Hrag Vartanian: Hey, doggy. Hello. How are you?
Lucy Lippard: Hi. She's she's just excited. This house is full of dogs.
Hrag Vartanian: That was Lucy Lippard, one of the voices who's truly defined contemporary art criticism. And as you can see here, these are some of the many dozens of books, monographs, and anthologies she's contributed. Everything from surrealism to feminist art to land art and everything in between. Her book on Eva Hesse, in particular, was very influential because it was one of the first to combine biography, as well as criticism, art history, and some personal insights, helping redefine what a book about an artist could and should be. She invited us to her home in Galisteo, New Mexico, where I had the pleasure of recording this podcast.
Now picture it. It is a very dry, windy plain just at the foot of the mountains in New Mexico. It's a small town, and I went and as you heard, knocked on her door. She was kind enough to let us in and open up about her own experiences and loves of art, writing, and the world. In order to get a fuller picture of Lucy's world and work, we also are speaking to 2 other brilliant women.
First of all, Catherine Morris, the senior curator at the Sackler Center For Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Back in 2012, she curated Materializing 6 Years, Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, which is based on this book right here. And then Susan b, a painter, book artist, and editor who is part of the same 19 seventies art world where Lucy was an emerging and prominent figure. My name is Horag Bartanyan, the editor in chief and cofounder of Hyperallergic. We have a lot to get to, so let's get back to the conversation.
So I'm here at Galisteo, the small I mean, it's a village. Is it a town?
Lucy Lippard: It's a village. It's 250 people.
Hrag Vartanian: 250 people. And you've lived here now for 30 years?
Lucy Lippard: Almost 30 years. Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: 30 years. Now how did you find this place?
Lucy Lippard: Oh, feminists. Like, Judy Chicago, knew about it, and and her now husband was working for Eggs Martin and lived here and was building his own house here. And then Harmony Hammond moved here, and she was very close to me because of the heresies and everything. And I was staying with her, and I looked across the creek, and there was a sign that this strip was being sold off. So I and then my mother died, so I had some money for the first time in my life and and bought it and built this little house.
Hrag Vartanian: What was it that ignited your imagination?
Lucy Lippard: Well, Galvestdale. I remember walking the first I was hiking. There's a big petroglyph site further down the road, and I was hiking there. And I walked across the bridge, and I thought this this place is foreign. I mean, I it was I I liked it, but it was foreign.
And, and I ended up by living here. So at first, it's so quiet here when I was first living here. It's changed quite a lot.
Hrag Vartanian: So so there is this image of 19 seventies contemporary art world in New York being very political.
Lucy Lippard: Well, we were much more political. I was I was an activist in the seventies and I all my friends were. So, you know, I we I would tell people when I moved down here, I'd say that I I'm getting away from art, and my artist friends would look pissed. So, you know, so they would and, so I started I I was actually getting away from the art world, and clearly, I never succeeded in getting away from art.
Hrag Vartanian: But Here I am.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Right. Well, art, it it turned out yeah. You know, I wanted to write fiction. When I graduated from college, I've gotten a couple fiction prizes and had stories published and stuff and and I thought, well, I'm a hot shit and I'm, you know, I'm gonna do that.
And I'm really glad that that I was really bad at writing the kind of fiction anybody would wanna publish and and, and I'm glad I and I it was already spending a lot of time on art, and and, I'm glad I ended up writing about art because everything I get interested in, I can look around and there's some artists who are interested in it too. And and so so there's something to talk about and write about.
Hrag Vartanian: So you did mention once talking about our criticism being a form of fiction.
Lucy Lippard: I think you mentioned that once.
Hrag Vartanian: I think I think somewhere that I I remember reading That
Lucy Lippard: was clever.
Hrag Vartanian: Do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Like, how true is that for you still?
Lucy Lippard: I I don't I don't know what I was really I mean, I guess everything is fiction on one level or another, especially in these days.
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: But one thing that interested me about writing about art when I realized that was what I was gonna end up by doing, was that it's almost impossible to write about art. I mean, I like that. I've always been interested in words and images, and and there isn't any real way of of talking about art unless you see it. And so that was challenging, and and I so I have always listened to artists, which was, you know, not done in the late fifties when I came to New York. I mean, you weren't ever supposed to use the word I.
God forbid. And you certainly weren't. I mean, Dori Ashton was fired from the times because she knew, in the biblical sense, new artists. She was too close to artists, married to one and so on, and so was I. And I I was happy to be that was where I learned everything I know about art was artists.
Catherine Morris: I think that Lucy would say it all started with the artists, plain and simple. She has said to me that, you know, she'd learned from artists, from being in studios, from being at dinners, from drinking and hanging out. And I think that's still true. I do believe that the emergence of the conceptual movement in the sixties seventies is one of the most important art historical moments of the 20th century and one that we're still grappling with.
Lucy Lippard: My name is
Catherine Morris: Katharine Morris. I'm the senior curator of the Sackler Center For Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Hrag Vartanian: And so the topic, of course, is Lucy Lapard, who is somebody who you've worked with, for an exhibition you organized roughly 10 years ago now. So can you tell us a little bit about like, first of all, describe Lucie Lippard for someone who may not know who she is and what role she plays in the art community, in art criticism, in art and museums, and why you felt so interested in her work?
Catherine Morris: Lucy is, in my mind, in the generation that I grew up in, an integral part of the art world, an integral part of the kind of people who made an intellectual framing of conceptual art and feminism that I learned and grew up with and believed in fully and still do. And she is a person who fascinated me because she is absolutely a part of the art world, but she's also a person that I think kind of holds herself at a bit as a reserve from that world. I think that that becomes part of a critical distance. I also think it's a personality and I think that it informs the way that she takes up the work that she does in relationship particularly to conceptual art, and the artists who were a part of her circle at that time.
Lucy Lippard: My parents loved art and they went to not contemporary galleries that much, but they went to museums and and they both painted, amateur watercolor painting. And and actually both were not bad, I mean, you know, for local things. And when I started writing about art in my sort of formalist period, daddy said, well, he said, you know, and I I don't really understand what you're talking about a lot of the time. And and I thought, here's an intelligent person who is well educated and likes art, and he doesn't understand what I'm talking about. This is not good.
And so I tried to clean up my act a little. I mean, it never fully worked because to be in the art world, you have to do some of that stuff. But but, I've I've managed to, you know, say what I wanted to say and get away with it on some levels.
Hrag Vartanian: I guess, like, because I mean, there's there's still this kind of concept, and I think it's something propagated by maybe academic programs. Yeah. You know, that that this kind of super jargony, slogany language.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, theory. I mean, I I I it's probably just because I'm too lazy to deal with theory, but I've always called theory ideas with hardening of the arteries
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: Because and I've never been an academic, and none of them liked me, and that's fine. Hilton Kramer once said, Lucy Lippard was was looking like a a really good art historian until she and I I'll never forget this quote. Until she fell prey to the radical whirlwind. And, you know, and I did I'm proud of it and so on.
Susan Bee: You know, you do nobody reads Hilton Kramer anymore. I mean, but at the time, he was the most important art critic in New York. My name is Susan b, and I'm an artist who lives in Brooklyn. And I've been a member of AIR, which is the first feminist art co op for women that started in 1972. The reason I'm so excited about talking about Lucy Lippert is that when I was in graduate school at Hunter in the seventies, like, 70 5 to 77, it was all male art teachers.
This was graduate school. Right? There wasn't a woman to be found except the art history department, but certainly not teaching studio art. And she became this very important icon to us at the time, even going back to the sixties, because she's somebody who came out of the minimalist movement, and she understood conceptual art and artist books and all of these things that were very important, performance art, that were very important in the sixties seventies. But she actually made the move out of, just supporting male artists, which is pretty much all that was happening at the time, to supporting women artists and writing about them and to centering feminist art, which was a very chancy thing at the time.
When AIR started in 1972, it was the first women's gallery. And the idea of having women getting together and doing a gallery was considered such a bad idea, you know, by the art world that she was very supportive of of these early feminist artists and also very involved with politics and with artist books. So at the time, she was somebody really crucial. Like, I would go to see her talk, and I would feel really inspired by her. Also, because she had a art history background, she was really well known as an art critic and well known also for supporting male minimalist artists, male conceptual artists.
So it wasn't that she was, just coming out of nowhere. As as an art historian, she already had all the respect, but the fact that she was willing to put herself out and support women, made it very important for our time period that back then. And, of course, she continues to age 87 now. So she's really been an icon for a very long time. You know, I have to think also that the Guerrilla Girls was happening at that time.
All these people were picketing, you know, museums. You had Harlem on My Mind, which had no black artists in it. I mean, there was crazy stuff like that going on that now it's almost you can't really, think back and realize how segregated the world art world was in terms of artists, women artists, artists of color, gay artists. I mean, whatever it was, there was people didn't talk about certain things. People never brought up certain things.
And, I guess it's hard to reconstruct that era because everything was just sort of coming into being. She was less judgmental, I would say, and more open to what was happening. So she, you know, she could look she could talk to somebody like Anna Mangietta or Marybeth Edelson, people who are doing performance work using their bodies in ways that were considered, you know, kind of considered wrong at the time, you know, putting themselves in their work. All these things that were kind of percolating, and she was on the ground with it. You know?
In other words, she wasn't she didn't divorce herself from the art world. I mean, she, you know, was involved with the minimalist. She was involved with conceptualists. She's involved with the feminist, so the political people. What she probably wasn't involved with is the mainstream work world at the time, but she made herself part of the scene at the time with more experimental writers, with more experimental performers, with people starting out, and that gave the whole scene much more credence because she could write and she could put it forward in a way that was made sense to the outside world, I think, because, you know, she was a trained art historian.
She wasn't coming out of completely out of left field when she had she was out of left field for sure, but I mean, she was a leftist for sure. But she was able to really penetrate these mainstream worlds, I think, in a very interesting way, which you see now with certain critics, you know, in hyperallergic and other places where you're able to make a difference by putting forward certain work or, you know, talking about, you know, Harlem in a different way than it was talked of at the time. I mean, I saw that original Harlem show. You know, it was just photos of Harlem. I mean, I was going to high school in Harlem.
This was a you know, what was I looking at? You you might as well just get on the bus and go to Harlem. You know? There was really no point to it.
Hrag Vartanian: So that hasn't changed again.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. What the hell? It will You
Hrag Vartanian: see? What are we doing?
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. You're doing it now. I'm I'm on the fringes.
Hrag Vartanian: But do you know what I mean?
Lucy Lippard: It's all your fault. Oh, god.
Hrag Vartanian: You're probably I
Lucy Lippard: mean, the next generation. I I would love to hear what your generation, what you think your generation did to
Hrag Vartanian: Yeah.
Lucy Lippard: Change any of this.
Hrag Vartanian: Well, I mean, I think my generation when I was going to school was in the nineties. Mhmm. And I think we sort of responding to the multiculturalism, which you've written about extensively, and we were trying to sort of reconsider the orthodoxies. Right? Yeah.
And I think we did a good job in terms of at least, like, realizing that there isn't this one, this only modernist notion of Sure. Art history. Yep. But the problem was we were never, like, the market also bloomed at the same time, and the reality was that so much of what we've considered the art system for so long has been sort of dictated and funded by the commercial market. Well, we're
Lucy Lippard: in a capitalist society. Surprise, surprise.
Hrag Vartanian: I mean But at the same time, it's like, I think that's why Hyperallergic was created partly was because we were like, okay, well, we're not interested in that. So our funders tend to be we have membership, we have, you know, art schools, we have museums, we have foundations, all these types of things. So it's like it's not galleries are not the focus.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah, right.
Hrag Vartanian: But unfortunately, you know, this corporate tendency in the art world, I think, really took away some of the DIY stuff or at least then monetized it.
Lucy Lippard: Does that make sense? I mean, yeah. That's what I discovered in the late fifties and early sixties. Before the sixties got going, I was beginning to suspect, you know, that Right. That, you think you're free in the art world and so and then you realize there's a wall right over there and it's capitalism.
I mean, you know, and there's
Hrag Vartanian: That's right.
Lucy Lippard: And there's how to, you know and you have to make a living. My first book was on prints and drawings of Philip Evergood.
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: Because I read that. Yeah. And I discovered another art world completely that I'd never even known existed, Raphael Sawyer and Exactly. Evergood's old pals. And it was a perfect book for me because, you know, Evergood stayed a communist long after he should have not been a communist.
But anyway
Hrag Vartanian: I'm so glad you brought this up because I was gonna ask you about that because it seemed really out of the ordinary considering the trajectory you were on, at least initially, it seemed like.
Lucy Lippard: The Evergood book. Yeah. It was my first book. I was I would've I mean, I was writing for money, such as it was.
Hrag Vartanian: Right. But but did you do you really credit that with opening your mind up to this different narratives? Or how do you
Lucy Lippard: Well, no. No. Not not to different narratives so much. Much. I knew about I mean, I was well educated about art.
Hrag Vartanian: But by the early sixties, that's that's
Lucy Lippard: that's what a cadre of
Hrag Vartanian: Got it.
Lucy Lippard: You know, artists who who had their own art world. I mean, they had their own galleries. They had their own collectors. And and when I wandered in, you know, I thought, oh, it's just like our art world. I mean, you know Right.
Like this other one over here, and then, of course, there are lots of those.
Hrag Vartanian: So now I wanna go to the question of image and text. Do you know? Because that's actually been one of the central ideas that draws my life and work.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. What interested me about image and text was that, was partly that I wanted to be a writer, but I was interested in art. And then I knew there was this gap of perception and and then of words. And then conceptual art happened, and that that was really a huge opening up for me.
Hrag Vartanian: So what was it like creating an art exhibit for someone who isn't necessarily an artist? Right? I mean, she she does she does sort of fall between categories in many ways. But what what was that like?
Catherine Morris: That was the fun of it. There were so many parts of that exhibition that Vincent and I had so many thoughts about. And what's interesting to me about that show and the thing that I think surprised people, as a curator of a Center For Feminist Art, one would think I would do an exhibition on Lucy's feminist writing. But it was really important to me and to Vincent to do this work starting with conceptual art because Lucy has talked about sort of moving away from conceptual art and into feminist art because she felt like conceptual art wasn't political enough. She got to the point in life where she really wanted to be actively political.
And I think now, then, 10 years ago, 40 years later, whatever it was, we saw the politics in that conceptual practice that didn't feel as vital to her at the time. But so for me to make the clear link between how conceptual practice that Lucy was interested in, not all conceptual practices, was very much linked to a politics that she was a part of and that feminism grows from. I think there's also a way in which the history of conceptual art and the history of feminist art are really inextricably linked.
Hrag Vartanian: So now how would you like looking back at Lucy's, you talk about the politics and and sort of like she was a little frustrated with the politics of conceptualism. Now, in retrospect, what were some of those radical things that she may have not seen at first?
Catherine Morris: You know, the number shows that Lucy did, which she's so famous for doing. The last one was circa 75100, which was the first all women and arguably the first feminist show she did. Not arguably, it is. And, that's where we ended our exhibition and that's where she talks about having kind of made this conscious decision to turn her attention to this sociopolitical movement that was grounded in conceptualism, but had a more overt political drive.
Hrag Vartanian: How would you describe the number shows for those who are listening and may not know what those are?
Catherine Morris: The number show was another kind of idea that Lucy had for how to democratize exhibitions. She called them her suitcase exhibitions as well. She asked artists she invited artists to submit ideas for works of art, conceptual works of art, to be included in exhibition on 3 by 5 cards. She would then take those 3 by 5 cards and she would go to the sites and produce the works as they were described on these 3 by 5 cards and she did 3 different versions of it, some of which she considers more successful than other And she became it was a way to kind of pass the baton. She could take these cards and she could make a show, she could pass them on to somebody else to do it, an artist could offer an idea that then in reality becomes, almost a a a collective action.
So the names of the shows were based on the population numbers of the cities where they were held. And you can still find in rare bookshops today, the the cards became the catalog for the show. So flipping through the 3 by 5 cards again is Lucy's variation and idea of a catalog. Again, as she put it, you could put them in any kind of order you like. You can throw away the ones you don't like.
You know, it is another, sort of conceptual activity that becomes part of the collective process.
Lucy Lippard: I collaborated with artists and and I was, you know, wrote things but it was part of the art and since they were doing text too, it didn't make me. And people said, oh, Lucy wants to be an artist and I never wanted to be an artist. I always was a writer but I could collaborate with artists. I could do whatever the hell I wanted. When I did the what people call now the card catalog shows or the number shows in 1969, 70, Peter Plagens wrote about it in Artforum or someplace and said Lucy wants to be an artist.
You know? This she's really the artist of all this stuff. And I was that was annoyed hell out of me. But anyway, that doesn't have anything to do with image and text. But then No.
Hrag Vartanian: I mean, I think it does. I mean, I think part of this one of the reasons I'm interested in this topic is because there's this such this strange gatekeeping around art writers and and sort of what we're allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do, but there isn't the same rules with artists.
Lucy Lippard: No. Artists are the the free spirits and
Hrag Vartanian: They can write things and they can, you know, and and no one ever says they stop doing it.
Lucy Lippard: Things that much. I mean, you know, they're Well,
Hrag Vartanian: Donald Judd did.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, yeah. No. But starting around in the sixties. Right. In Smithson and so forth and so on.
But that's that Historically
Hrag Vartanian: historically in the academies, people did write. The artists in the academies wrote a little bit, Joshua Reynolds
Lucy Lippard: or But they didn't write about other people's work that much, did they?
Hrag Vartanian: Not that much.
Lucy Lippard: But then so conceptual art, I did things called I tried to make pictures into words in a series of things called photo dialogues or something. And I tried to do a paragraph of text and then a picture and then pick up from the picture the next paragraph. I mean it sounded like a good idea, but it never really worked. I don't think people ever they just looked at the picture and went on to the text and or something. Or just looked at the pictures and never looked at the text or whatever.
So Or
Hrag Vartanian: maybe they read it differently now Yeah. When they did that. Just like good art, sometimes good art writing takes some time to seep in.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. I mean, I'm just really I don't see myself as a genius art writer. I see myself as sort of a hack. I mean, you know, like, frankly. Yeah.
I mean, I've made a living at this. I mean, somebody I did a talk at the New School about criticism a few years ago and one of the questions was what do you what do you do about writer's block? And I said I don't. This is how I make my living. I don't get blocked.
I mean you know, I mean I've I've written some stupid things and some bad things and so forth, but but I I write to her like Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm sure you do and everybody most people do. I mean, it's but I think art writers don't get writer's block because we're not respected enough to have writer's block. I mean I
Hrag Vartanian: mean, I see
Lucy Lippard: we're not creative enough
Catherine Morris: I think part of the reason that Lucy feels like a bit of a enigma is because, you know, she didn't think of herself as a critic. She thought of herself as a novelist or a writer. And so I think that that contributes to the way she positioned herself in the world because she didn't define herself by those terms that most people seem to want to, which obviously also defines all of her work, including the book 6 years, which, my great colleague Vincent Bonan and I did an exhibition on.
Susan Bee: She also was a writer. I should say that she wrote some very good fiction, which she never really pursued. But, in the experimental writing world, she was also known. So, I mean, on all of those levels, I think her importance is very, it's almost underrated, I think, because I don't in a way, I don't think people now really know her work.
Hrag Vartanian: So why do you think, like, with artists, there's often this idea of, like, they can create different bodies of work, but with art writers, I feel like there's less flexibility in people's imagination about what we do. Why? Why do you think that is?
Lucy Lippard: I have no idea. I mean, I've just always felt like I could be as flexible as I wanted because I'm a freelancer. I mean, you know, it's I don't have any kind of never had a boss, but,
Hrag Vartanian: it was So let's talk about that part. It's because I know that you you, you often joke that you have a problem with authority.
Lucy Lippard: I'm an only child. Maybe that's it.
Hrag Vartanian: But at the end of the day, as a freelancer, you do and you don't have freedom. Right? Because you still have to appeal to a certain, like, you know, publication Yeah.
Lucy Lippard: You want people to have you write again. Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: So so I I wonder how you navigated that.
Lucy Lippard: I was never very aware of navigating anything. I've I've always had a lot of energy. I don't anymore, but I used to have a lot. And I just went ahead and did what I wanted to do. And if somebody didn't like it, I mean, there were plenty of projects that didn't happen and grants I didn't get.
And I stopped applying for grants at one point because it just seemed like, why bother? I remember we used to have a discussion around in the early eighties about whether activist artists should be trying to get into museums or in galleries and so on. And a lot of people just said, you know, we get co opted if we go in there. We have to stay on our own and stay in the co opted galleries and or no gallery at all and so on. And then Leon Golub, who was certainly an admirable activist, said, no.
We we belong in the museums too, and our art is important. And these messages that we have are important. And I, you know, I was totally convinced once he did that. You know? I still prefer the margins for myself, but but artists I mean, like, I have artist friends who say, well, you're so lucky.
You can not make much money and you can live. I mean, it's true. They they have to buy materials. I mean, painters, I'm thinking.
Hrag Vartanian: Sure. I get it. And And sculptors. Definitely.
Lucy Lippard: Sculptors, definitely. And and going out and getting things out of the gutter doesn't work for everybody.
Hrag Vartanian: So now getting back to image and text.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. I know. I mean, you're not getting what you want.
Hrag Vartanian: I don't know what it is. I'm actually really fascinated by it. Like, the fact that that because this seems to be a central thing for you, but at the same time, you seem to not wanna talk about it.
Lucy Lippard: Well, no. I yeah. This is this is a problem. I was interviewed by somebody fairly recently who's kept on with these wonderful sort of theoretical ideas about writing and she said, and then do you think that? And do you think about that?
No. Like I said, so, you know, basically, I just kinda do what I do. I mean, I I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. So, I really don't know where to go with it. I mean, obviously, if you're an art writer, you're dealing with image and text, and people do it in different ways.
Hrag Vartanian: And and Well, I but I think some writers actually feel very divorced. Like, you read their stuff and you're like, do they have eyes? You know, like, that happens too. Yes. Right?
Or or they just never choose good images, and and you kinda wonder about their visual literacy when they can't, like, even, you know, take a simple straightforward, you know, informational photograph or something or, like, or figure out how to tell the story with images. Do you know? So it's like I I think it's I think, maybe, and I do wonder sometimes whether it's the academia part of the art world because they don't know
Lucy Lippard: what to do with images sometimes.
Hrag Vartanian: Do you know? Because no one gets no one gets tenure based on the images in your paper. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's that's just not, like, the way the system kinda works.
Yeah. So I guess that's what I'm trying
Lucy Lippard: to do. I I also was never never gonna go into academia, so I I I really don't I mean, I had a high no. A college boyfriend who was who was in law school, and he said, you're a good thinker, but you're a shallow thinker. And and, no. And and, no, I thought about it.
I was a little insulted, but I was in college. I didn't know what kind of thinker I was, period. And and then I thought I always thought afterwards, oh, he's probably right. You know? I I don't I write about what I write, and I don't dig into it too much.
I mean, I'm not I don't spend a lot of time thinking about writing. I just write.
Hrag Vartanian: Can can I offer another interpretation? No.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: I mean, maybe it's that you don't stake your identity on these ideas in the same way. I wonder.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. No. I don't stake my identity on any particular Because
Hrag Vartanian: I do think a lot of people do do that.
Lucy Lippard: Because that's why that word changing is called changing. That's right. And I've never seen anything wrong with changing, and and the art world doesn't approve. I look at Guston being the classic example.
Hrag Vartanian: Exactly. Yeah. But I wonder, like, is it that flexibility that has also made you so relevant for so many decades?
Lucy Lippard: I have no idea why I'm so relevant. I mean, I don't this is not false modesty. I really just have no idea because I have always just kinda gone ahead and done what I how I wanted to do. I used to wanna be liked, and I've stopped that because I realized, no. These people don't like me.
I'm like
Hrag Vartanian: I always say, you know, most people don't like themselves, so why are they gonna like you? I think there's a grain of truth in that. Do that. But I don't
Lucy Lippard: know where else to go with this image and text thing. I mean, you know, idea you know, ideas come to you and you think, well, I'll try that. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Hrag Vartanian: But where do you think the seed of that came from? Because I I I can't believe that it that it just sort of, like, naturally evolved. Well, I
Lucy Lippard: mean, I've seen I mean, obviously, art is my education. I mean, I've I've I used to see 30 shows a week or something. I mean, you know, I've I've seen one hell of a lot of art. I mean, more art than is healthy for anybody, I think. Absolutely.
But I was writing for Art International. That was just a sort of lucky break because Max Kozlov was a friend and he and Barbara Rose were writing for Art International, and then they quit within a month or 2 of each other. And Max recommended me, and Jim Fitzsimmons was desperate. So and he would have had I I never told him I was pregnant when I started because he would have had a fit to know that the Art international New York letter person was
Hrag Vartanian: Really? So it's classic sexism. I I yeah.
Lucy Lippard: I mean, I didn't even know what sexism was then, but Yeah. But I I I intuited that I should not say I'm having a baby. I mean Right. And I missed a couple of shows. And and I said, well, I'm sorry.
I just had a kid. That's why I missed the show too.
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: And he was like, oh, geez.
Hrag Vartanian: So do you wanna talk a little bit about that? The role of sexism in the early part of your career? Like how did that happen?
Lucy Lippard: No. There again, I was, when I got into the women's movement in 1970 basically, I've always just sort of, I guess, had a thick skin or something because I never, I I never really noticed much. And as a freelancer, I didn't ever know that somebody got the job instead of me or somebody was being paid more. I found out later that the guys were getting paid a lot more, but I it's okay. I was making a living anyway.
So but, and then I started hearing women's stories and women artists stories. And I don't think it was that hard on critics except for the story, Ashen story, which she was told she knew artists too much. But but artists were really god when I heard these stories from women. I mean, it's just I I remember one dealer telling me in the early seventies about Mary Miss. She'd shown him her work and was interested in being in the gallery and and, he didn't take her on and I said, god.
Why didn't you tell I don't know who it was. And he said, oh, well, I loved her work, but she was so beautiful. I was afraid I'd be taking it for the wrong reasons. I mean, I nearly died. I was like, what?
So
Hrag Vartanian: I think that's something that I think maybe generations following, like, we don't understand because that was never Yeah. Like, we we thought, like, how did people not see this?
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Exactly.
Hrag Vartanian: And so that was really, like, you didn't see it because you didn't really have a word for it. You didn't see other people's experience, so you didn't know this was a pattern. Exactly.
Susan Bee: It it's hard to even think back on the time period. You couldn't really find any women in any of the museums. You couldn't find books about women artists. And, you know, here I was, you know, marooned with these minimalist, male artists at Hunter and just going to these Monday night series at AIR where they had different women critics and male critics talking about feminist art. And we had somebody like Rosalind Krauss, who was actually my thesis advisor, who was against women's art, you know?
And she'd come out and say things like that. And so, you know, as a young artist who was starting out, it was so important to have these essays and to have Lucy take seriously women's art organizations willing to write the essay for the first print portfolio of AIR, which was in 1976. And these essays were really, really crucial. It's now it doesn't I don't think from the perspective of the present day where you can see women in museums, you can go to the Whitney Biennial and it might be half women. But for years, we were marching.
I mean, I remember going to demonstrations that she was at literally with signs in front of museums trying to get women and also persons of color shown. When people say, Oh, it happened. Well, it just happened. None of this stuff happened. It was really a fight and sometimes when I hear people say oh, well, you know, now you can just see x and y in the museum.
You can, you know, see women's art at the MET, and you can see, you know, all sorts of things that you couldn't see in the seventies. But it wasn't it didn't happen by mistake.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. I mean, we really just you know, life was what it was. I went to a women's college. I went to Smith and Mhmm. And, Oh, you went to Smith?
Yeah. Why?
Hrag Vartanian: Why why why do so many awesome women in the art world come to come to Smith?
Lucy Lippard: I don't know. But it would women's colleges are a good thing. My mother had gone to Smith. And she was a she and my father were both she was a church mouse and my father was just poor working class. And and, because I mean, in class identity, it's not something Americans like to even think about.
And Ever. And that and we did a a Heresies issue on class.
Hrag Vartanian: Heresies is a journal, a feminist journal.
Lucy Lippard: A 17. Feminist Journal of Art and Politics. And, and when we were founding it, we we had what we call the mother collective. And then the the different issue collectives, if somebody was interested in doing a lesbian thing, harmony did a lesbian issue. But anyway, we did class thing.
We said, okay. We'll do an issue on class. Let's talk let's go around the table and talk about class and our own lived experience.
Hrag Vartanian: Uh-oh.
Lucy Lippard: And it was so funny because we all wanted to be working class, you know. And and a lot of us had come from, you know, usually one me anyway, one thing away. 1 my parents my father was raised working class, but by the time he got into college at Yale at the age of 16, he he wasn't working class anymore. I mean, you know, and my mother the same with my mother and so on. So so that was sort of fascinating.
Well, my grandmother was a farmer. Well, did she own the farm, you know, that we started in on all this this stuff. It was it was very interesting.
Hrag Vartanian: So what what did you learn from that? Because I think that's exactly what kind of happened
Lucy Lippard: to us. Well, we knew that Americans don't like to talk about class. And so we thought we we will talk about class. And and, I learned a lot about my friends and our pretensions. Yep.
Hrag Vartanian: Right. Right.
Lucy Lippard: And I include myself in that. And I never forgot my parents' story. My parents said to me at one point now, because they were in the upper middle class by then and they said, why do you hate the rich? And I said, because of your stories of your childhoods and youth and so on and getting into college and so forth and the way I mean, when my mother was at Smith, there was one how one dorm for scholarship students. They were all in one place.
Right. And she said she didn't mind because they were interesting people and they all that she had more in common with them than she did with the rich kids in the other place. But but I mean, a lot of these they didn't know what they were telling me. And I would they I listened to this stuff really carefully. I mean, it made a big impression on me.
I mean
Hrag Vartanian: So I wonder, what happened at the Village Voice? Like, what what was can you explain your
Lucy Lippard: Well, that that new guy whose name I have blocked, Kim Kiff something, came in as the editor. And I had been hired to write once a month for god's sakes.
Hrag Vartanian: This was the mid eighties?
Lucy Lippard: Early eighties.
Hrag Vartanian: Early eighties.
Lucy Lippard: Right. Yeah. I I think I did it for 5 years or so. Anyway, to write about art and politics, which was fine, I mean, once a month. And then this new guy came in, and he fired me.
I mean, you know, and, and I went in to talk to him and see what what was going on, and he said, it's not about your politics. And I said, well, that's interesting that you brought that up so immediately. I mean, I'm like so it must have been about my politics. I it's a but the voice forgot.
Hrag Vartanian: But but they never gave you a real reason?
Lucy Lippard: No. Jeff Weinstein was it was the betrayer. I mean, he was the editor, and he should have stood up for me, and he didn't. So I have never really understood what I've got fired from a lot of things. I mean, you know.
Hrag Vartanian: So that seems like a really odd sort of decision.
Lucy Lippard: Then I went to, what, In These Times or,
Hrag Vartanian: Oh, In These Times. Yeah. Yes.
Lucy Lippard: In Chicago. They more or less fired me.
Hrag Vartanian: Why?
Lucy Lippard: And then I went to, Z Magazine.
Hrag Vartanian: But why? Why did it
Susan Bee: I I don't know.
Lucy Lippard: They never said much. And by that time, I was like, okay.
Hrag Vartanian: Okay.
Lucy Lippard: I was interested in doing something else. I didn't really I was in Boulder a half a year. I wrote from Boulder for for z, I guess, and and they got rid of me too. I it didn't make that much difference in my life, but I never was clear about maybe it was too much about art for the political things and too much about politics for the art things. Or
Hrag Vartanian: Oh, that sounds familiar. Yeah.
Susan Bee: The establishment art world was very against, what she was doing, supporting political artists, supporting work that was not mainstream. Even her support early on of Eva Hesse and eccentric abstraction and certain forms of feminist art like Judy Chicago, those things were not considered mainstream. And somebody who was an important critic at the time, Hilton Kramer on The New York Times, would never review those works. So the fact that you came out of art history and was a really good writer, could write about pop art, could write about political art. I mean, what made a difference really to me is that she's a really good art critic, you know?
She's a good writer, she's and she can also write about things like ecology, like if she when she turned her mind to different parts of the art world that weren't really being covered, she probably got pushed back. I mean, I wouldn't really know. I saw I saw people like Ross Krause who were, you know, against feminist art or against political art or feeling that it was impure, that the art that she was, you know, that she was speaking up for was not considered mainstream art at the time. You know? Now you might consider that Nancy Spiro is somebody who might be in a museum, but in those days, Leon and Nancy, nobody showed them and you know, except for AIR, and Leon couldn't get shown.
Those kind of political artists, you know, the new museum was just starting, and they were starting to show alternative what they called alternative art. But, you know, she really was the one who put it on the map, partially because of her really good writing skills and her advocacy. I mean, she was very involved with the Art Workers Coalition that was also against the Vietnam War, And she was involved with, printed matter, which is very important because people were starting to show artists books and heresies, which was a very important starting point for me looking at this collective. I even went to a meeting with her and Anna Minjetta. I tried to join the issue on the ecology.
They said it was an open call, and I was so intimidated by Lucy and Anna that I never went back. It was like they were so scary, to me as a young person, you know. So she just she was everywhere and she really came out and, like, I was in a little group on the lower east side of women called the limbo lounge and she came and spoke to us. It wasn't an important group. It was just a group of women who formed together.
We were doing shows together, and she came and talked to us. You know? And I feel that that openness really went missing when she moved out to New Mexico and kind of, you know, I'm I'm glad for her that she, you know, she got time to herself to do her own work. But she was so present during those years, you know, that I think that made a big difference to have an art critic who is actually also willing to, you know, to be an activist.
Hrag Vartanian: So what's been what has it been like living in New Mexico in general?
Lucy Lippard: Heavenly. Like Yeah. I mean, I don't I I love being outdoors until my knee bit the dust of few years ago. And so I was spend a lot of time hiking and camping and and a lot of good friends and, you know, it's just it's I'm really glad I did what I did and so I've never really regretted any decisions. I've made some stupid ones, I think.
But but,
Hrag Vartanian: Haven't we all?
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. But, you know, they've always worked out.
Hrag Vartanian: So how do you think it's impacted your writing? And and the way and the different ideas that you're
Lucy Lippard: Well, I think, I mean, New Mexico has has made a big imprint. I've written 2, 3 books on New Mexico.
Hrag Vartanian: Right. And Your Galisteo book is quite, quite great.
Lucy Lippard: The Galisteo, then there's one on the Galisteo Basin that came before that archaeology and history and really no no art. I mean, none of them really have much art in them. I I stick in some art now and then. But, and then one on I did a the text for a book on Chaco Canyon with a photographer friend of mine.
Hrag Vartanian: And I wanted to talk about Chaco Canyon shortly.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, well, let's talk about Chaco Canyon. Oh, yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: I love that talk. Okay. Go
Lucy Lippard: ahead. I went to Chaco Canyon first in 1972. It's a fascinating place. Yeah. And New Mexico is fast.
It's there's no my partner is was raised in New Mexico. It's in Alamogordo. It's White Sands. But but, we we for the pandemic, we've every Sunday, we take a 4 to 7 hour drive around the back roads of New Mexico. And even though he was raised here, you know, there's we always find things that are fascinating.
And and it's it's a really interesting it's got so many layers
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: Of history. And and I I think old age gets you more interested in history or something. Maybe.
Hrag Vartanian: But then even like someone like David Wojnarowicz found Chaco Canyon.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, yes. And I you know, I didn't know for years that that was where that face thing of his would came.
Hrag Vartanian: But so what do you think the draw is of Chaco Canyon?
Lucy Lippard: It's they I mean, I always talk about the mystery of Chaco Canyon and and it is very mysterious. I mean, in in a funny way, we know more and more about it.
Hrag Vartanian: So Lucy Lippard wasn't simply getting away from the New York art world, but maybe she was going towards something else, like the native cultures in the southwest, where prominent sites like Chaco Canyon continue to enthrall visitors from all over the world. Between 85250 CE, Chaco Canyon was the home to the Pueblo people who created some fascinating artifacts and grand buildings that you can see even today. A sacred site, it's also sacred to the Hopi and Navajo people. I myself had the pleasure of visiting Chaco Canyon, and I can tell you it really is unlike anything you've ever seen. But like you said, there are so many layers.
It's not it's
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. And it's it's such a strange place. I mean, why is it there? And a a good friend of mine is Anna Soffer who's who who really broke open the astronomical aspects of it. And the archaeologists were all like, didn't like what she was doing and that's this is bullshit and so forth.
And now they're all realized that it's there and they have to deal with it. But, so it it and it
Hrag Vartanian: and How how dare someone tell tell them. Right?
Lucy Lippard: And she came out of art. She was an artist and that's and she saw things, I think, that they didn't see by just being an artist.
Hrag Vartanian: Sometimes art and like good writing is making connections other people don't make.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I, you know, I saw it at an impressionable time of my life and it's, I've been back lots of times and it's just so fascinating.
Hrag Vartanian: So what captured your imagination about Chaco Canyon?
Lucy Lippard: By the time I got down here, I had already become interested in Native American art. The American Indian Community House was very briefly in the Leo Castelli building on West Broadway. I didn't know that. Yeah. So I went in.
I always saw everything. And I went in and and Peter Jemison and Jolene Rickard were the were directing it. They were talking to me as I was wandering around and they said, you don't know anything about American Indian art, do you? And I said, no. How would I?
You know? And, and they said, took me in hand to kind of and decided to educate me. Oh. And there was a show at the Queen's Museum at the time of George Longfish and I went out to see that, which I might not have done otherwise. And
Hrag Vartanian: So that's an interesting connection. I didn't know about that early connection.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Learning about Native American. Harmony was living down here teaching at UNM briefly. Anyway, she knew Jaune Quick to see Smith who was down here. And they did a show called Women of Cedar and Sage about native women, and Harmony probably said let's get Lucy to do a text.
And so I came down, and I I spent time with Jean and Ramona Secestoa, who's good artists here. And she was a weaver at that point and, and Hopi. And that that between that and Peter and Jolene, I I started getting really interested in native stuff. And then in Boulder, I went on trips to the Four Corners and stuff with photographers, people I knew, and camping trips and seeing a lot of rock art. And I fell for rock art.
When I got down here, I got to know Polly Shasman, who's the the Duane of all rock southwestern rock art. And and we hiked and saw stuff and so on, and she's still a close friend. I mean, the the west interested me. My grandmother told me stories about the west because she was raised in Dakota Territory, Wyoming, and Colorado. My grandkids started calling me my oldest grandson started calling me cowboy grandma because I lived in the west.
And, and then when he was a little older, he said, you know, why aren't you cowgirl grandma? And I said, well, I I am. You know, like, exhibit. And so the whole Pueblo culture is not something I'd ever known anything about until we I mean, when Charles and I came down because he wanted to go to Shalico at Zuni, and that that was my first we went to dances at other Pueblos, and I was like, woah. This is so interesting.
So that that was another opening up. I mean, I was always I never ever I don't do so well doing the same thing over and over again, So I'm always kinda when something else comes along, I'm excited. Absolutely.
Hrag Vartanian: So so, one of the one of her also her intellectual interest seems to be indigenous work and particularly, her book around Chaco Canyon and a lot of that. How do you think that fits into the larger?
Catherine Morris: I mean, I think it really fits into Lucy's profound sense of thinking about issues of equity in a political sense. I think that as we just were talking about the community of artists that were part of the downtown scene when in the sixties seventies when she was really involved in conceptualism was white, middle class, driven by male thoughts and directives largely. But there's a lot of other communities as we know doing other really important work blocks away from from where that was happening. And somehow those stories haven't been told. And I think one of the things that really Lucy took on personally, particularly when she was on the mother board of the Heresies Collective, was thinking through her own positionality and the voices of the BIPOC and non white people who were excluded and that she was a part of that story to some degree and how could she, you know, respond to that in a way that was productive.
And I think that aligned with her also burgeoning interest in thinking about the land and thinking about the environment and thinking about climate. And I think that those things come together very, easily for her in that intellectual way, conceptual way.
Hrag Vartanian: So now in terms of, the, you know, kind of your imagination, where does it live today?
Lucy Lippard: Do I have one? Where where would it live? Where does yours live?
Hrag Vartanian: Mine lives often in art. That's why I write about art. That's what they say.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. I don't I don't think mine is in art particularly. More in the world the outside outdoors, and that's kind of where I mean, New Mexico is it it it sparks imagination all over the place, I guess.
Hrag Vartanian: So so the way you talk about are the about your writing and sort of like where your imagination lives sounds very much like your writing in general. Where it's sort of like there are these journeys you take.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's I mean, I often say this is why I don't do, well, interviews, but, I often say that I I don't think until I have a keyboard in front of me. I mean, instead of this this thing now, these damn things. You're pointing at your laptop.
Yeah. And people say if you're writing I mean since I never taught, I never learned how to write in the air. I have friends who teach, are incredibly articulate and when I'm on panels and stuff I think oh wow. Wish I if I had a keyboard I could have said that. How is it different writing online?
Because all of your work is online basically.
Hrag Vartanian: You know, it's my passion. I find it's, I think because with talking about image and text, you don't have any real, you know, barriers to include a video clip. Include as many photos or apps as you want, which I find were very freeing.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: But I also love hyperlinks. I love the links to other things. I think that's such an important part of the writing that I feel like I miss when I write in print.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: Do you know? Because I feel like it allows me to talk talk about something without having to necessarily always going into the history, let's say, because I can put a link if you wanna learn more. Sure. It allows me to get to the point, but I just love that poet, the citational poetry of it. Do you know?
Lucy Lippard: That's wonderful. Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: Do you know? I love that part.
Lucy Lippard: I never have written for online, and it's for as far as I'm concerned, it's like it's not really I mean, I I read your writing and and and everybody's, and it's fine online. But for myself, I don't wanna write online. I do. Absolutely.
Hrag Vartanian: Well, it's like the decision not to have a television.
Lucy Lippard: Well, it's bad enough with this thing. Yeah. I mean, I I don't surf at all, but I but I do find myself drifting into Absolutely. For a few minutes of a an animal thing or something. You know?
Hrag Vartanian: Few minutes. Let's say in that couple of hours.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Well, I do I do I don't do that. But I but I do look up some of these, you know, they found this animal in the bushes, and I think, oh, I'm gonna read that anyway.
Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely. No. I I mean, I could totally relate. So from your perch here in Galisteo, how has the world changed for you?
Lucy Lippard: Galisteo, in a funny way, I I think I well, I think I broadened my view by being here. At the same time, I narrowed it down to a tiny community, which is contradictory. But
Hrag Vartanian: But also sounds right.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Because I mean, I I I always tried to work with communities and stuff and I there was never really a community organizer on any level. But Yeah. But I like the idea of being in a community. And I I was 55.
I thought I was old. Totally.
Hrag Vartanian: Well, I I'm thinking of, like, many artists, writers that never leave their towns. Right?
Lucy Lippard: Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: That see the world and can tell you about the world in so many ways.
Catherine Morris: Yeah. So you asked about, why Lucy moved to the southwest and kind of that was she taking herself away from from the world? What's fascinating to me is the number of women artists of that generation who moved out there. Right? You have Nancy Holt.
You have Harmony Hammond. You have Mae Stevens who was a very close friend. You have Judy Chicago. So I think that that Lucy saw herself as moving very much into a community, actually, of of people who had settled out there and were working in that context, which, you know, if you wanna throw Georgia O'Keefe into that mix too, I don't know that she'd wanna be there, but, you know, it's part of the story. So I think there's a way in which she did not see it as that far as out of the art world, not the art world that she was a part of and the people she was friends with.
Hrag Vartanian: So, I mean, Galisteo has this incredible reputation of this, like, little I don't know. This little, cluster of really smart, accomplished people.
Lucy Lippard: Well, it annoys me because it you know, there are some of us here. But basically, it's a village that's, you know, founded by Hispanos and and there are still they're they're in the minority now because the the village has been so gentrified. I mean, when when I moved here, one old lady, a local lady said to me, we like your house because it's so small. I mean, you know, because Right. It wasn't a mansion.
This side of the creek has never been the the the fancy part. And now it's Oh,
Hrag Vartanian: I see there's some fancier places.
Lucy Lippard: Well, now it's the most interesting. I mean, we we we've also got the fire department and the community center right here.
Hrag Vartanian: So so you do the community newsletter here at Galveston?
Lucy Lippard: I've done it for 25 years now, I think.
Hrag Vartanian: So what's that been like?
Lucy Lippard: It's been wonderful. When I first was here, I was helping build part of the fire station. And, somebody said, oh, you're a writer. And I said, yeah. And and and they said, well, we have something called Fireflyer, which was one sheet, which came out I never saw any more than one, I don't think.
But and they said, will you write something about what fun it is to help build the fire department? So I said, I did. And, and then somebody said something about it. There was a guy in the fire department, lovely gay guy who was much too much of an activist already, and he so he wanted to do a newsletter. So, and I said, well, I I I would love to work on it or whatever, and I've done a lot of editing and things.
And then he he called me during the summer, and he said, my partner's leaving me because I'm too involved with too many things. And so you can do the newsletter. And and so I I took it to the community association, and and one woman said, one of the local women who was the Patron family, which is the rich family in town, and she said, we don't need no local history. She said, all the old people are at each other's throats about things that happened a 100 years ago. And, and I thought that was pretty silly, but it was perfectly true.
Right. But, anyway, but everybody else was pretty enthused about doing it. And so they said gave me the okay, and we and, so I've done it ever since. And it's, you know, it's a it I love doing it. It's called El Puente de Gallisteo, and and,
Hrag Vartanian: And it's printed?
Lucy Lippard: Oh, yeah. It's printed. I I people every now and then, somebody says, oh, just you know, it's it's a hassle because I have to every month, it's about a 100 sit down and stamp and sticker and label and so forth. But I can listen to the news and do that. And Jim helps me sometimes.
I mean
Hrag Vartanian: Totally. Also, I mean, speaking of your experience in terms of, like, books like 6 years, this idea of, like, creating this anthology or compilation of disparate events is kinda what a newsletter is. No?
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. Yeah. My friends from out out of Galiste are always wanting to subscribe and they don't get to. I mean, I said, no, this is for Galiste and some Totally. We pay for it and it's like, my son gets it and I don't think he pays much attention to it.
But it's the only one I I send it to.
Hrag Vartanian: But I see a I see a commonality. You were kind of doing something similar for the conceptual art movement. Yeah. Now you're doing it for your town and your village in a way. You're sort of, like, helping write this history.
Lucy Lippard: And I did, I did this this thing. So
Hrag Vartanian: Yeah. So the the book you just handed me is called Village of Galisteo Historical Time Line 18 14 to 2014.
Lucy Lippard: Yep. Yep. And it's just a little booklet. We've published 2 or 3 books, little books like that. It at Puente Press.
This one I think I paid for, but, but it's I love doing it. It keeps me in touch with
Hrag Vartanian: everything and But, I mean, to speak of your writing in general, you're one of the first art writers to really bring the eye in.
Lucy Lippard: I I couldn't help it.
Hrag Vartanian: Yeah. But I mean, but I think that is more revolutionary than I think people realize.
Lucy Lippard: But see, in my day, there was you didn't learn how to do art writing. I mean, there there's no courses in curating or art writing or anything. You just did it. And most of the people when I gave this talk at at, The New School in, several years ago, I said to at the beginning, okay. Yeah.
How many people are in the audience are art writers? And a lot of people raised their hands. And then I said, and how many of you thought that was what you were gonna do for your living? And Almost not. Nobody raised their hand.
Because in those days, you know, everybody wanted to be a poet or and I wanted to write fiction and
Hrag Vartanian: And so many early art writers were poet.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. And they were.
Catherine Morris: You know, the other part of of Lucy's story is she has spent a lot of time in Maine and still does every summer. And so I think that for her, the kind of sweep of the United States is just part of the the playing field that she's interested in, particularly as she's gotten in the last decades really involved in ideas of land art and that I've also believed grows out of her feminism. Really?
Hrag Vartanian: So how would you connect those those things?
Catherine Morris: Well, I think the book overlay does a lot of that work. Right? The, idea of the way that women in particular approached land art, Anna Menjie primary among them, I think really drove an interest and expanded an instinct with Lucy's critical thinking about an examination of the land and what the land holds.
Hrag Vartanian: So now I'd love to ask you a little bit about land art because I think being in New Mexico, you can't at least I can't help but think about it a little bit because the landscape plays such a big role.
Lucy Lippard: Well, that's I wrote something for one of the land art catalogs or something saying where I said I asked myself what kind of land art I would like to see here. None. I didn't I don't I the land is interests me far more than whereas land art interests me a lot. I I always call it an urban interest, an urban art really, colonizing
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: Ruralism or whatever.
Hrag Vartanian: So so how do you how do you resolve that between that?
Lucy Lippard: Well, I I haven't, you know, I I like art about land, but I don't like art that fucks around with the land. Right. Originally, earthworks were fascinating because they were so different and they did get you out of the city. It wasn't escape from the art gallery world and so on. I mean, I love Spiral Jetty.
I love Nancy Holt's sun tunnels and and Charles Ross' Staraxis, which isn't done yet, but but I can't stand what Heizer does. I mean, if you walk around the land here, even a coyote trail or just a little walking path can become a gully so easily. And he's made this huge gully. I mean, you know, like, the landscape doesn't need more gullies. I mean, it was just just annoying.
So I got more interested in land use than land than land art. Earthworks, have have had their day, I think. I mean, when all of us urban folks go west, we get excited.
Hrag Vartanian: Smitten by the landscape.
Lucy Lippard: Yes. I mean, you know, I did a BBC interview at one point and they were interviewing all artists all over New Mexico and and everybody was talking about the light and the and the this and the that. And I said, yeah. But it's one of the poorest states in the union. Land is about people.
I this cultural landscape are what really interests me. I mean, I I like wilderness as well as the next person, what's left of it. But, but it the cultural landscape is far more interesting to me. And that's partly looking at there are 8 Pueblo ruins in this in in the Galaseo Basin. Mhmm.
And that fascinates me. I mean, you know, and you you can't walk. I mean, see all this stuff under here, like
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: In that. That's all stuff I found on my land and and they're
Hrag Vartanian: So it's this old
Lucy Lippard: Oh, wow. Arrowheads and
Hrag Vartanian: Arrowheads and
Lucy Lippard: other things.
Hrag Vartanian: Sort of
Lucy Lippard: spearhead things and so forth. So Oh, wow. And that just all came up from by my pump house. Wow. So anyway and I've always loved rocks for some reason.
I the house is full of rocks. And, and at that, I liked rocks most of my life somehow. And and
Hrag Vartanian: I'm almost sensing a theme of time in your interest.
Lucy Lippard: Time? Yeah. Yeah. I call I called the Chaco book time and time again. I was I love that title.
I was so glad he went with it. Oh, you know?
Hrag Vartanian: Do you do you have a spiritual practice?
Lucy Lippard: No. None. No? I'm an atheist and and, that's I mean, I I suspect there's something out there. I mean, I I don't I'm not totally stupid, but
Hrag Vartanian: I could Sure.
Lucy Lippard: Sure. Sure. It, I'm it doesn't it interested me for a while and doesn't really anymore. Now my parents were liberals and agnostics, and I had to go them one better, so I became socialist and atheist.
Hrag Vartanian: Why not? Yeah. Really. You know, why not? How do you maintain hope?
And how do you continue to be true to your ideals when, you know, clearly a lot of people don't have the same commitment you do?
Lucy Lippard: Oh, I don't know if it's commitment or habit. Like, I don't Well, could be both.
Hrag Vartanian: Could be both.
Lucy Lippard: I don't maintain hope. I mean, I I think this is a pretty incredibly hopeless moment. So I'm not particularly hopeful, but I'm I'm in I've never been depressed. I mean, I'm not I don't have a depressive personality or whatever. So just Are you an optimist?
I think I have been off and on, but I I don't know if I'm I remember somebody said, pessimism is a waste of time, and I I like that. But so I'm not really a pessimist, but I can't say I'm an optimist either. And I don't go around being hopeless, but privately, I don't have a whole lot of optimism about anything that's going down now. But but we always I mean, people are, you know, capable of changing things, and hopefully, we will before it's too damn late.
Hrag Vartanian: You're you're so refreshingly realistic.
Lucy Lippard: I guess so. Yeah. But I'm, you know, but I'm I'm privileged. I mean, I I make a living, and I have a nice place to live in and Sure. And, so forth.
So it's it's I I think if I were one of these poor souls who'd just been burned out by these fires
Hrag Vartanian: Right.
Lucy Lippard: I would be pretty hopeless. They don't have insurance. Nobody will insure those little villages anyway because they are
Hrag Vartanian: You're talking about recent fires around
Lucy Lippard: the river. The fire fires are huge. We still still still going. 300,000 acres. Oh, wow.
Hrag Vartanian: I didn't realize it was that long.
Lucy Lippard: Oh, yeah. It's like, 400 square miles or something. And this is becoming a chronic 600 square mile I can't remember the date.
Hrag Vartanian: It's becoming a perennial issue. Do you think part of your interest in Chaco Canyon is the environmental part of it? Because people talk about the environmental
Lucy Lippard: Well, Chaco is sort of anti environmental. It's one of the interesting things about it. They they they they went miles away for building materials and stuff and they but they chose this place for some spiritual reason and and that's really a mystery. I mean, and the Pueblo people talk about it in a different way than we look at it. And and, the the Pueblo people don't believe in ruins, and they don't like rock art to be rock art because it's not art.
Hrag Vartanian: It's living.
Lucy Lippard: It's it's life. Yeah. And I still use the word rock art because it's beautiful. But but the the fact that nothing is a ruin because the spirits are still there and it's alive. Right.
It isn't dead. Right. And that's kind of fascinating. I mean, but I don't necessarily believe I mean, I'm not a Pueblo person. So No.
I understand. Yeah.
Hrag Vartanian: No. But I just wonder if, like, Chaco Canyon and part of your interest is also in some ways it's our, it might be our future in a way. Like, you know, it, you know, the, and it's not the only Pueblo civilization that, you know, changed according to the environmental reality.
Lucy Lippard: Yeah. But it is really it's it's it's unique. It's it's a very peculiar place.
Hrag Vartanian: So what do you feel like, you one thing you've taken away from Lucy's work that you feel like stays with you in terms of your own curatorial practice when you put maybe the experience putting together the exhibition? Is there something or maybe a a work of hers that is the one that stays with you the most?
Catherine Morris: Well, the work that, of course, will always stay with me is 6 6 years. One of the takeaways that I think I've gotten from Lucy is her pragmatism. I think that she is a person who thinks deeply and thinks critically, but also doesn't lose track of the kind of human aspect of all of this stuff that we're all doing. And I think that's very important. And I think that doesn't, stop her from using her voice in the way that she thinks is most important and has the most value as a social idea.
But at the same time, when you meet her, she takes what she does very seriously, but she does not take herself that seriously. And that's always a refreshing thing.
Hrag Vartanian: What have you seen, younger emerging feminists sort of look at her work and sort of admire the most?
Catherine Morris: I think that what people admire most about Lucy is, as I've said, is that she has really stuck to her beliefs and to her values. And she keeps writing. I guess I am glad to hear you ask the question because I want people to be thinking about Lucy, and I hope they are. That would be a great takeaway from this conversation, for example. You know, I do think that that generational knowledge of people who've come before them ebbs and flows depending on what conversations are being had.
So I think it's time for a new edited book of Lucy's essays.
Hrag Vartanian: What a great idea.
Susan Bee: I just, I wanna just say that I totally admire her, and I think it's very unusual for an art critic to be so generous and so supportive of artists. You know, a lot of art critics at that time, and even now, would stand back from being involved with artists. And she really threw herself into the politics of the time, which were, you know, very intense. It would you know, if you wanted to get involved with something, it wasn't like a small matter to have a meeting with, you know, the Art Workers Coalition. You know, these kind of fierce guys and overalls.
And she just would go in and I I'd have to say she was unintimidated by what was, you know, a rather, controversial time period. That's what I really admire about her is that she was willing to stand up and say what she thought and to really put forward the people she wanted to put forward. She didn't go for that kind of mainstream approach. I think in the end, that's what makes her work stand out from that time period.
Hrag Vartanian: Is there anything you wanna end with, Lucy? No. Well, I just wanna say thank you because it was a real
Lucy Lippard: Well, I'm sorry that I didn't I didn't know you were gonna be such a good interviewer. An hour is all I can do.
Hrag Vartanian: Well, I I mean, I I was honored with even just an hour. Mhmm. But it's just more to sort of understand, a little bit about where your writing comes from Yeah. Because it's I think, the writing still resonates with so many of us.
Lucy Lippard: Well, that's nice.
Hrag Vartanian: And I think that's really nice.
Lucy Lippard: That's good. That made my day. Oh my god.
Hrag Vartanian: Well, thank you.
Lucy Lippard: Thank you.
Hrag Vartanian: Thank you so much for listening. This podcast is edited by a producer, Isabella Segalovich, and a quick word from our sponsor, Hyperallergic Members. Hyperallergic is an independent art publication based here in New York and we pride ourselves in telling it like it is. We're not supported by billionaires. We are not some pet project of a bunch of people who think that they can game the art world.
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