An audio recording of the American artist performing a German folk song while masturbating.
“When I was living in France in 1975, I made an audio cassette singing some lines from a famous German song: ‘Wenn keiner treu Dir bliebe, ich bleib Dir ewig grün, Du meine alte Liebe, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin.' [When no one stays by you, I'll remain forever true, my old love, you, Berlin will always stay Berlin.] Maybe the song was on my mind because I had just received the news that I had been awarded a DAAD artist grant for the following year. I was home alone that evening and, after painting for some hours, I decided that, since I still had a lot of energy I would make an audio cassette. and so, I set up my simple equipment on the floor by my bedside. I didn't have any particular plan when I started to sing, but somehow, as I went along, I began caressing myself and my voice changed according to my feelings. But yet despite what I was feeling, the discipline was to keep singing those same four lines. The voice itself expressed the stages of sexual arousal. Shortly before orgasm, I was almost completely breathless and could hardly continue repeating the lines between gasps, and then suddenly, as the orgasm began, my voice became really strong and loud, soaring into the air for some moments beefore subsiding as I, very softly, managed to utter the concluding lines.”
Dorothy Iannone
Limited edition of 270 copies.
For more than six decades, American artist Dorothy Iannone (1933, Boston–2022, Berlin) attempted to represent ecstatic love, the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure. Today her oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist's books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female
sexuality, and political and
feminist issues. As
Fluxus artist
Robert Filliou declared as early as in 1972, "She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation." A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.
Active from the 1960s to the early 2020s, her work has been recently exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2022); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); the Serpentine Pavilion, London (2018); the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2017); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunt, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2014); the New Museum, New York (2009).
See also
Dieter Roth.
