Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning

by Kathy Acker, Anja Casser (Editor), Matias Viegener (Editor)

An essential compendium on the work, life and legacy of the transgressive autofiction pioneer

The American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through a tradition spanning Bataille, Burroughs, Schneemann, French critical theory and pornography, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, among them the classics The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Blood and Guts in High School and In Memoriam to Identity. A truly pioneering postmodernist, plagiarist and postpunk feminist, Acker continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers and artists, from her contemporaries such as Dodie Bellamy, Avital Ronell, McKenzie Wark and Chris Kraus to younger writers such as Bhanu Kapil and Olivia Laing.
Get Rid of Meaning is the first comprehensive publication to synthesize art and literary perspectives on Acker’s work. It shows Acker’s own visual sensibility in her cut-up notebooks and her use of mail-art idioms, and orients her emergence within the 1970s art scenes in New York and California populated by Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Constance DeJong, among others—artists who made innovations in performance, of which Acker would make use.
Also included is previously unpublished material from Acker’s personal archive and other collections, including correspondence, her library and various personal effects.

394 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2023

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Jack Skelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A postcard from Kathy Acker to me is part of this art book of essays & archives edited by Matias Viegener & Anja Casser. The postcard reads:

"Dear Jack Skelley – When I received the postcard in London of your radio show (“Fear of…”) I thought “What the fuck” and on returning to New York pissed off, your booklet and mag. Well, despite my dislike of seeing my own name I think you’re a good writer – so I’m very honored – even if I shouldn’t be. You’re really a good writer. Never what’s expected – Kathy Acker”

Kathy subsequently gave me an excerpt from Blood and Guts in High School for my magazine Barney. The multi-track dimensions of this thick catalog from Badischer Kunstverein circle & splice Kathy’s letters and notebooks w/ essays/interviews by Sylvere Lotringer, Jason McBride, Claire Finch, Chris Kraus, McKenzie Wark, Avital Ronnel, Leslie Dick, Dodie Bellamy, more. It’s a stunner. The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Jack Skelley – long-delayed, “secretly legendary, novel” – publishes June 6 on Semiotext(e).