“When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how
art and politics could dovetail.”
Lucy R. Lippard may claim that being a library page at the
MoMA is the only real job she’s ever had, but as a freelance writer, art
critic, and curator, she has worked undeniably hard. It’s evident from her list
of accomplishments, and in her comment that editing other people’s texts
resembles being on vacation compared to writing herself. For anyone who thinks curators
sit back and let other people do the heavy lifting, get this: for her so-called
Numbers exhibitions—the subject of a new book—she did favours like source out
and shoot 400 photographs of purposefully mundane Seattle horizons for artist
Robert Smithson who couldn’t be there to do it himself. Curiously, each Numbers
show was named for the host city’s population and Canada was lucky to have one.
First came 557,087 (Seattle), then 955,000 (Vancouver), then an overlooked 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires), followed by a touring c.
7,500 (Valencia, California). The fact that
the third show was so overlooked (Pip Day highlights the absence of press
coverage and the shortage of archival material) demonstrates the importance of
publishing books on the history of exhibitions.
From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers
Shows 1969-74 (Afterall Books, 2012) is the
third title in the Exhibition Histories series published in association with
the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard
College; and Van Abbemuseum. It looks not so much at her shift in focus from
conceptualism to feminism as the blending of the two: her final Numbers show
was still heavy on idea-based art but it included only women artists, some of
whom made work with a feminist bent and others who didn’t.
Lippard’s activist impulse was rooted in time she spent in
Argentina in 1968 before the Buenos Aires show to jury an art award. It’s hard
to imagine being exposed to the type of art being produced there without being
affected. For example, Tito Fernández confiscated gallery visitors’ belongings
and banned conversation inside the venue to comment on the police state.
Characterizing the ‘dematerialization’ of art was Graciela Carnevale’s Acción
del encierro (Confinement Action), for which she invited people to a gallery and
without forewarning them, locked them inside until someone on the street broke
a window an hour later and they escaped. The artists worked in solidarity, at
one point burning their works collectively to protest police censorship of a
single artist’s (Roberto Plate’s) work and reading a manifesto-like statement
at a conference after cutting the electricity. When Lippard returned to
America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.
I almost didn’t review this book because Conceptual Art
really isn’t my bag (so many ropes, so many mirrors!). Much of Conceptual Art
is text-based (Nancy Wilson Kitchel said it best: “My work would be different
if you couldn’t read”) and I find myself agreeing to a point with Peter Plagens’
scathing Artforum review of Conceptual
Art’s writing quality. Ultimately, though, I was won over by coverage of the
many thought-provoking pieces, like John Latham’s Still and Chew (1966/67). A part-time art instructor at St.
Martin’s School of Art in London, Latham was frustrated by the scholarly
high-fiving of critic Clement Greenberg, so he checked out the school library
copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture
and proceeded to make a unique protest. He invited students, critics, and
artists to chew a page from the book and spit it out in a flask. It was
chemically treated, and when Latham received an urgent overdue book notice, he
had the audacity to present the then liquid solution to the librarian,
poker-faced. The next day he was fired.
From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers
Shows 1969-74 includes a main essay by Cornelia Butler, interviews with
Lippard and several exhibiting artists, and reproductions of selected index
cards that were used in place of traditional catalogues for the exhibitions.
