Making Muses: Dorothy Iannone’s Erotic Art Was Inspired by Dieter Roth

It’s fitting that An Icelandic Saga opens Siglio Press’s new collection of Dorothy Iannone’s image-and-text artworks. Writing the Saga retrospectively — in 1978, 1983, and 1986  —Iannone describes her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States. But it also marks the start of another kind of journey: Iannone’s maturation as an artist and her lifelong quest to achieve ecstatic unity, or “becoming one with another” by way of erotic love.