After Kathy Acker
Chris Kraus
[Allen Lane]
A leather jacket appears on the cover of After Kathy Acker. Turning away from the viewer, it reveals a painted design of a skull with roses in its eyes, under the words “DISCIPLINE” and “ANARCHY”. The image is taken from a series depicting the clothes Kathy Acker left behind after her death in 1997, part of an exhibition organised by the writer Dodie Bellamy.
It’s a fitting visual analogue for Acker’s writing: the apparently tough, fetishistic fashion ‘trophy’ formed over time to its wearer’s skin, but comprising the work of multiple dressmakers, and the lives of several beasts. Acker was the cut-up queen, the literary pirate, celebrated–and maligned–for plagiarising historical texts and integrating them with her own diaries “so they’d seem to be about myself… So there were two I’s in the book, the I without the parentheses and the I within the parentheses.”
Similarly, Kraus’s book – which, she warns on the first page, “may or may not be a biography” – reveals a patchwork self, a life lived between extremes of passion and evasion, a restlessness born more out of fear than love of the chase. “I refuse to let structures of a society I didn’t pick to be born into determine how I relate to people,” Kathy Acker wrote, early in her career, in a letter to Alan Sondheim. But then she writes: “The books are coming out, I have to go farther and be absolutely clear and steadfast… Quick virtuosity teenage passion is no longer useful or interesting. It’s the choice, not identity, but choosing: that reverberation.”
Are identity and choice so at odds with each other? Can’t they be reconciled, through self-fashioning? There are many Kathy Ackers in this book: the ‘Black Tarantula’, the sex-show performing, motorcycle-riding enfant terrible. The one-time “most shoplifted author in the world” (consider that sometimes we shoplift the books we would be embarrassed to bring to the counter…). The artist moving in a world of “poets and bikers, leather dykes, tattooists, philosophers, astrologers, renowned artists and writers, bodybuilders, psychics, promoters, and editors.” The vulnerable yet unlikable woman who broke up marriages, who outstayed her welcome in other people’s homes like a patchouli-scented ghost.
Some have observed an ambiguity, even a cruelty in Kraus’s tone, noting her ties to Acker through their mutual ex, the critic and theorist Sylvère Lotringer. But aren’t writers afforded a right to ambivalence? Doesn’t Kraus live, to some extent, in the ‘after’ of Acker’s life? Biographies as vivid as this one are always complicated by the presence of survivors: Kraus might be unwilling to mythologise the dead, but she succeeds at describing a life lived in the manner of mythology.
Words – Roisin Kiberd
