DOROTHY IANNONE. OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Curated by Tania Pardo.

With her original, boundary-breaking works, Dorothy Iannone (Boston, 1933–Berlin, 2022) was a pioneer in granting a central role to the expression of female desire and a series of topics that confronted her with the censors on multiple occasions. She studied literature before becoming a self-taught artist, and although she associated with Fluxus circles and leading figures in 1960s European conceptual art, she never adhered to a particular style or movement and always maintained an absolutely [.......] position. Her friend Robert Filliou described her in 1977 as an artist who “for many years now, has been investigating through her visual work, her books and her records, the world of love and loving-styles. [...] She skilfully blends imagery and text, beauty and truth. She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist. Her aim is no less than human liberation.”

The artist worked in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture and artist’s books, as well as voice as an essential component of recordings and sound boxes. Her works, saturated with text and colour, speak openly of love, eroticism and sexuality. Drawing inspiration from her personal life and from Japanese woodcuts, Byzantine mosaics and Egyptian frescoes, her oeuvre is characterised by an approximation to Oriental mysticism and a particular interpretation of classical iconography.

This exhibition—the first monograph dedicated to Dorothy Iannone at a Spanish institution, curated by Tania Pardo—takes its title from the spirit of perseverance and continuity with which the artist approached life and art, and also from her passionate and generous approach to creation. The expression “over and over again” embodies Iannone’s lifelong conception of her work as the draft of a total work. The exhibition itinerary is organised around six thematic sections that invite viewers to explore her creative universe.

Desire and eroticism

Iannone's work possesses a strong autobiographical and psychological dimension that alludes to her self-affirmation as an artist. In her assertion of her position as a creator, she reconfigures the representation of female desire, subverting the traditional notion of women as objects of desire by turning them into subjects who desire. This gesture, which left a profound mark on her work, chimes with second-wave feminist movements, although the artist never overtly aligned herself with them.
The explicit figuration of genitals became one of her hallmarks, as evidenced in the early series People (1966–1968), a type of social cartography of her time made up of portraits of both famous and anonymous figures.

Love and friendship

Dorothy Iannone draws on her personal biography as a tool to situate her work. Using her own life experience—and, specifically, her relationships—she speaks of universal themes such as the love and desire, understood in multiple senses, she feels for her various partners, her family (her mother, Sarah Pucci) and her friends (Robert and Marianne Filliou, Emmett Williams, Jan Voss, Mary Harding, Ulises Carrión, etc.). This is reflected in one of her last series, Giant People (2020). Most notable within this universe is the relationship with her partner, Swiss artist Dieter Roth, who was the muse, driving force and main topic of the majority of her works in multiple formats. Iannone was always able to put her feelings to good use in her art: autobiography, through the domestic, became an essential channel for her explorations, as exemplified by A Cookbook (1969), in which she not only included recipes but notes on some of her most intimate feelings.

Censorship

Iannone’s openly provocative attitude towards the representation of sexuality and female desire led to various confrontations with the censors. In the 1950s she was actively involved in the defence of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer, banned in the United States because of its erotic content, managing to win a court case to allow its publication in the country. Not long after that, her own work confronted her with the censors: in 1967, her People series was removed from an exhibition in Stuttgart and, one year later, the same thing happened in London. With its explicit representation of genitals, the series was perceived as a threat to social order and the conservative morality of the day. Something similar happened a year later under the same pretext: in 1969, during the Friends exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle in Bern, she was asked to cover the genitals of the figures in Ta(Rot) Pack. She refused, with Roth’s support, and the works were removed, leading Szeemann to resign as director. This episode, which Iannone recounted in The Story of Bern (1970), is a landmark in the history of curating and the freedom of artistic expression since it also coincided in time (the spring of 1969) with the famous When Attitudes Become Form exhibition, again curated by Harald Szeemann, at the same institution.

Text and image

Dorothy Iannone studied American literature, which partly explains the eminently textual nature of her visual work. Writing constitutes a structural element of her oeuvre, expressed not only on the surface of her works and artist’s books, but in the general mode of expression adopted, which coexists alongside her characters and signature figures. Text and image form part of a constant dialogue that runs throughout her output, from her paintings, drawings, sculptures and sound boxes to her abundant correspondence.
This aspect is reflected, for example, in the series of letters sent to Ulises Carrión, who in 1977 organised an exhibition with her books in Amsterdam, and in her extensive correspondence with Dieter Roth, which she maintained from the beginning of their relationship until he passed away in 1998.

Voice, sound and performativity

Voice is undoubtedly another essential medium of expression in Iannone’s oeuvre, from the 1970s (Singing Boxes, Dear Dieter, 1973) to some of her latest productions (1001 Songs for Erik Bock, 2019). Her experimentation with voice and sound ties in with her playfulness and fondness for improvisation. As Joanna Zielińska has recently written, the female voice in Iannone’s work is crucial on several levels: “as a useful tool for translating a personal biography into the artistic language, as a plastic creative material and, lastly, as a voice that speaks in favour of freedom and the liberation of women from social and cultural oppressions.”

The exhibition is completed with a publication designed by Clara Sancho, which invites readers to delve deeper into Iannone’s creative universe and features texts by Tania Pardo, Joanna Zielińska and John Giorno, as well as a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist, conducted over the course of three meetings held in 2006, 2008 and 2018.

DOROTHY IANNONE

(Massachusetts, 1933–Berlin, 2022) studied at Boston University and Brandeis University, specialising in Literature.

She started painting in 1959 and travelled extensively with her husband throughout Europe and the Far East. Between 1963 and 1967, she and her husband ran a cooperative gallery on Tenth Street in New York. In 1966 the couple spent several months in the south of France. She subsequently lived in different European cities until 1974,  and then in 1976 she moved to Berlin after receiving a Berlin Artists-in-Residence fellowship from the DAAD. This city became her permanent residence until she passed away in 2022.

After embarking on her career in the 1960s, Iannone made vibrant paintings, drawings, prints, films, objects and books, all with a marked and openly autobiographical narrative and visual character.

Recent years have seen a retrospective of her work at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and individual exhibitions at venues like the Migros Museum in Zurich, the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, the Camden Arts Centre in London and the New Museum in New York. Even more recently, individual exhibitions of her work have been held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark; the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, in Denmark; and the M HKA in Antwerp, Belgium.  Her work is held in the collections of prestigious museums like the Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).

TANIA PARDO

(Madrid, 1976) studied Art History at the Autonomous University of Madrid. A curator and researcher, she is currently the director of the Museo CA2M, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, having previously served as the museum’s deputy director (2019–2023). Until July 2019 she was the plastic arts adviser for the Regional Government of Madrid. Before that, she was head of the Exhibitions Department at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. She was also a curator at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, and head of programming for Laboratorio 987. She was head of projects at the Fundación Santander 2016 (2009–2010) and taught art history at the Complutense University in Madrid. She writes essays for exhibition catalogues, teaches courses and seminars on contemporary art, and sits on the jury for various awards and competitions related to contemporary art. She has recently curated the show El origen de las formas, by Cristina Garrido, at the Museo CA2M; Pájaro Sueño de Máquina, by Teresa Solar Abboud, together with Claudia Segura, as a co-production with the MACBA and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin; Buscando Guanábana ando yo, by Sol Calero; and El espacio entre los dedos, by Jacobo Castellano, at Sala Alcalá 31.  She also develops different education programmes focused on social inclusion through art.