Nadège Paquette
This artifact is a video recording of a performance reading given by Kathy Acker at the Montreal bar Foufounes Électriques in 1986. I would like to frame Acker’s rendition as a performance reading to highlight that both the moment of talk before the reading and the period of reading itself are forms of performance. The talk is an instance of gender performance while the reading is an instance of artistic performance. Both are moments of negotiation between Acker’s avant-garde aesthetic of shock and the audience who consented to the reading but maybe not to all its content. Their vulnerability to each other—Acker’s vulnerability to the crowd’s comments and disrupting noises as well as the audience’s vulnerability to Acker’s violent text—are at play in this event.
The recording is part of the Alan Lord Collection and the video and audio tapes are held at Concordia University’s Special Collections.