In and Out of Feminism: The Experimental Writings of Lee Lozano and Lucy Lippard

Abstract

My dissertation, “In and Out of Feminism: The Experimental Writings of Lee Lozano and Lucy Lippard,” examines the experimental writings of artist Lee Lozano (American, 1930-1999) and writer, art critic, curator and activist Lucy R. Lippard (American, 1937-). Guided by the layered connectedness of their writing of the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that these women’s words created and occupied a malleable interstice within their practices and conventional art discourses – an alternative space in which their work was at once autobiography, theory, fiction, criticism, conceptual art, and life/work. The dialogue I establish between Lozano’s Private Books (1968-1972) and many conceptual Pieces, and Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean (1979) and numerous other unpublished works of fiction, supports an analysis of the feminist labour that constitutes, drives, and sometimes complicates these marginal forms and early examples of autotheory, a self-aware feminist writing strategy for thinking and feeling from liminal spaces; a subjective way of working that is personal, conceptual, theoretical, critical. (Lauren Fournier, 2021) Articulated around close reading and recent archival finds, this research refocuses and revalues anecdotes, gossip, citations, and footnotes, both as legitimate historical evidence and theoretical framework. Haunting conventional and acceptable forms of feminisms, it mobilizes contemporary queer feminist methodologies and theories, namely shadow feminism (Judith Halberstam, 2011) and the figures of the wilful subject and feminist killjoy (Sara Ahmed, 2010, 2014, 2017, 2023) to push against normative relationalities established between Lozano and Lippard and to question the histories, knowledge and ways of knowing that have cast Lippard as feminism, and Lozano as the (constitutive) ‘outside’ of/to feminism. Destabilizing and introducing friction against accepted narratives of second-wave feminism in the arts, this research simultaneously expands understandings of Lippard and Lozano's respective experiments in writing and contributes to the history of feminist praxis and genealogies of feminist writing, critical, and performative methodologies as they emerged within and against conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s.