Dorothy Iannone: Echtachromes

Choosing, from among my possessions, an object of major significance was not that easy. I walked through my space looking for the utterly indispensable object, but I couldn’t find anything which would cause me, not just some sadness to lose, but absolute agony. Until, scanning the shelves in my storeroom, my eyes fell on two boxes which contain echtachromes of much of my work from the last fifty years, and especially from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Many of these works were shown only once long ago, and are unknown to my new audience. Most of them are no longer in my possession, nor do I even know where some of them can be found.

The echtachromes are the witnesses, the proof that this work which is now, in part, virtually lost, was indeed ever made. They establish its existence. And if it’s now possible, in retrospect, to regard my work as a Bildungsroman, as I have recently read, then the knowledge of the authentic manuscript, so to speak, is indispensable. It would break my heart if my lifelong enterprise were not able to be presented in its entirety. And that entirety depends, in large part, on the contents of these two boxes.