dorothy iannone: a fluxus essay

Tochnit Aleph presents Dorothy Iannone's A Fluxus Essay. Audio CD with 20-page booklet. Edition of 270. Recorded in Berlin 1979. Dorothy Iannone tells her Fluxus story. "There, George Maciunas and I looked deeply but impassively into each other's eyes, not knowing then that we would meet again on these pages. Perhaps he was thinking, "Who is this woman?". Perhaps it might even have amused him, somewhere far back in his mind, to know that I am she who is the Fluxus woman artist who is not the Fluxus woman artist." Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1933. She attended Boston University and Brandeis University where she majored in Literature. 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. 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 lived 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. Her works narrate the her 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.