Intentos de escapada / Escape Attempts

A.- Actually I didn't want to renovate anything. I never thought of myself as a "critic," because everything I know I have learnt from artists. I was never their adversary. I didn't want to be an artist but I felt I was trying to do some of the same things. We were collaborating more than me just standing aside and writing reviews. The artists I was hanging out with were saying "anything we do is art," so I thought if anything an artist does is art, anything a critic does is criticism. I could curate a show, collaborate with artists, write weird things, and it was all criticism because I was a critic. That makes it easier. Later I did comic strips, performances, street theatre, political art, etc., but I am not an artist.

Q.- What strategies do you use when approaching an artist or an oeuvre?

A.- I don't have a specific way of carrying out my work. I have no idea of what you have to do to be a critic, because I didn't study anything, I just hung out with people. I like contemporary art. I liked seeing what was going on in the studios to then write about it. I was just in the right place at the right time. When I first started writing, art critics used a very poetic, literary style. My generation, the "minimalist conceptualists," didn't like that and we were very straightforward, without so many descriptions. We wrote very clearly. The next trend, was very into theory, using an incomprehensible language. Also, I enjoyed trying to adapt my writing to the artist. If I was writing about Donald Judd, I would try to write like his art, and if I was writing about somebody else, then I would change my style to adapt to the artist. I tried to make the text follow the guidelines set by art (Sol LeWitt always said that imitation is the greatest homage). I have never seen criticism as standing by itself, I have always considered it a collaboration with the art, with the artist. Another thing I like to do, even if it annoys people a lot, is changing my mind. I wrote an essay called Consistency in Small Minds [in Changing. Essays in art criticism , 1971], because someone, Bertrand Russell I think, said "consistency is the mark of a small mind". So I decided I would be inconsistent. I also found it challenging to write about visual "things," because it's almost impossible to write about visual art. There is a gap between words and images that can never be closed. It was an interesting challenge.

Q.- You now prefer to be called a cultural critic . How would you describe that term?

A.- I started using that about fifteen or twenty years ago because it was broader and I like crossing disciplines. I never was an artist. I have a masters degree in art history, but I didn't want to get stuck in that world. That term appeared as I began to write more about cultural geography and anthropological issues. I decided to stop calling myself an "art critic" to call myself a "cultural critic," because that gave me more room to move around.

Q.- You have said feminism changed your life in many aspects, also in terms of the way you approach criticism. What did that encounter involve?

A.- It was a big break. The kind of criticism I was doing was based on minimalism and conceptualism, with a very clear and direct style, even very "masculine" in a way. When I started writing about women's work, I wanted to be more accessible and more emotional, like Eva Hesse's work. You could be emotional in a frame that was more minimal or more formal, but have the emotions come out. Feminism gave me permission to just do what I wanted to do in a different way than conceptualism did. It gave me a fabric to write in, before I was always all alone out there writing these things. I was often the only political person, the only woman writing in a very male field, although there were several women, good women critics. Also feminism was more about lived experiences. Feminists were more autobiographical. Most critics don't write about themselves, but I do. I try not to write just about myself but I use my own experiences in my writing.

Q.- Are you planning an autobiography of any kind, as a memoir or in a similar format?

A.- Not an autobiography as such, but something similar... When I left New York, I had collected a lot of art, people have given me a lot of things and I had stored them under my bed, behind things; it was all dusty and dirty. When I pulled everything out from under the bed I had five great big rooms full of art and decided to donate the works to the Museum of Santa Fe [New Mexico], with a great big exhibition. I called it Sniper's Nest: Art that has lived with Lucy Lippard . The title may not be too appropriate at present. It sounds too military, but I thought of it as a metaphor, as I see myself as someone shooting into the art world from the outside. That show could be considered a memoir, because it was all of my life. It was very special to see it all on display. A friend of mine was in tears when he saw it, saying "These objects are part of your life." My son thought the same. The exhibition went from Robert Ryman to native American art. If I ever wrote a memoir, I would do it describing the objects, just describing the place they had in my life, from rocks to paintings by unknown people, objects from other cultures.

Q.- Do you still store art under your bed?

A.- Well, I try not to, but I live in a tiny house, with no wall space, so it's back under the bed. Although most all of it I gave away... but there is an Eva Hesse under the bed now!

Q.- To illustrate your book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (1976), you chose Femme maison (1947) by Louise Bourgeois, an artist you have dedicated a good part of your work to. What did that image mean to you at the time?

A.- Louise has done some wonderful things. I admired her very much, and she was much older than the rest of us, so I liked using her on the cover as a tribute. We all knew we were trapped by the house, so it was a common theme in women's art, and there was quite a lot of women's art that showed women trying to get out of houses, women as couches, etc. It was a nice homage to Louise, since she was a very important figure, who did not always acknowledge that feminism had done anything for her.

Q.- Was conceptual art the easiest way into the art world for women artists?

A.- Not always. It was for me, because that was what I was involved in; but there were a great many other women who weren't interested in it. Conceptual art offered a lot of ways to make art that hadn't been thought of before and women could get into the art world through them. Some did get in and others didn't. Adrian Piper, for example. Yet, there were other platforms also, like performance and autobiography, which also opened the way. It was harder for women painters and sculptors at the beginning, because that was considered the male high art. Now there are a lot of well-known woman painters and a lot of them came in through feminism. Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder or Susan Rothenberg... To some extent, they have all been feminists. Susan doesn't like to be called a feminist, but she gained a lot from feminism, like many others who gained a lot from the movement, but did not want to call themselves "feminists."

Q.- A line can also be drawn in the opposite direction: feminism embraces certain figures, it adopts them, to aid the cause, even when these women deny belonging to the feminist movement...

A.- Sometimes, but mostly it works the other way. I have been accused of not being a feminist anymore, because I don't write about feminism anymore. Yet I consider that everything I do is affected by feminism. As I am not a theorist, I have not gone deeper and deeper into feminism; I have gone on to other things.

Q.- What would you say to those women artists who reject the term "feminist"?