Jason McBride on #KathyAcker's 'Black Tarantula' years. What she did then is still ahead of 90% of today's ambitious writers. https://artseverywhere.ca/2020/11/12/kathy-acker-black-tarantula/

Her medium wasn't just writing, it was the entire media environment of which writing is a part. An expanded field obvious to artists by the 60s but not writers, who were still churning out their chunky big-man Great American Novels.

The Black Tarantula era work was also attending to questions of property and ownership. Then when she became a 'Grove author' there was nothing half-hearted in switching to the production of the simulation of author as star.

Always amuses me that anyone thinks there's bold and game-changing writing happening that is just shipped out without a thought through the usual channels. It's hard to get beyond, I know. But what's a bit sad is writers who aspire to nothing more than that.

Particularly in this era when the culture industry offers so little in exchange for becoming its product.

But for me the most interesting artists or writers tried to revolutionize form on all of its levels, not just those internal to the immediate work. They intuit their tactics as happening in the field of media. All interesting art is media art.

Writers have tended to be a bit slow to get this, perhaps because the technics of writing became so naturalized. The Paris literary ecosystem in Balzac's Lost Illusions looks little different to New York now.

Interesting that Acker's most original moves happened when she moved away from the city, to San Diego. Through the Antin's media practice she came up with her own.