Breaking through Memories into Desire

"Breaking through Memories into Desire" is a chapter from Chris Kraus's forthcoming critical biography of experimental artist Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2017). Drawing on private correspondence and philosophical-autobiographical artwork, Kraus's chapter opens a window onto the New York 1970s art scene and makes a claim for the relationship between emotion, thinking, sexuality, collaboration, and artistic production.

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

It's doubtful that Acker stayed at her parents' apartment that February for very long, if she stayed there at all. She and Len Neufeld were no longer speaking, and—perhaps because she found his artistic crush on her awkward—she avoided seeing Jackson Mac Low. Bernadette Mayer and her then-boyfriend, the filmmaker Ed Bowes, were Acker's closest ties to the poetry scene and the art world, so it's likely she stayed at their place. On February 18, she and Mel Frielicher read with Ed Bowes and two other friends at a St. Marks Poetry Project Monday Night reading.

The previous year Mayer and Bowes had made two videotapes, Sexless and matter, with Bowes's unwieldy video camera. They lived in his loft at 74 Grand Street, one block south of Canal. To Mayer, the loft was depressing. Watching the long and static exterior shots of Lower Manhattan in Chantal Akerman's News from Home offers a sense of how the neighborhood looked at the time: a wide, empty cobblestone street lined by vacant industrial buildings, debris blown to the curb. Mayer and Bowes were in the process of separating. Soon, Mayer would move to a friend's St. Marks Place apartment, and it's possible Acker stayed with her there.

In any event, there's no doubt that Acker met Alan Sondheim during those weeks through Mayer and Bowes. As Eleanor Antin's Blood of a Poet had demonstrated a decade before, the New York art world was small: a series of Venn diagrams in which everyone was related, if not by marriage or blood, then by friendship and sex, and everyone knew everyone then. As Acker described it that year in a postcard to Ron Silliman, Endless meshes incest. Sondheim, then thirty-one, was a poet/musician who'd studied at Brown and worked with the poets Keith and Rosemary Waldrop. Teaching at RISD after completing his MA at Brown, Sondheim immersed himself in studies of phenomenology and quantum physics and soon established himself in New York as a promising conceptual artist. Three of his pieces—including the faux documentation of the assassination of Richard Nixon, and a diagrammatic display outlining "the general structure of the world"—were shown in the 1973 Paris Biennial. Sondheim knew Mayer and Bowes through his friendship with Vito Acconci, who'd been married to Bernadette's sister, the artist Rosemary Mayer; in the late 1960s, Acconci and Bernadette Mayer produced the seminal 0-9 magazine.

Early in 1974, Sondheim and his then-wife Beth Cannon were living in a loft near Fourteenth Street owned by Ed's brother, Tom Bowes. Sondheim and Cannon were soon to divorce. When Bernadette Mayer moved out of 74 Grand Street, Cannon moved in with Ed Bowes. Around the same time, Rosemary Mayer and Sondheim became an on-again, off-again couple as well. Chronology here remains vague. As Sondheim writes in his remarkable, ongoing "autobiog.txt," an intuitive account of recalled events that begins with the year of his birth: "Information as true as I can make it. Please back-channel any and all corrections. Certainly my memory may be faulty; there are spelling errors, errors of omission, distortions, repressions, sublimations; there are errors of remorse, errors of hallucination, of dream-or virtual worlds. No errors are intentional, none designed to be hurtful, vengeful, 'setting the record straight.' There are no records to set straight, there are recordings, they set nothing. There are no clues, no cues."

Sondheim heard Acker read that night at St. Marks and invited...