The artist Aline Mare told me this month that she’s been thinking about the work in her new exhibition for 20 years. Mare, who recently moved to LA from San Francisco via New York, is a former filmmaker and actress who once performed with playwright and director Richard Foreman’s bizarre and visionary Ontological Hysterical Theatre, in which highly skilled actors portrayed shards of the director’s mind amid buzzers and sirens, when the company still performed all of its work in his Wooster Street loft.
Mare’s latest show, “Requiem: Aching for Acker”, was installed for three weeks at the Mike Kelley Gallery in Venice Beach between 6 – 27 May. It consisted of 10 stunning paintings, produced in editioned prints on metal and paper that respond to the opera libretto for “Requiem”, which was the late American writer Kathy Acker’s last finished work.
“Two years after Acker’s death, Mare created a multi-media installation in homage to her friend. She included artifacts of Acker’s life, including her gym workout sheet. She’d even borrowed one of Acker’s last motorcycles – a Harley Davidson Sportster – and dragged it up three flights of stairs to include it in the work.”
As notorious for her tattoos and adventurous lifestyle as for her radically disjunctive, sexually explicit confrontational texts, Acker wrote “Requiem” after she’d declined conventional treatment for cancer and moved to London in 1996. She would return to San Francisco and die at an alternative treatment facility in Tijuana at age 50, the following year.
In “Requiem”, Acker departs from her previous strategies of folding plagiarised pulp fiction, porn and classical literature into her own writing. The poetic text is a cry from the heart, seeking strength and some form of redemption to her impending death. “Because of this, because I have met death, I must keep death in me, gently, and yet go on living,” she writes.
When Mare read these lines, she was gutted. She’d been one of a small group of friends who’d helped care for Acker at the end of her life. They’d been on-again, off-again friends since their twenties, but she became close to Acker at the end of the novelist’s life. Granted a residency at the Headlands Center for Art in Marin County, California, two years after Acker’s death, in 2000 Mare created a multi-media installation there in homage to her friend. She included artifacts of Acker’s life, including her gym workout sheet. She’d even borrowed one of Acker’s last motorcycles – a Harley Davidson Sportster – and dragged it up three flights of stairs to include it in the work. But nobody cared, or at least, not enough. People who saw it were struck by the exhibition, but it was never repeated beyond Headlands.
This extract was taken from Chris Kraus’s column in the current issue of SLEEK magazine. For the full article, get your copy here!