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-ference between writing your own work and writing criticism is gigantic.  I don't see how anyone can pretend that they're the same thing.  It's much harder to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and do your own art.  I mean, even if I'm half-dead and depressed and not writing very well that day, I usually can come up with some damn criticism.  Because I  have the other person's work to lean on.

What I do like about writing criticism is the impossibility. That gap between writing and seeing, knowing you'll never really be able to capture the visual experience verbally.  I like that challenge.  I go into writing art ass backwards, anyway.  I majored in art history in college because I knew I was going to write and I didn't want anybody telling me about the things I cared most about, so I stayed out of the English department.  I thought I knew it all already.  Then when I got to NY, criticism seemed an honourable way out of the same bind.  I'd be writing, but not selling my precious soul.  Ha! I wonder now if I didn't, unconsciously, understand that to be a writer in the art world was to be different, and to have some automatic clout.  I certainly wasn't aware of this, but it was obviously easier to write criticism, to be the only writer among artists, than to go out and compete with the real writers.

What did you think real writing was, at that time?

I thought I was going to write novels.  I kept starting but not finishing them.

Like what?

Beckett, and Faulkner, and mainly Joyce. Not Stein or Woolf, oddly enough - or maybe not so oddly.  I don't remember courses on them being offered in college, and I had to find Beckett for myself, in Paris and not at Smith College.  D.H. Lawrence had always been a favourite too.  Then when I came to New York I got involved in the Beat Generation, Zen, Indian Philosophy, all that.  Then the nouvelle vague and new art - the real influences on the fiction.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, Lawrence and Beckett in different ways were very much male models, and there's always a problem for women writers, that if you attempt to speak 'for humanity' you're being inauthentic, whereas if you speak 'as a woman' you're being trivial.  I wonder if you had this particular conflict at the time, and if movements like Minimalism and early Conceptualism - whose works seems to me not to be obviously either male or female - allowed you to avoid or perhaps to solve this conflict?

That's an interesting idea.  It would have to be unconscious, though.  Because I was completely unaware of these problems.  I was trying to be superwoman for most of the 60's.  Dressing up and having a baby and giving big dinner parties to show I could be a writer and a woman too.  Then later, when I had started writing fiction seriously again, in the late 60's, it was very free-flowing, formless.  I don't have a structural or logical or analytical  mind.  Maybe one reason I could identify so much with Eva Hesse's work was that at first she had no armature, either.  She was good at making images, but couldn't find a place to pout them, how to cframe them.  That was in the hey day of the grid, and Minimalism - especially Sol's work - provided her with that structure.  the same thing happened to me later, when I was writing the original version of I See/You Mean in dribs and drabs and it kept changing with all the new art I liked because I never had time to work consistently on it.

But the book is very different from the cool tone of most of that art ...

Yes, because when I got to Spain alone, away from all the art, and just started rewriting it from scratch, it became a completely different book.  That amazed me.  Just before I left New York, the novel consisted of nothing but descriptions of photographs and there was an index that gave clues to the entire plot, which happened in the changes of position, glance, relationship, etc., within the group photographs.  A 'brilliant' conceptual idea that would have been deadly dull.  When I realised that if I were really going to finish this book, I'd have yo go off and do it alone, away from the artworld, I destroyed the manuscript and went off to Spain with nothing, to start from scratch.  Spain was a great place for a 'radical' writer to go in 1970, but the house was free for four winter months and I was desperate.  There I got away from that image of cold, hard, Minimalism - which was its public image, and people thought that since I wrote about that kind of art I must be that way, too.  Anyway, the book changed drastically, and that was when I had to confront the whole feminist issue.  I'd been political before, but not a feminist. When you say political, do you mean radical politics, the New Left? 
Yes, radical politics, the anti-war movement.I'd always considered myself 'political' but I knew absolutely no theory. I was brought up within the civil rights movement, or Race Relations, as it was called in those days, because my grandfather was a Congregational minister who was president of a Black college in Mississippi, and my mother worked as a volunteer on civil rights and housing. My own political eye-opening was when I worked in a very poor Mexican village with the American Friends Service Committee -Quakers- just after graduation from college. But it wasn't until 10 years later, when I went to Argentina and got caught in a political situation where I had my first taste of public rebellion and got virtually kicked out of Bueno Aires that I really started to do anything. (I've always hated being told what to do. I have a real authority problem that has provided me with some of my finest moments.) Then I got involved with the beginning of the Art Workers' Coalition, protesting the political use of art by the 'apolitical' powers that be. Then some of the women in the AWC formed a group called WAR - Women Artist in Revolution. I didn't even know the feminist movement was happening then. They started raising hell about women's issues and I was sort of embarrassed about it. I thought.... ugh, yet another faction. But I realised that, given my politics, I couldn't reject them. I supported them in a half-hearted way but I resisted joining them. They kept saying what are you doing not with us? And I kept saying, 'I made it as a person, not as a woman'...tra la...
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