Kathy Acker review – a voyage to hell with the pirates of desire

ICA, London
This Babylonian beast of a show crashes the New York avant garde of the 80s into today’s transgressive talents, with Acker as its visionary guiding spirit

There was something piratical about Kathy Acker. This New York poet, novelist, self-styled plagiarist and social visionary, who died as a result of cancer in 1997, gleefully sailed the seven seas of literature stealing what she wanted and leaving nuggets of savage rhetoric in her wake. That’s the impression I got from this sprawling, many-voiced, Babylonian beast of an exhibition. It begins with a TV clip of Acker on Channel 4 telling the story of the real-life 18th century pirate Mary Read. Acker celebrates Read’s gender freedom as she put on male clothes to become a pirate - then evaded the noose because she was pregnant. At the end of the show, another video shows Acker performing with the Mekons, who are all dressed as pirates in a playground-style pirate ship.

I say “begins”, “end”, but I’ve actually got no idea if I followed this exhibition’s intended route – and to impose a narrative on Acker would be a betrayal. “Do you think I write so that you can name me?” asked the philosopher Michel Foucault, whose books, covered in her annotations, are on show in vitrines. Acker turned the post-structuralist ideas of Foucault and other French academics into blistering, erotic, prophetic language. She put postmodernism on the mean streets.

Related: Sex, tattle and soul: how Kathy Acker shocked and seduced the literary world

I, I, I, I, I, I, I Kathy Acker is at the ICA, London, until 4 August.

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