The writer and film-maker Kathy Acker. Photograph: David Sillitoe
A highlight of London's cultural calendar for the new year is the Kathy Acker retrospective at the ICA. Feted in the US, with luminaries such as Rick Moody celebrating her works at events in New York, here in England (where she lived for several years in the early 1980s) any public discussion of the controversial author has been sadly absent. Now Ali Smith will be reading from Acker's work and introducing a selection of her films.
Acker's breakthrough novel, Blood and Guts in High School, was never likely to enjoy an easy ride. A coming-of-age story which examines incest and paedophilia with a profoundly Sadist literary bent, it follows a ten-year-old girl from Mexico to Alexandria, giving more than a nod to William Burroughs en route. Banned In Germany for glorifying incest, the controversy surrounding its publication in 1984 presaged battles to come over Bret Easton Ellis and AM Homes. It was to prove a high watermark for 1980s alternative culture, and, in combination with her 1988 follow-up Empire of the Senseless, can be credited with moving mainstream literature into indie territory.
Acker's experience working in film, graphics and body-art gave her a distinctly non-literary approach to writing. Her novels use techniques taken from the visual arts, borrowing heavily from the modernist armoury as the narrative is disturbed with drawings, poems, collage and factual material. An unashamed plagiarist, Acker was content to cut and paste entire sections from others' work, not least Jean Genet, who ends up becoming a central character in Blood and Guts.
For Michael Bracewell she "presented herself as part rebel bohemian avant-gardiste, part NYC downtown punk, and part venerable literary grande dame." For Robert Lort, she was "always out on her own, a strange girl thrown towards the threshold of language and thought." A decade after her untimely death from cancer in 1997 we can see her influence in the work of a number of younger - and noticeably, male - writers, like Salvador Plascencia, Travis Jeppesen and Noah Cicero.
Reviewed by even the most august outlets - something unimaginable for a comparable author working today - Acker was a genuine starlet of 1980s literary culture. The ICA's reassessment of her work and reputation is long overdue.
