Intentos de escapada / Escape Attempts

P.- Pasó sus dos primeros años allí sin red eléctrica, leyendo con una lámpara de queroseno... ¿Fue una vuelta a la cabaña, a lo salvaje, a la naturaleza, como en Walden o La vida en los bosques , de Henry D. Thoreau?

R.- En cierta manera lo fue, aunque era bastante más civilizado que Walden . Tenía dinero para construir la casa, ¡pero no para conectar la luz! Lo llaman estar "off the grid" (desconectado del suministro)... Cuando vives en la ciudad, ni siquiera sabes qué es eso del "suministro". Durante un tiempo, viví con la casa conectada al coche, a través de un cable; tenía que conducir a diario para recargar la batería. Un día alguien me dijo: "¡Si tú siempre has vivido desconectada !". Se refería al hecho de que siempre había estado desconectada del sistema. Ahora sí tengo luz, pero con energía solar.

P.- Desde su nueva ubicación se ha dedicado a cuestiones que tienen más que ver con el paisaje, el medio ambiente, el turismo, la arquitectura, la geografía, la antropología, la cultura de los indios americanos...

R.- Llevo diez años preparando un libro sobre el lugar donde vivo. No tiene nada que ver con el mundo del arte. Ahora estoy más metida en el mundo de la arquitectura, el uso de la tierra. He empezado a abarcar nuevos campos. No echo de menos estar "conectada". De todos modos, no me he apartado por completo. Mis amigos son artistas, sigo viendo arte y tengo que seguir trabajando para ganarme la vida.

P.- En su último libro, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place (1999), explora estas preocupaciones acerca del espacio y la cultura, y habla del "canibalismo" presente tanto en el arte como en el turismo. ¿Qué valoración hace del arte como gran reclamo turístico?

R.- Es una cuestión de consumo. El turismo no es más que un apetito voraz por todo lo que está fuera de nuestra propia experiencia. La sociedad occidental quiere engullirlo todo. Respecto al turismo cultural, no se trata solamente de las visitas a las grandes exposiciones de museos, que se pueden considerar una imposición, el gusto de una clase muy poderosa que ha decidido que ese arte es magnífico (¡contemplamos la obra de artistas que ya han fallecido!), tiene que ver también con palacios y lugares espectaculares. Nunca vemos las casas de la gente normal. Acabamos con una visión distorsionada del lugar que visitamos. Y lo engullimos todo.

Traducción: Laura F. Farhall

Lucy R. Lippard (New York, 1937) has lived and narrated the second half of the 20 th century from her position as left-wing feminist. She witnessed and played an active role during a frenetic period in New York, with the emergence of minimal and conceptual art, civil right movements and the eruption of feminist demands. Lucy Lippard does not think of herself as a theoretician, even though she has written dozens of essays on art, criticism, culture and feminism. Neither is she comfortable with the term "critic." She prefers the freedom of classing herself as a "cultural critic."

Her publications include Changing: Essays in art criticism (1971), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973), From the Center: feminist essays on women's art (1976), Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (1980) , Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983), Pop Art (1985), The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997), On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place (1999), and monographs on Eva Hesse (1976) and Sol LeWitt (1978). She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and is co-founder and member of many artistic groups.

Lippard entered the New York Bowery in the sixties, alongside Robert Ryman, becoming part of a circle of acquaintances gathering Sol LeWitt, Ray Donarski, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Frank Linoln Viner, Tom Doyle and Eva Hesse. LeWitt, who she claims had a transcendental influence on her life, introduced her to Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Hanne Darboven, Art & Language, Hilla and Bernd Becher, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner, among others.

We were able to talk to her during a recent trip to Spain, invited by the Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo ( cendeac ) -for a workshop in Murcia, entitled "Intentos de escapada: una vida dentro y fuera del arte" [Escape Attempts: A Life in and out of Art].

Question .- When you returned to New York in 1958, after graduating at the Smith College and spending some time in Mexico, you wanted to work in a gallery because you considered it "more romantic" than working in a museum. Yet, you got a job at the Museum of Modern Art.

Answer.- Fortunately I wasn't pretty enough and I couldn't type either, so I got a job at the m o ma library. That was a much better place to be. Sol LeWitt was at the night desk, Robert Ryman and Dan Flavin were guards. That is where I met Robert Mangold, who took my job when I left.

Q.- Were you aware of being part of an exceptional circle, at a time that would generate so many transformations on the artistic panorama?

A.- Well, back then I didn't feel like I was in the middle of anything. We were very young and we didn't know we were going to be the middle of a whole movement. We were all poor and wanted to work. What occurred afterwards simply just happened. Sol LeWitt is older than me, but he hadn't made his real work yet. He was a great influence on all of us, or on me anyway.

Q.- What were you looking for back then?

A.- I was twenty-one, very starry-eyed and dazzled by the art world. I wanted to write fiction, novels, but decided I would write about art for a little bit. In those days you got four, or even five, dollars for writing a review, so I thought it as a way to pass the time until I wrote the great American novel. I got drawn into the art world through living with painters. I thought that if you were an artist, or you were in the art world, you could be totally free, but it turns out you can't be totally free in a social system that isn't free.

Q.- Was criticism satisfying enough to give up fiction?

A.- No, although my fiction is not very good... It took me twelve years to write the novel and I came to Spain [Carboneras, Almería, 1970] to do it. It's called I See/You mean , instead of "I see what you mean," it's "I see and you put the meaning into what I'm seeing." Very abstract, very influenced by conceptual art. I realised that it wasn't a terrible novel, but it is very difficult to read, very experimental. I like to read novels with stories, and I couldn't seem to write those. By that time I was just immersed in the art world, it was a very exciting time.

Q.- Nevertheless, on several occasions, you have explained that you conceive criticism as a form of fiction. In fact, to a certain extent, you extended the traditional role of the critic. You organised your first exhibition, Eccentric Abstraction , in 1966 (at the Fischbach gallery, displaying works by Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Gary Kuehn, Keith Sonnier, Don Pots, Frank Viner), when it was not the norm for critics to organise exhibitions, and considered it back then "another form of art criticism." You also experimented with the narrative, applying conceptual freedom to your texts, with strategies like fragmentation, series of data or quotes presented almost devoid of comments, imitation... What were you aiming to renovate?