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Growing up 

Lucy Lippard with David Coxhead

DC How have your attitudes to art and artists changed since you first came in contact with the art world?

LL When I first came to New York, I was starry-eyed about artists. It was the first time I'd seen intelligent people who weren't polished and pompous like in academia, people who talked about ideas and their work with that kind of intensity. What passed for freedom in those days (this was 1959-60) was a revelation. At first I was living with a Bowery panhandler, hanging out literally with bums, on the far fringes of the art world - we went to 10th Street openings, Cooper Union free lectures and the Amato Opera. But I was also working as a page in the library at the Museum of Modern Art, where Bob Ryman, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Flavin were guards, night watchmen etc. I couldn't get over the fact that the artists I met knew so much more about writing and music and everything, than the writers I met knew about art and writing. I was very impressed by artists' breadth of knowledge and the literateness and especially the articulateness. Plus of course the dedication to their own work, although nobody else was paying any attention to them then.

What about your attitudes to art in a more general sense?

Well, I thought that I'd Always be able to support all kinds of art, even though of course I didn't like everything I saw in any so-called movement. I grew up aesthetically with late Abstract Expressionism and the shoots it was putting out, some of which became Hard-Edge, Pop Art, and so-call Minimalism. When I first came to New York, Dore Ashton was a kind of role model for me. She was the most visible woman critic. I liked how she wrote and how she looked, and she was married to an artist. Then when Minimalism came along, she absolutely put it down from start to finish and I remember telling myself, I'm never going to get to the point where a whole movement is just anathema to me. At that point, you know you'd better quit. Then around 1970, when I'd only been writing five years or so, it hit - with 'lyrical abstraction', which wasn't a real movement, but the fact remains I never saw one woozy 'lyrical' painting I liked at all; and I thought oh my god, it's happening to me. It's already happening. 

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Lucy Lippard is a distinguished American art critic. Her books include Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object (Studio Vista, 1973), From the Center; feminist essays on women's art (Dutton, 1976) and Eva Hesse (New York University Press, 1976). Her most recent book is a novel, I see/you mean (Chrysalis Books, Los Angeles, 1979). She is also a member of the collective that publishes Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. She contributed the introduction to the catalogue of the 1978 Hayward Annual.

But I wasn't ready to give up yet, so I decided someone else can deal with that stuff. There's still a lot of other art I'm interested in.
Maybe that was the beginning of what I can only call my present jadedness. Something does happen to you when you do almost nothing but look at art for twenty years. You get less open in spite of yourself. Openness, pluralism, has always meant a great deal to me. I always prided myself that I was as open to one thing as the next. Feminist art, for instance, has had that effect on artists - a kind of tolerance for all kinds of experience brought into art, and to hell with stylistic restrictions and fashions imposed by the market.

Do you feel guilty for not being as open as you used to be?

I simply have to admit that now I not only know what I like, but what I don't like, and there's no use pretending to anyone, much less myself, that I'm interested in seeing everything that's done, because I'm not. Nor am I interested in everybody's career any more. At one point I was a great crusader for all the kind of third stream art that's been called Conceptual art. Then I insisted on women's art, helping to force it into the mainstream too. There were so few women artists visible in the early 70's that it wasn't difficult to go to virtually everybody's show or studio. Now, happily, it's different. No way any one person could cover it all. I find myself getting cranky when it's suggested that I have some sort of obligation to go to everyone's studio or show, even when I know I don't like their work and it has nothing to do with things I'm writing at the moment. At the same time, I do feel guilty for this crankiness because I'm well aware that everything I know about art I learned from artists. After all, what is a critic without art?

Your early contact with the art world came out of your relationships with friends and neighbours?

Yes, I was living with Bob Ryman and later married him. Sol LeWitt was around the corner. Bob and Sylvia Mangold lived in our building. Bob M. had taken my page job at the Modern when I left. Eva Hesse, Tom Doyle and Ray Donarski were living down the street. Jim Rosenquist was around a lot, and Alice Adams (then his sister-in-law) and Frank Lincoln Viner. It was a very mixed group stylistically.
Sol was also a literary influence for me. He used to get books out of the Donnel Library across the street from the Museum and read them all night at this desk. We'd share them, trade back and forth, talk about them - especially about the French New Wave stuff - Butor and Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet and Pinget. Sol also took women seriously all along. He's helped a lot of women artists to find themselves, by just naturally respecting them and treating them like equals - sadly, a rare thing among men in the art-world, even the 'good guys'.

How long were you writing art criticism before you started living with Robert Ryman?

Not at all. I didn't actually start writing - or rather, publishing - till late '64 and Bob and I were together in '60. When I first came to New York in September '58, I'd bombed right in to see Hilton Kramer, who was editor of Arts then. I wanted to be a reviewer and I did some samples for him. He was very kind about it. He wrote me a really nice letter about these truly awful reviews- I knew nothing, but I said things like so-and-so uses colour quite well, and was appallingly matronising about the art. Anyway, he said they were well written but I needed to live through a showing season to understand more about how it all worked, and come back in the spring and he could probably use me. But I felt so hideously rejected I never went back - which I think is a typically female and insecure response to such an experience.

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