CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/4/2024

The radical performativity and transdisciplinarity of Dorothy Iannone

Featured spreads are from JRP|Editions’ exciting new book on the previously under-examined performative aspects of the legendary, ultra-liberated and often explicitly sexual Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone, whose sometimes outrageously confessional artworks tackled themes like unconditional love, the celebration of matriarchy and the myth of Eros. M KHA curator Joanna Zielińska quotes the artist, from a 1970 Robert Filliou publication entitled Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts: “Never mind what they say about the nature of ecstasy, I’ve got a feeling one could limit oneself to such an extent that it would be possible half the time—and that’s like all the time. At thirty-six I am down to (in a passionate way) eating, drinking, sleeping, smoking, only the greatest friends, love and sex. Work is no longer a constant matter of being alive happily. It’s a method of expression waiting for those times when I am not being a beauty in other ways (today, for example).”