Lucy Lippard

Margaret Harrison in conversation with Lucy Lippard

from Audio Arts Volume 4, Number 1, 1978

Transcript

Margaret Harrison in conversation with Lucy Lippard. From an immense basis of practical experience, American writer on contemporary art, Lucy Lippard, and British artist Margaret Harrison compare, analyse and discuss what it means to be an artist and woman within British and American Society today. An informative background is also given of women artist groups, in both countries.

Margaret Harrison: Is the separatist aspect of feminist art practice still continuing as a very strong thing or do you think it’s a little merged at some point?

Lucy Lippard: It’s merging; I know the separatist thing has not been strong over here and has been unpopular in Europe generally, mainly because of the more general Marxist politics. In New York, even the most politically involved people are not all Marxists. I suppose, a lot of feminists, having been treated like dogs, arose from the far left. I think a certain period of separatism was bound to come out of the way women had been treated within the left organisations.

MH: Is the Women’s School in Los Angeles still continuing?

LL: Yeah, that’s the second building they’ve completely remodelled. It’s an extraordinary place.

MH: What is it now?

LL: I’m not sure whether it’s just a women’s building in the sense that they’re mostly involved in feminist practice. Men come to a lot of the functions there although some of them are women only. That’s been the stronghold of separatism, so called, and Judy Chicago, who was one of the founders of that whole idea really, has pulled outThe separatist idea came from the West Coast and New York was very anti-separatist to begin with, and I was one of the few proponents of it in New York. There was tremendous resistance against it; I resisted it too at first. It’s lost ground to some extent, on the basis of getting into the art world, which is not a politically oriented thing it’s economic, to put it politely.

MH: As a result of this whole activity has the proportion of women increased?

LL: Yes incredibly. A thousand percent or something, which isn’t much considering a thousand percent is starting from one. There has been a gigantic improvement, whether that improvement is actually for the better or whether it just means that women are being reabsorbed into what the art world is about in the first place, it’s very queasy. I think it’s a real sort of dangerous point. ‘Heresies’ is all women and we only publish work by women, whereas some other magazines publish work by men. There’s a magazine called ‘Womenart’ which has men writing for it. I still feel that for the generation that’s just starting to get into feminism, whatever age, it’s still very important, as things haven’t changed much in society itself, for women to get together and to have that kind of conference that you get from other women and not be immediately stood on in mixed groups, and that still happens. I was amazed; well I guess this was about almost two years ago now the Artists’ Coalition Group stopped in 1971 and there was a gap, there wasn’t anything in ’72 or whenever it was, there wasn’t anything going as a mixed political art group and all of us women who had been in the Coalition and many more besides had been totally involved in feminism. The Artist and Writers’ protest continued as a mixed group, but that just sort of comes to the fore when something ghastly happens in the world and we leap up and do a benefit or something, but there’s a constantly meeting group; there were also smaller Marxist study groups. Finally anyway it started again, partly over the Rockefeller bullshit at the Whitney Museum in 1975, as a brace-up for the bi-centennial, which was a great sign for all the worst elements of American patriotism to rise to the fore again. Anyway the organisation started again, a group of the same people, called ‘Artists Meeting for Cultural Change’ and this was the first time that I had been involved in a mixed political group for four or five years. For a year there was a great interest in the art world, all of a sudden it was coming on again and the younger artists were far more politically savvy than they had been when we started the coalition; just in theory, in Marxist theory and so on; it used to be that Carl Andre was the only person who could quote Marx, now everybody could. From a feminist point of view, it was really ‘here we go again’ we all looked forward to it. (Carol Scheemann?) did a paper on ‘The Tyranny of Pronouns’, I mean the same old business of ‘do you always have to use a male pronoun?’ which is an extremely minor point but a very basic one. Could we get this large group of passionately political types to ever use the female pronoun – hell no! It just went on and on and on and finally some of us are jumping up every time somebody used the only male pronoun and then you got ‘you rotten feminists you’re always trying to drag us into these minor things’. We had some people who did some feminist papers and women were commenting on them for the first hour, men weren’t allowed to comment for the first hour; when the men came in they had nothing to say, they just couldn’t have been less interested. We realised that there was still an incredible amount of work to be done if this was indeed the socially conscious area of the art world. ‘Art and Language’ which was a large faction in this group, published another one of their magazines and did the same thing with the pronouns right on through. The artist ‘he’ the critic ‘he’ right on through. They drove me right the hell back to separatism. I thought ‘right, they’re not ready yet’. I’m not going to waste my time trying to reform the men, I’d rather spend my time being supported by and supporting other women.

MH: This latest conference on the State of British Art, a few weeks back, really brought it home to us that we were completely invisible. Two women did speak within that conference, Lisa Tickner and Mary Kelly, and I think Lisa actually mentioned women artists. I think a few of us have now realised that we’ve got to re-group. I think ‘Heresies’ is seen as a very important step.

LL: When we first started I was very excited about it but I didn’t realise how much of a gap there was; the gap between socialism and feminism. In America it was completely unfilled in art and politics. It wasn’t until we actually got going and realised the response that we were getting. We were trying to raise money from people and get their two dollars, we’d say ‘this is going to fill a gap’ but the gap is still terrifying, and the great danger in America, because so many women are being shown now in galleries, is that people will feel that we can rest on our laurels and we must have succeeded. It’s not success at all, it’s the tiniest total, which can be lost in a second and that’s what I realised when we went to this artists’ meeting for cultural change.

MH: Well you know that in a sense you can never win. That you have to keep going all the time and the same thing happens with legislation, that even when we get legislation like equal pay and the sex discrimination act, that one realises that they’re never going to hand it over to you. For instance, when women were given equal pay, we looked at the factory situation and we realised that the companies was then working like mad to reverse the situation. They found a way of using another pool of cheap labour, or they could move the whole factory onto shifts.

LL: Those active in the separatists level have also been active in other areas.

MH: And that has detracted from our separatist activities.

LL: I don’t understand, all the terrific women I’ve met here seem to be so clear about what they’re up to. Why doesn’t it work?

MH: I don’t think there have been enough of us. There hasn’t been ...

LL: They’re never enough, there’s no question about that.

MH: Just the of pressure of surviving and I think that after that period of abdicating art practice then we had to use other tactic for establishing ourselves as artists. If you didn’t get a layer of women demonstrating their art practice within a public gallery then there was nothing to build on. I found it incredibly difficult to actually produce the work I do, earn a living and looking after kids as well.

LL: Don’t we all, yeah.

MH: I thought that the Women’s Free Arts Alliance, once the whole thing had got established, would be able to build up a healthy situation. Why that hasn’t happened, I can’t really understand.

LL: I wonder if to some extent it has to do with the geography of London; the community is so broken up, so spread around. I mean there’s no place in London that I can imagine going on a Saturday and meeting fifty people who one has something in common with. That’s one thing New York still has going for it.

MH: I think that we may be into a second or a third phase where people will have to try and pull together.

LL: It’s interesting because the feminist movement here has already been through one of the phases that we’ve been through, because we are now just getting it together from separatism to deal more with sort of so-called politics, whereas here, you started out like that.

MH: How did the women artists relate to the women’s movement in general in the States?

LL: The red stockings, who were the earliest sort of women’s group, several of them were artists, which is very interesting considering the art world itself is usually very backward politically.

MH: I think that’s the essential difference really, that visual arts, within the feminist movement, seems unimportant to the rest of the feminist movement.

LL: It’s the same in the States too.

MH: When we first formed that first London Women’s Arts Group, I think I was the only one on the art side.

LL: You see that’s the compelling aspect that did happen to some of the women artists who were originally in the women’s movement. The New York art world is large enough and solvent enough and compelling enough and competitive enough and people don’t wander out of it.

MH: Well there was nothing to belong to.

LL: Yeah, but it’s definitely a very incestuous little world, something that you can’t get out of. I wanted to get back to this business of the backwards and forwards. I mean I didn’t know who was backwards and who was forwards, but the fact that there’s never been a woman’s show at an institution or a large women’s show at all in London; ‘The Hayward’ has been picked by five women, but it’s a mixed show.

MH: I believe that for a time you didn’t actually participate fully in feminist art activities.

LL: No at first I didn’t at all and then I did fully, never any halfway business.

MH: But what brought you into that situation?

LL: Well I was politically involved in the Artworks Coalition and the anti-war movement and all that was going on in ’67, ’68, ’69; and in ’69 within the Artworks Coalition, which was a dissident artists’ group involved in protesting about the museums lack of political responsibility, artists’ lack of political responsibility and setting up community things. It was a huge venture and a very very mixed group. A group of women started something called ‘Women Artists in Revolution – War’ and I remember being really rather embarrassed by it when we put in our list of demands to some museum; we covered every little picture, but we hadn’t covered the feminist one because it was really just creeping into the art world. Juliet Gordon, Nancy Spero and Dolores Holmes came up with ‘Women Artists in Revolution’, and I remember feeling, ‘well I’ve got to support it but how embarrassing’ I didn’t come to the meetings or anything I simply said ‘yes’ this should be in the list of demands. They said, ‘well how come you weren’t involved because you should be a feminist, I mean look at you’. I said ‘I made it as a person and not as a woman’. I’d worked so that I wouldn’t have to be identified with women; I mean my consciousness was simply not on the level that there’s was. So I was sort of half as sympathetic but I didn’t join them at all.

MH: So what precipitated you to ...

LL: Then I went to Spain, of all places, to live for three and a half months to do my own writing. Completely alone and completely out of the art world and when I started doing that I had a revelation about my whole position as a woman. I mean it was only when I could get what my own experiences had been through this filter that was making art or whatever and I became a raving feminist all by myself (difficult to understand) by the time I got back. I just fell right into the movement. But work had already been going for six or eight months and they had done a small woman show, which was the first woman show that was done in New York called ‘X x 12’ or something.

MH: So really it was part of a whole kind of political consciousness?

LL: Oh, very much so, hell, I mean I don’t think I would have been able to recognise the sort of earmarks of oppression in quite the same way if I hadn’t.

MH: I think it arose very similarly in this country, which was the Artists’ Union and out of that grew the biggest grouping. I think that there was a real dilemma for women artists that, although there was a need for a separate debate within that organisation, it was also absolutely crucial that the women were active within it. They serviced everything, they kept the women’s thing going into every single workshop and that’s why, although the workshop grew to about seventy people, the energy was dissipated, through having to keep the consciousness of women’s demands throughout the whole structure.

LL: Well that’s interesting because what happened with the coalition is that in the fall of that year a group of us got together and made a second women’s organisation. Then the coalition really sort of fell apart, and that was that.

MH: I mean why do you think that was? I gather that the Women’s’ Art Movement seems to be the most outstanding thing that happened in the last few years in the States. That’s the thing that comes across from this side of the Atlantic.

LL: Yeah, well in a funny way there seems to be a stronger political art movement here, than there ever has been in the States. We’ve never had a show like the Serpentine ‘Art for Whom’, we’ve never had a show like the Whitechapel Show. Since there wasn’t a strong movement like that, the Women’s Movement was just completely separate; there were artists who were working politically, always through the coalition, but it never became a real movement. I’m sort of glad it didn’t in a way although I would like to have seen it have more strength. One of the dangers of feminist art is that it can be called a movement, because movement is something you can get rid of fairly soon, because of the bandwagon aspect of the New York art world, which is different from London. One reason there’s never been that kind of movement is that there isn’t a market for it and New York is much more dependent on the market aspect. The feminists were free of that because we weren’t in the art world. I was in the art world in the sense of writing, but the women at that point weren’t being shown and it wasn’t a matter of rejecting galleries, which the men found very difficult to do and didn’t do.