Dorothy Iannone & Juliette Blightman: The Vleeshal Opera

“Though it’s much too soon for our generation
Perhaps you’d like to try equality
This means we give up our serviceable sado-mas
And take a chance on liberty. […]

But let’s concentrate and try it
Let’s love as much as we possibly can
Though I’m Women’s Liberation I love you
My incomparable genius man.”

The seeds for the duo exhibition The Vleeshal Opera can be found in a publication with correspondence in words and works by Dieter Roth and Dorothy Iannone, from which the above lines are lifted. In 2009, Juliette Blightman was given a copy of this book. This was the first time she came across Iannone’s art and felt a strong admiration for and affinity with both woman and work.

Juliette Blightman (b. 1980, UK) first met Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933, US) in 2014 in her Berlin studio. During this meeting, Iannone told the whole story around her hand-drawn artist book The Story of Bern (1970). She had been invited by her beloved Dieter Roth to participate in the exhibition Freunde - Friends - d’Fründe at the Kunsthalle Bern, but some of the other participating artist “friends” pleaded to cover the genitals in her work (Ta)Rot Pack (1968–1969) with tape. The work depicts scenes of Iannone and Roth’s everyday life and their passionate relationship in 27 cards, painted on both sides with felt-tip pen and ink. Some of her works were removed by the Kunsthalle a few hours before the opening, so that the next morning Iannone and Roth took out all of their works from the exhibition to protest against this censorship. Published soon afterwards, The Story of Bern bluntly retells these events in Iannone’s distinctive and explicit comic book style. Hearing the artist recall “The Story of Bern” led Juliette Blightman to make a series of penis portraits, which she exhibited uncensored at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2016, 45 years later, with the support of the institution’s first female director, Valérie Knoll. In The Vleeshal Opera, these portraits will sing together with Iannone’s works for the first time.

The work (Ta)Rot Pack​ by Iannone can be thought of as the starting point for the duo’s exhibition at Vleeshal, which is the third iteration of their collaborative project, following Prologue at Arcadia Missa and The Köln Concert at Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2020. ​Juliette Blightman responded to (Ta)Rot Pack with the series Stages of Seed Development (2020). The artist made her version of a Tarot card pack, incorporating photography, drawing and painting. Blightman’s cards reflect on the boundaries that domestic responsibilities and motherhood have on her ability to create, thereby exploring, in her own words, “the different rhythms and atmospheres each room has, of my home, and other people’s. […] The rooms in a home hold different purposes, environments and atmospheres, as well as different relationships to the other inhabitants of the home, or the isolation of being alone.”

Different motifs from Blightman’s Stages of Seed Development recur in the artist’s other works in The Vleeshal Opera—a monumental pussy flower painting, phallic cacti fountains in fulgent green and the above-mentioned penis portraits. Similarly, intimate friends of Iannone who are, directly or indirectly, present in her (Ta)Rot Pack reappear in the exhibition as wooden cut-outs, entitled Giant People. Dorothy Iannone presents herself in the good company of artist Robert Filliou and his wife Marianna Filliou, as well as Jan Voss, co-founder of esteemed artist’s book store Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam. In The Vleeshal Opera, there is no risk of being alone. Artists Dorothy Iannone and Juliette Blightman both draw down time into all-encompassing symbologies of love, sex, care, work, autonomy, joy and other selfhoods. This exhibition brings together these two highly individual and yet affiliated cosmoses.

A new publication, Juliette Blightman & Dorothy Iannone: (Ta)Rot Tarot, has been published in collaboration with Kölnischer Kunstverein.