Barbara Caspar's “WHO'S AFRAID OF KATHY ACKER?”

 

“get rid of meaning,
Your mind is a nightmare
that has been eating you:
now eat your mind”  Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in Highschool
 
Tamara Straus
Sunday, October 5, 2008

In this first documentary film to access the literary and countercultural legacy of writer and performance artist Kathy Acker (1947-1997), director Barbara Casper gives us a mostly adulatory picture of the experiments Acker indulged in and the controversies she generated. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, Acker is traced from her early forays in the New York literary underground of the 1970s with a series of experimental and sexually graphic self-published stories (informed by her gigs as a stripper and porn performer) to her heyday in the 1980s and 1990s as an admired writer, teacher and figure of punk feminism. The film is strongest when contextualizing Acker as a female artist. She is captured in interviews angrily and powerfully responding to the lack of tough female artists. (Acker believed that no previous writer had sufficiently articulated her rage against modern misogynistic, capitalistic society or presented her sexual and intellectual sensibilities.) Director Casper wisely juxtaposes Acker's interviews with those of her friends, students, lovers, supporters and critics, who parse her influences (Burroughs, Duras, Genet) and her destructive, brave and brazen behavior. "She was like a rock star whose meteoric rise was destined to fall," says her agent Ira Silverberg. "Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker" is not for everyone, but it is an important contribution to American feminist history.
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Kathy Acker, The New York Times once called her books "a rock 'n' roll version of the Critique of Pure Reason by the Marquis de Sade as performed by the Three Stooges". A writer , poet , playwright, screen writer, Opera libreto composer , striper, rebel, Scholar, and a cultural Icon--she even inspired Delirium --a DC comics character based on her. She studied latin and the classics at Brandeis University. In 1965 she went to the University of California in San Diego to study under Herbert Marcuse , the Marxist psychologist and Critical Theory(Frankfurt School ) philosopher who was a major influence on the burgeoning counter- culture of the time (the pioneer linguist Roman Jakobson had been her tutor at Brandeis).  Later she continued her studies in Classics and philosophy in New York. Although she could have worked as an academic she didn't want distraction from her writing so took a myriad of mindless jobs. They included a job in the sex industry. Again, there are conflicting stories. One says that to help pay for her studies at San Diego State she worked as a stripper in a vaudeville house. Another says it was on 42nd Street in New York and it was a (fake) sex show to pay hospital bills. Perhaps she did both. Kathy Acker died in Tijuana, Mexico, 30 November 1997. Also visit Mark Space's excellent page dedicated to Kathy .