by Kathy Acker
JUNO: It was like “Tattooing’s pretty normal…but God forbid you have a pierced nipple!”
ACKER: When I used to work as a stripper, all the strippers didn’t want any whores in the club, right? So these three transvestite whores came in one night, and the strippers were screaming: “Get them out of here; we don’t want women like that in here! We’re good women!” [laughs]
JUNO: You’re still damned—you may as well be as outrageous as you wanna be!
ACKER: Well, I’m not much of a moralist that way. I have a friend who’s always getting lipo-something, or getting her face changed—she does that. But tattooing—to me, it’s a form of art and I’m dealing with a tattooer who’s putting his/her art on my body. Whereas if I got lipo-whatever, it would be to conform to an image that’s presented in Vogue or Cosmopolitan. A lot of women my age are heavily into dieting—to me that’s another form of that lipo-stuff. They’re basically anorexic. Whereas I eat like a pig, but I bodybuild—so I don’t eat enough. I can’t stand surgery—it drives me nuts. I once had a little cyst in my breast taken out, and I said, “Never again! Even if I get cysts in my breasts—I don’t care!”
I saw this film by Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning, about Puerto Rican and black queens who dress up to be whoever they want, and they have contests. By my standards, it was very radical because they’d want to be the richest man in the world, or they’d want to be the head of the Pentagon, or they’d want to be a fashion model—there was no irony, it was like postmodernism without the irony. They wanted to be just whoever they wanted to be, without any politics or idea of “Left” or “Right” or whatever. And they went in and sort of showed off; they did these kind of vogue-like dances [like Vogue models going down a runway]. It was hot!
When interviewed, some of them said, “Listen, we know that in this society a gay black man is a piece of shit, and a gay black man isn’t anything, so we’ve done this because we know this is how we’re going to get what we want. This way I can be anything and people are finally going to accept me because I’m going to be famous!” I mean, they weren’t dumb. And if plastic surgery were like that—I can see it. It’s the sense of play that I like—I like the art, I like the play, I like the extremity of it. But just women going around getting their thighs skinny so some guy’ll fuck them—ugh!
JUNO: We’re talking about two different things. If you really are obsessive and have this creative idea to remake your body, then doing it by any means (liposuction, facelifts) could be a creative art form. But most people have actually given up their creativity, so this kind of remaking of the body is used for societal control. Sometimes a woman might like her breasts, but her husband doesn’t, so getting breast surgery is not even for herself…
ACKER: They’re like puppets or zombies. These PR queens who were doing the voguing were definitely searching; they weren’t puppets…
JUNO: The key factor is the motivation behind it, that searching—
ACKER: The difference between the liposuction/anorexic behavior of certain women, and women who get tattooed or do every extreme body modification is: the first class of women are just looking to come as close as possible to certain norms that they’ve internalized. They’ve taken an image out of a magazine or they’ve taken a number of images and thought, “This is how I should look; this is how I should be.” Whereas the second class of women are actively searching for who to be, and it has to do with their own pleasure, their own feeling of identity—they’re not obeying—they’re not obeying the normal society. They’re looking—it’s very different. And when you look, you know you’re “failing,” you know you’re “inferior.” You’re inferior because you’re always looking; there’s always something missing. And it’s interesting when there’s something missing. It’s not interesting when people think they’re “gods” in that very stupid way. It’s interesting when there’s suffering there, and people are full of feeling, and they’re full of life, and they’re constantly making choices.
JUNO: There’s something moving about people who are really searching: who have the honesty to face up and admit, “I am inferior.” It’s a continuum: facing inferiority, facing death, facing who you are…
ACKER: Yeah! All of us have had these choices. I mean, you could have married and had a nice suburban house and two dogs and a cat and three children (or whatever they have these days). But you’ve made the decision not to do that.
JUNO: Another thing: liposuction and facelifts are very different from going to a tattoo artist. Getting a tattoo is a participatory experience. It is not like being anesthetized and flopped on a table like a cadaver who has just given up her body and soul for a period of time to this medical “institution”—usually a male authority figure—and getting plastic padding inserted underneath your nipple. And liposuction is far more painful; for months afterward you feel “wrecked,” you can’t exercise, and you have to keep your body wrapped up. Surgery is pretty serious; it takes about six months to fully heal.
ACKER: You’re really messing your body up, then. I hate pain!
JUNO: Okay, if you hate pain, how does getting tattooed feel to you?
ACKER: I hate it! It’s not a high for me to get tattooed; I just love the tattoos! My idea of a good tattoo is one that doesn’t hurt while it’s being done. I’m really not into the pain of tattooing. It’s one thing to control two or three minutes of pain, but after an hour of pure pain I think, “Fuck it!” A tattoo that takes twenty minutes—that’s a kind of high. But two hours—forget it!
It’s one thing to play with pain in an S&M context where you play with things you don’t like because you’re scared of them. I really hate pain, so when I play with it I’m seeing if I can endure it. It’s like building muscle: you see if you can do another repetition. And I really have this thing about: “Go another step! Just go farther! Just go over another hill—there’s another hill. Just go one little step farther!” I love doing that sort of thing. But if something gets boring and it’s just about repetitiveness or unpleasantness…if you’re tattooed for two hours, all it is for me is unpleasant, and I’d rather not feel it—because there’s no play there, I’m not learning anything…
JUNO: Can you talk more about rites of passage?
ACKER: From what I understand, a rite of passage means a real change; you go through intense trauma or intense modification. The nearest I experienced to that was when I studied with a Korean Zen master for about a year and then did a three-day session with him. That was probably the strongest experience I’ve ever had in my life! Basically, we just sat in a room for three days; we didn’t do anything (although we got up and went to sleep in the evening)—I don’t like to talk about these things too highfalutin because of people’s reactions. And at the end I had an interview with him. It felt like he just put his hand into my mind—literally! It was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had; the most radical. Is that a rite of passage? I don’t know. I was very high afterwards. I was walking into cars; nothing happened to me, I was totally safe, but I wanted to come down, so I called him up and asked, “I’m too high—how do I come down?” and he said, “You’re supposed to enjoy it! Oh—go get drunk!” So I went and got drunk, and that took care of that…
We don’t have anything in our society that allows us to do a rite of passage communally; we do everything individually. Our own search is all done individually; now and then we might tell each other about it, but we always have the feeling we’re being a bit “outside” the society when we tell each other. I mean, ecstasy—be it sexual or some other kind of orgy—should be taking place somehow in our community—and it’s not. Our society gives us nothing. We have no rites of passage—we have nothing—nothing that gives us any wisdom, that gives us any way of dealing with death, that gives us any way of going from one stage in life to another, or even telling us what a stage in our life is. We just grow up and earn money and have babies! And work! A holiday is degenerated from what should be ecstasy into sort of Club Med!
We don’t have any language with which to talk about these things.
JUNO: That’s why we’re tripping over words all the time—
ACKER: Yeah. And then we make up these activities—tattooing and piercing—which is the nearest we get to a rite of passage. I mean, it’s our way of doing it—that’s what we’re looking for.
JUNO: Looking for what?
ACKER: Well, we’re looking for a society that allows us the fullness of what it is to be human, I would think—it’s hard to know because I’ve never been there! But I read about societies in which ecstasy and joy and certain areas of sexuality are venerated (not just in individual situations—or maybe it can be even individual experiences that go further)…and a whole range of feelings—really, a fuller life. I keep thinking: what we know of as “life” is so thin and juiceless and boring, frankly—we’re ground into nothing before we even start out! I mean, take tattooing (which has been denied us for so long). It’s beautiful, the colors are gorgeous, the images: if you have the tiger on you, you have the spirit of the tiger in you. That’s something—to find out what it is to be an animal! We forget everything; we forget all of this.
JUNO: Really, what we’re talking about is the quest for creativity, the quest for illumination…
ACKER: Well, I think that’s what we want! We don’t want to just work like dogs—
JUNO: Or live on the surfaces of life.
ACKER: A “normal relationship” is usually a surface thing, where you wake up and say to your husband, “Hi, honey!” and have breakfast together and bitch a little and at night get into bed and think, “Oh I gotta fuck again.”
JUNO: But there’s also a societal control process to get rid of creativity in people, because that can be very dangerous: people exploring creativity, then taking power in the world.
ACKER: I guess there’s always this argument about whether humans are naturally good or naturally have evil or very destructive things in them. Obviously, we have some destructive urges in us. The feeling is that humans aren’t totally good; they have to be controlled or else their violent destructive natures will come out. There are also libertarians who argue, “Humans are good; it’s society which is repressive.” I think you’d agree there are various things in us—not all of which are kind, gentle, and tender…Readers of de Sade and Genet would probably agree on this point! But I think you can explore these things without becoming a mass murderer, without causing real damage, without turning to real crime.
One way of exploring these things is through art: there are various ways of doing this. We have to find out how to have a community where the highest priority is to explore these different paths—to find out what it is to be human—and yet not wreak total havoc on the society! How can we have this freedom, so that society’s not repressive, and yet it’s not a society of mass murderers? And I don’t think it’s worthwhile making the problem too simple, it would have been solved long ago!
JUNO: In Western society, the body tends to be identified with women and children and with uncontrollable forces of “nature” that are dangerous—therefore they have to be repressed.
ACKER: It’s like Nietzsche’s myth of the “eternal return”: You can view the world without “God” as “demonic” (in which you make the “demons” or the “horrible” forces of the body); whereas, if you simply accept the eternal return, then the body becomes the area of joy, and you value life and you value all the changes and all that is in flux. So, how can we institute a society where that search is both individual and collective at the same time?
What society has done is tried to make the search simply individual—also, label those individuals who are searching with their bodies as “weird,” “evil,” “freaks,” “queer”—whatever words you want to use. But we could proclaim, “We’re normal!” because we are normal! It’s normal to love your body; it’s normal to have a body; it’s normal to see through the body and feel through the body. And during ecstasy, the body and the soul are united. So that’s where the discussion about S&M ends up, really…
JUNO:…and any discussion about body modification as well. We don’t have a community; there is no communion; we’re doing this individually—and yet there are attempts at making extended families, little communities—among many tattoo people there’s certainly a bond.
ACKER: And among certain artists there’s a network that’s been going on…
JUNO: And this network has to support individuals in their search for self-knowledge—
ACKER: Of course! You get through trauma by reliving the trauma, be it in fiction or in play. You don’t get through trauma by burying it and not saying that it happened. If your attitude to “evil” or to something bad that happened is to just say, “Oh no, it didn’t happen”—to shove it away—that just throws away an opportunity to grow. So if you want to say, “Women are totally equal to men,” how can you say that women are submissive? In other words, you can’t be a feminist if you say women are “submissive.” That’s just shoveling it underground—of course women are submissive—they’ve been trained to be submissive—that’s the problem! And we get nowhere by not announcing the problem! It’s like when black people decide to use the word “nigger,” it’s terrific in a way. We should take the word “submissive” and write it on the sky!
A woman who does a cutting on herself and lets herself bleed a little is hardly as unhealthy as a man who beats up his own wife. What so-called “normal” people do is so disgusting, that…Someone who deliberately puts a few cigarette burns on their body is so much more healthy…well, at least they’re trying to deal with it.
JUNO: The body really is the only thing that you can control, and if you put a mark on your own body, it will heal—at least you own it.
ACKER: I used to cut my wrists, and I didn’t do it just to die. I think (if I can remember the emotions) it was like: “Look, this incident has really hurt you—just look at how it’s hurt you, and stop it right now!” It was a moment of self-confrontation; a way of telling myself, “Cut it out!” Or else, I’d do this to freak out somebody: “Look how you’re hurting me! Stop it right now!” So this probably was not the most direct way of dealing with it, but…
There’s a story about James Chance—he did a gig at a Mafia club in New York. Afterwards he asked to get paid and they said, “Fuck you—we’re the Mafia and we’re not going to pay you!” So he took out a razor blade, and they took out their guns (“Is this guy going to go for us?”) and he just held it to his wrist and started cutting…They were so freaked out that they just threw the money at him and yelled, “Get outta here!”
BODY BILDUNG
LAURENCE A. RICKELS TALKS WITH KATHY ACKER
ARTFORUM
FEBRUARY 1994
Kathy Acker was on tour this summer and fall promoting her new book, My Mother: Demonology: A Novel. She interrupted the California portion for this interview break. What I’ve always found so strong and futural about Acker’s work is it’s close with adolescence, not as the phase or phrase everyone has to get beyond rather than stuck on, but as a channel that is always there, ready to be tuned or turned into, for example, whenever you’re in groups. The force field she works is what Freud called group psychology. Acker’s work shows how the problems of adolescence or group psychology are always there, even or especially in one-on-one relationships. I’m thinking of her great dialogues (examples from Blood and Guts in High School come to mind), which are completely organized around the adolescent metabolism, or perpetual ambivalence machine, in which making up takes turns with breaking up. It reminds me how over and over again we try to form couples, we try to be in individual therapy, we try to stay with the transference, and all the while we’re pulled back into the group, with all the problems we face being in groups. Adolescence is a blender: the teen rebounds between extremes and short attention spans (for example, between asceticism and sexual or self-destructive excess) because the two sides of parental guidance or identification—the mother, the father—n
eed to be mixed into the assimilated identity of ego or group member. The building blocks of development—early identification, sublimation, superegoic sadism—get libidinally mixed up between couplification and group processes. It’s the group that permits teens to get around their parents, who are too out of it or off-limits to give them their sexual license, which they receive instead from the group. But even as their sex comes groupie-fied, teens receive another set of orders from the group—to form couples, which are the genitals of the group but which the group is ever dissolving back into itself. Group psychology isn’t just a symptom; it’s not a problem of masses that are already a measure or mass of psychopathology. We are in groups. In Acker’s work, language stays tuned to the ambivalence between groups and couples. It is a language that asserts identity, communication, then automatically group-formats the one-on-one.
Art that makes contact with the adolescent turbulence inside us risks having outer work experiences with midlife criticism. That’s why the critical rep or rap always given works of ambivalence is that they’re adolescent. They’re then further name-called “perpetual,” “pathological,” you name it. Journalistic critics (I mean the pseudo types, like Camille Paglia, at the top of the best-sell-out list) forget the adolescent origin of their otherwise happy medium (which lies in the keeping of journals or diaries) while at the same time acting it out in the decontextualized, empty run of a short attention span. The deferred adolescents among us (who are at the one remove from perpetual adolescence that’s only a heartbeat away from crisis coming soon) interpret the Teen Age only one-way. But the always foreclosed other way is what adds the stereo context (that of ambivalence, transference, or reading) to our understanding of cultural—that is, cathected—phenomena. The mono turn-on that shuts down the stereo describes from the inside out the one readily identifiable form of adolescent acting out that is around, along for the writing, in open hiding inside midlife criticism.