The Pleasure of Cooking for You

Dorothy Iannone's cookbook

Article

No. 3 • September 2016

In artist Dorothy Iannone's Cookbook, food preparation is inextricably intertwined with lust and sex.

text: Rianne van Dijck

‘When I look at you, I find you admirable, lovable […] I would never have started this recipe book if I had not taken such pleasure in cooking for you.’

American Dorothy Iannone (b. 1933) fell in love with German artist Dieter Roth during a trip to Iceland in 1967. She left the husband who travelled with her, and gave up her comfortable American existence to settle with Roth in Düsseldorf, where they would become part of the avant-garde art scene. ‘It was the journey that made all the other journeys in my life possible,’ she later wrote, by which she meant: the development of her own artistry, her sexual liberation, her intense, seven-year relationship with Roth, the men thereafter, and finally the realisation that while she had always sought the ultimate connection with a man, she could also be her own muse. The ‘ecstatic unity’ she had found mainly in erotic love could also be achieved by having a good relationship with herself, she discovered as she grew older.

Fig 1. Dorothy Iannone, She didn’t Look Back, 1972 | Courtesy of the artist, Air de Paris (Parijs) and Peres Projects (Berlijn). Foto Jochen Littkeman

Iannone, who did not really make a serious breakthrough until she was 75, with exhibitions at Tate Modern and New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, creates colourful, erotic paintings in which she regularly depicts herself as a high priestess, primordial mother or sex goddess. A picture with a video of her face, for example, while she reaches orgasm time and again, or paintings with such explicit sexual acts that several parts of them had to be covered up at an exhibition in Bern in 1969.

In her artist books, a kind of graphic novels, on the crowded pages the texts and drawings tripping over each other have an equal role: both interpret her feelings, thoughts, reflections, fears and raptures.

Fig 2. Dorothy Iaononne Cookbook Page

In her artist books, a kind of graphic novels, on the crowded pages the texts and drawings tripping over each other have an equal role: both interpret her feelings, thoughts, reflections, fears and delights.

So too in Cookbook (1969), which runs to 69 pages and is really more like a diary, or an artist’s book into which some recipes just happened to end up. Between lists of ingredients and instructions on how to slice cucumbers or clean a trout, we read phrases, fragments, fragments, loose words. ‘I don’t like being sad, but half the time I am,’ we read at a recipe for gazpacho. The recipe for a blanquette de veau is accompanied by reflections on a friend: ‘What I love about Emmett is that he never hurt me.’ The recipe for a chicken pâté is written over a nude portrait in which her voluptuous forms add extra zest to the instructions on how to melt the butter and fry the chicken. ‘The older I get, the more I enjoy it,’ she writes, leaving open whether this is about the chicken or her own naked body.

In her Cookbook, preparing food is inextricably linked to love, in both carnal and spiritual forms. At a time when feminists fulminated against women’s servitude and saw even the sexual act as a form of submission, Iannone advocates the celebration of love and total surrender—with exuberant eroticism, spirituality and, on occasion, a delectable spaghetti with lobster.

Fig 3. Courtesy of the artist, Air de Paris, Parijs | Foto Hans-Georg Gaul

Dorothy Iannone’s Cookbook was first published in 1969. It was republished by JRP | Ringier Kunst Verlag in Zurich in the Spring of 2017.

In 2014, Siglio Press published You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends, which also includes a wide selection of pages from the Cookbook.