  ACKER: Yeah, it got popular this year.

  ALPERT: “Porno Art.” I wondered what you thought of that.

  ACKER: Oh, I don’t think very much of it. How naive they are, that it shocks them. Last year one girl did a performance where all she d
id was a striptease (I didn’t see the performance but someone described it). It wasn’t a wild striptease at all. I mean, I’ve seen some gorgeous stripteases. This was just…whatever. And it’s ridiculous. You know, these people don’t go to bars and see it?

  ALPERT: Well, I go to bars and see it; I’m interested in that circumstance. For me to see upfront sexuality in an art context makes me think further about it.

  ACKER: There’s a big difference between doing simulated sex acts on a stage (and even that was interesting) and working as a stripper. Working as a stripper is a very high form if you want to take it like that…I mean it’s gorgeous and a real art unto itself.

  ALPERT: And you considered it an art in which you perfect your moves?

  ACKER: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I could never be a good one. I don’t know that, but I never trained to be a good one. But I’ve seen good strippers and they are absolutely amazing.

  ALPERT: My sense is that you can make an art out of any activity you engage in. Bringing it over into an art context is I think the…

  ACKER: I don’t really know what art is. I know what an art context is…

  ALPERT: If you do it in certain places, it’s not only voyeurs who go…

  ACKER: But I must say, one of the essences of stripteasing is money. [laughs] Let’s face it.

  ALPERT: Right. If you do a sexual performance at The Kitchen, you’re not going to get paid too much. Or at all.

  ACKER: Yeah, right. And I just find it very amusing [laughs] that people do it for free. Because it’s about power.

  ALPERT: The power you have over the audience?

  ACKER: Yeah. And the power they have over you and the whole business. I mean it’s complicated. I’m not sure what it’s about, but I know that’s one thing it is. And I know it just doesn’t exist without money.

  * Creative Artists Public Service Program.

  INFORMAL INTERVIEW

  BY R. J. ELLIS, CAROLYN BIRD, DAWN CURWEN, IAN MANCOR, VAL OGDEN, AND CHARLES PATRICK

  APRIL 23, 1986

  GROUP: When’s your new novel, Don Quixote, due out?

  ACKER: Tomorrow. I brought a copy with me.

  GROUP: Does it work with the text in the same way as Great Expectations?

  ACKER: It’s a much straighter narrative. It has three sections, it’s very episodic. The first section is straight Don Quixote. I’m just taking the text and usually just copying it—except Don Quixote’s a woman. This first joke needs to be kept up. And then, in the second part, she sort of fails. I mean Don Quixote’s always failing. So she reads other texts to try to find out how she can succeed in her adventures; so the second part of the book is just readings of other texts. There are four other texts, it’s very readable. In the third part you resume the straight narrative. Except that the readings of the text have very much influenced the language. At least that’s how I see it. So that the narrative is straightforward, but it’s changed. It’s as if some sort of multiplication has happened. And that’s the structure of the book, so it’s much more narrative than the earlier ones. Even more than Blood and Guts.

  GROUP: Do you think that’s a retreat back to narrative?

  ACKER: I don’t think it’s a retreat, I think it’s a step forward because the reason I’m interested in narrative isn’t the eighteenth-century Balzacian narrative, it’s African folktale. I wanted to use narrative because I thought there was a lot of strength in it, but it’s always been a huge problem for me. I saw it as something happening at the beginning of the twentieth century. You can either go the way of Finnegans Wake, so totally cut up at this point that you lose your energy—you lose your rapport with the reader—or you go towards conventions where no one even questions those conventions, the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. I think that Barthes in Writing Degree Zero described it absolutely perfectly. There is no reason to do more than reiterate his stuff. And also I was very much coming out of a poetry tradition in the United States; I wanted to be able to write and not know what I was going to write. From another point of view, there are two ways of writing: I mean either you start out and know what you’re going to say, and that’s a certain moral position that a writer takes; or you start out and you’re more of a journalist, you’re more investigating and you don’t know what you’re going to say, which I prefer. I mean, I don’t prefer…it’s the only thing I can do. But then you have a problem of how you can have a narrative. And that’s always been a huge problem, which I saw solved a little bit in a lot of the European novelists. First when I was a lot younger I was very influenced by Blaise Cendrars for that reason, especially by a novel called Moravagine and also by Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. Again, it’s the episodic novel and it’s a narrative, but within the narrative there’s a cut-up. I don’t mean cut-up in the way Burroughs uses it, I mean disjunction. The nouveau roman in France [also] really influenced me. Robbe-Grillet is obviously very conceptual. He works as a minimalist painter would in America. And someone like Claude Simon is a tremendous influence on me. Often his texts come from “Carton” paintings. It’s disjunction. Nothing follows anything else, as in Finnegans Wake. It’s as if you’re at the edges of narrative all the time, and so I did that. I think I got as far as I could in the Pasolini, working on the way themes related to each other, but somehow that seemed as if that were over to me. What had happened is I’d moved here [London] and I became very disillusioned with New York. Pasolini, the last novel in the trilogy Blood and Guts, is very much based on avant-garde moves, and I started to question those moves. I saw New York becoming more and more a fiction about what happens to capitalism, and the art world as a real illustration of what was taking place about rich and poor. And in a way I’d grown up in New York City and I’d been baby-fed Jackson Pollock and the cowboy myths and avant-garde disjunctions and the whole business, and for the first time I started to question all these things and wanted to move to something else but didn’t know what, and totally distrusted the nineteenth-century narrative and distrusted the sort of typical English novel—not that happened in the nineteenth century but certainly that’s happening now. And so there’s something new, which this book simply hints at, which may work or not. I got very interested again in narrative. [And also in] a certain postmodernist technique or ploy I found very helpful: my friends in New York were part of a group of painters called the Metro Pictures painters (Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, mainly), and what they do is copy other paintings very simply. And I saw that I could have a narrative if I copied another narrative and didn’t interpose too much. I was getting away from the position of elitism, and I wasn’t having to deal with “I’m an expert telling you how I think the world is”—you know, this damned “world position” that I hate—but I could still have narrative, and all I wanted was narrative. There’s a kind of beauty, you know. Something I wanted. But I didn’t want to have to mean by it. So just taking Don Quixote and copying it was a great freedom for me. And then as I proceeded in that book I became more interested in what happened with narrative in a lot of African writing. So that’s what I’m dealing with now. So I don’t see it as a retreat. I can’t say quite where it’s going.

  GROUP: You say that you are attracted towards African narrative styles. I wondered how you’d come to that and what roads you’d used to enter into this interest?

  ACKER: Just reading them. It’s so hard to talk politically. I mean it’s just so many years of experience, and you sound pompous when you talk about things. So it’s hard to talk about my experiences politically in the United States; it’s maybe not more than here, but to me, there it’s so much about black and white. And it’s about having worked with a lot of blacks—I used to live with Angela Davis for a while. Anyway, maybe that all had to do with things. Anyway, there’s this series of Heinemann books which are incredible and I would go through them. Collett’s of London used to have a whole series, and so I’d go in there to get books, and I’d pick up all of the Heinemann series and there’s some amazing write
rs in there. There’s Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence, and he was actually exiled [from South Africa]. There’s a writer called Armah, who I’m told is now teaching in the United States, who is a bit like Jean Genet, an incredible structuralist. But the passion in his novels…I think Why Are We So Blest? was the one that most influenced me; and he’s done two sort of like a Zola—Ekwensi. Again, he was solving the problem for me about how to be surprised, how to write something that’s not dogmatic, how to be political. It’s like they were guerrilla people, they spanned all sorts of things and they ended up with really powerful novels. So there’s like structuralism and content.