Lucy Lippard
"Three Ways to Enter a City"
Wednesday, March 09, 2005, 11:30 AM
LUCY LIPPARD is one of the country's leading feminists, a celebrated art
critic, author, and theorist. She has published twenty books, including The
Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society. Lippard has
been a columnist for the Village Voice, In These Times and Z Magazine.Cofounder of Printed Matter, the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artist’s organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerilla theater, and edited several independent publications, the latest of which is the decidedly local, La Puente de Galisteo, in her home community in New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.
Her latest book, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art and Place, is an extended chapter of her previous book Lure of the Local, which examines the relationship of culture to place. "It's more about staying home than traveling," Lippard says. "It looks at how much people move around trying to find their place."
Lippard was born in New York City and lived in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Va., before enrolling in Abbot Academy in 1952. She says she knew well before she arrived that she wanted to be a writer. After earning a B.A. degree from Smith College, she worked with the American Friends Service Committee in a Mexican village - a first and crucial experience of the Third World. Later, she earned an M.A. degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Part of every summer of her life has been spent in Georgetown, Maine. "I would venture to say that places have profoundly influenced my life, probably more than people have," she says.
In 1968, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics, and place, and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. "The art world never turned me on much," she says, "but I liked writing about art because of the challenge; it's almost impossible to put the visual into words."
An early organizer and cofounder of several feminist art organizations, Lippard says she is 100 percent feminist. "For 10 years or so I thought and wrote primarily about women in art, women in politics and in society. It certainly changed me for the better."
She is currently writing a book about community, water, and the future of the region she now calls home – the Galisteo Basin, southeast of Santa Fe – after a lifetime spent mainly in New York.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Ms. Lippard focused on gravel pits and public art, and concluded with a “Homily on the City.” These themes gave structure to a kaleidoscopic meditation on the connections between environment, the “Arts,” and civic life.
Gravel Pits
All cities begin with gravel pits. The bigger the city, the deeper the pit (or the greater number of pits). Cities are built on gravel pits, whether literally, as in a river city, or figuratively for a city that has to haul its gravel and other resources from great distances. Lippard used this theme as a metaphor for the city’s relationship to the land: construction through destruction.
Public Art
Here Lippard described a performance art piece, in which performers stomped around New York City Hall in huge yellow platform shoes, which left large yellow chalk marks, dumbfounding the casual passerby viewer. The result after much stomping: a five acre yellow blotch on Manhattan demarking what used to be Culluct Pond, drained and filled in 1803, after it became polluted by the adjacent tanning industry. This public art performance started a conversation about hidden legacies and public memory.
Lippard then took the audience through a dozen or more public art performances that made citizens part of the art and involved them in the conversation. One performance piece put actual frames around citizens and performers. Others highlighted existing structures, processes, and even individual trees as part of the urban aesthetic. The message, which could be lost in the fractal flashes of slides and ideas (Lippard slows down for no one), was that art, environment, and civic life are part of a multi-dimensional whole, with clear boundaries in some places, connections in others, and various degrees of separation elsewhere.
Homily on the City
Ms. Lippard ended her talk by deconstructing current civic paradigms:
• The New Urbanism: she agrees with the
principles, but finds the execution contrived
and lifeless. Like Jane Jacobs, she values
spontaneity.;
• Arts: The art scene is often confused with the
art market.;
• Suburbs: They can take on their own identity if
people are allowed to create within them,
hitting a similar theme as Stewart Brand’s
discussion on Levittown;
• Quality of life: Lippard wryly observes that
quality of life is about creating more choices for people who already have choices.
Lucy Lippard is an actively curious woman. She explored many more hidden aspects of cities than can be described in a short summary. She is more interested asking questions and seeing where they lead, than providing “authoritative” answers. Like the art, architecture, and communities she has been a part of for nearly half a century, the verbal and visual canvass that she uncovered briefly is far too complex and multi-layered to understand in one evening. She left the audience with many questions to ponder about the co-evolution of art and place.
Introduction from Lure of the Local
"Place for me is the locus of desire. Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places faster and less conditionally than I do for people. I can drive through a landscape and vividly picture myself in that disintegrating mining cabin, that saltwater farm, that little porched house in the barrio. (My taste runs to humble dwellings nestled in cozy spaces or vulnerable in vast spaces.) I can walk through a neighborhood and picture interiors, unseen back yards. I can feel kinesthetically how it would be to hike for hours through a vast “empty” landscape that I’m dashing through in a car - the underfoot textures, the rising dust, the way muscles tighten on a hill, the rhythms of walking, the feeling of sun or mist on the back of my neck. In the late seventies, I lived on a idyllic farm in England for a year. While there, I wrote a weird short story about a woman who fell erotically in love withe the place and was literally absorbed by it. I missed Ashwell Farm terribly when I returned to New York, then I found I could continue to take my daily walks in a kind of out-of-body form - step by step, weather, textures, views, seasons, flowers, wildlife encounters."