RITA ACKERMANN — Jezebels, Soccer Club Club / Drag City, Chicago, 2016

Softbound artist’s book. 16.5 × 19 cm. 40 pages. Full-colour printing on paper. Illustrated throughout. Standard unsigned edition. Published by Soccer Club Club / Drag City, Chicago, 2016.

Published alongside Rita Ackermann’s JEZEBELS exhibition at Soccer Club Club, Chicago, held from 21 July to 9 September 2016. The book followed an earlier presentation of the series at FARAGO, Los Angeles, and was issued through Chicago record label and publisher Drag City.

The project began with photographs made by Richard Kern and staged in relation to Ackermann’s 2002 painting Restlessness and Angry Optimism. Ackermann subsequently treated the photographs as working material, passing them through painting, rephotography, photocopying and further reproduction. The Chicago exhibition presented 33 resulting images alongside the earlier painting from which the collaboration developed.

Masked women, firearms, exposed bodies and electric-blue painted grounds move between fashion photography, political imagery and the historical stereotype contained in the title. “Jezebel” operates here as an assigned identity: the supposedly dangerous, sexually autonomous woman. Ackermann complicates that construction by repeatedly covering, degrading and rebuilding Kern’s photographs, allowing the figures to alternate between visibility and disappearance.

Ackermann emerged from the New York art and music culture of the 1990s, initially becoming recognised for drawings and paintings of adolescent female figures before progressively moving between figuration and abstraction. Creation and destruction remain closely linked in her practice: bodies appear, are crossed out, submerged or reconstructed through layers of gesture and colour.

As an artist’s publication, Jezebels is more than a record of the exhibition. Painting becomes photographic staging; photography becomes painted surface; the altered image becomes print, exhibition and book. The compact paperback completes that sequence by placing the images back into circulation. Its saturated blue cover and largely image-led structure retain the instability of the original works: figure and ground, seduction and threat, documentation and intervention remain unresolved.

Condition: very good. Light rubbing and handling to the covers, with minor edge and corner wear. No substantial creasing or marking visible.