How the radical legacy of post-punk literary icon Kathy Acker lives on

It’s difficult to establish whether experimental American writer Kathy Acker is making a comeback as the media seems keen to purport, or if she actually ever left. In her lifetime, Acker achieved a level of popular success rarely attained by avant-garde, subversive writers — even if she considered her invitation to the establishment as tokenistic. After her premature death in 1997, of breast cancer aged just 50, her unpublished fiction and non-fiction works finally saw the light, readers were compiled (notably Essential Acker, selected by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper), and even a film essay, Barbara Casper’s punchy Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, was released in 2008. On the other hand, for a generation too young to have enjoyed her prolific output and exploits in the 1980s and ‘90s, it might have been Chris Kraus’ coruscating biography, After Kathy Acker, published in 2017, which provided the perfect initiation to this godmother of so many contemporary anxieties and traits.

Now, London’s ICA is adding another layer to this historicising endeavour with I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker. This powerful exhibition, which opened last week, explores Acker’s literary and performative work whilst situating it in dialogue with some coeval artists, such as David Wojnarowicz, Ellen Cantor, Reza Abdoh and Genesis P-Orridge. What propels this show into an even more productive and un-nostalgic terrain is that it also seeks to trace the seeds of Acker’s vision (and mission) in artists and writers working today. The shrewd selection includes apt entries such as Linda Stupart, Caspar Heinemann, Precious Okoyomon, Candice Lin, Patrick Staff, Jamie Crewe and Reba Maybury. Another artist in the line-up is Penny Goring, who straddles both generations in terms of age and production.

But I won’t go on to describe what’s on view at the ICA and whether it made sense for it to be there, curatorially speaking — although I felt it totally did, in case you are curious. Because the brief given to me for this piece was not a review of the show, but a feature on “Acker’s legacy” —  a remit as broad as anyone could imagine. Helpfully, though, Acker was asked a similar question in her last interview, given to Kasia Boddy a couple of months before her death: what did she think she had given other writers?

“I think I’ve freed other writers,” Acker replied. “I think it’s different with men and women. But I broke rules […] What is said to me most often is that people felt freed by my writing to do what they want to do rather than what they are told to do. Here I’m guessing, but I think for women, there’s this real empowerment. Coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s women so felt that they had to write in certain ways, that they couldn’t talk about certain things, have certain attitudes. I think I gave a lot of women a lot of freedom to say I can still be strong and yet I can talk about this.”

I think there’s a lot of truth to that statement. The spectacular rise of confessional (or “autofiction”) writing, a fertile literary domain where authors like Chris Kraus, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti and Olivia Laing (whose recent self-fictional novel Crudo channels the spirit of Acker) draw from their vulnerabilities as much as their strengths, surely attests to this. Still, I’m not entirely sure if there’s so much real freedom to be found in the fields of visual arts and academia in a post-Acker world where anything deemed “offensive” is anathema — swiftly signalled, pilloried and neutralised. In fact, Acker, whose protagonists belied an ever-shifting amalgamation of personas and points of views and who considered second-wave feminism too “strident,” wasn’t a fan of identity politics. In the same interview, she told Boddy that she thought identity politics was “very dangerous” and “repulsive”.

“I think that you have to be really careful that when you are asserting identity you are only asserting in a certain time and place, and that you don’t make it an absolute,” she said. “[…] I think that my work is extremely difficult given this sign of the times because I don’t fit into any identity. I can’t be marketed as gay, I don’t even look good in the feminist sections, and I’m not ye old straight novelist. There’s no way to categorise the writing.”

Perhaps it is in less predictable realms — not sex, not identity, and not process— that one can find the spectre of Acker truly alive and kicking. One of them, for example, is the re-telling of Greek myths as a way to understand contemporary issues, from kinship and citizenship to taboo and desire. Acker was trained as a Classicist and the characters of Eurydice, Orpheus, Oedipus, Electra, Antigone and Medea recur in her novels. Mythology was huge in the literary mainstream last year, for example, which saw the publication of Madeline Miller’s take on Circe; Pat Barker’s retelling of the Iliad, The Silence of the Girls; Daisy Johnson’s phenomenal version of the Oedipus myth, Everything Under; and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which takes the myth of Antigone as a starting point.

Another salient aspect of her oeuvre today, meanwhile, could be the anxieties towards capitalism, terrorism, populism and state control and surveillance. In her 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless, written in the throes of the Reagan presidency, Acker cooked up a discombobulating speculative fiction to deplore the state of America in what she called a “post-cynical” period in which politicians and intelligence agencies are as much in the apocalyptic rampage consuming the world order as the terrorist cyborg protagonist. From the films of Adam Curtis and Laura Poitras to the multidisciplinary works of Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, James Bridle and Sidsel Meineche Hansen (the latter’s work is included in the ICA show), the preoccupation with dystopian presents is pretty much everywhere now.

And there’s then the person behind it all. How she relentlessly crafted her own persona: the charismatic and polarising writer as much a creation of hers as any of her books. Or her professional ambition, which propelled her forward but was constantly marred by her ambivalence towards the literary and art worlds of her time, her desire to belong hindered by disappointments in persons and scenes. Self-branding, self-exploitation and nagging ambivalence. Tell me what is more du jour in contemporary culture than that.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London through to 4 August 2019.

All Kathy Acker’s quotes taken from her interview with Kasia Boddy, published in Kathy Acker, The Last Interview & Other Conversations by Melville House Publishing in 2018.