BonusEp. 16: Tamar Avishai interviews Lucy R. Lippard, Art Writer

The Lonely Palette

Arts, Podcast, Art, Museum, Painting, Modern Art, Visual Arts, Art History

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation. Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photographs, drawings, relationships, grandchildren – is the subject of her new memoir, or, actually, what she calls “Stuff (Instead of a Memoir).” She joined me to talk about the book, but also more than 60 years of writing about art in the way that centered life. After all, “art,” she often quotes, “is what makes life more interesting than art.” Art is the artists, the world they inhabit, their shared cultural references, their shared understanding of the art world and art history. Their human experiences rendered in paint. The stuff they leave behind. Music Used: The Blue Dot Sessions, “Lacquer Groove,” “Hardwood Lullaby” Episode Webpage: https://www.thelonelypalette.com/interview/2023/12/20/lucy-lippard-art-writer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hub and Spoke. Audio Collective.
0:09.0	What I'm going to do is read something, little bits from a catalog that was actually a collaboration
0:15.4	between myself and Jerry Kearns. It's a catalog of his show.
0:20.9	I have been accused of writing sort of fiction criticism. I do consider this still to be criticism.
0:26.0	It's all tied very much into the Everybody's got color now. A golden
0:40.9	girls in your future. Mary in the sky with diamonds, Madonna of Glitz,
0:45.0	material girl, supermarketed like a pop tart.
0:47.0	It's only easy money if you take your prize and run away.
0:51.0	Marilyn died alone, threatening to talk about presidential affairs.
0:55.0	Madonna weighs gold-plastic crucifixes.
0:58.0	Kim Fuke became a flaming cross.
1:00.0	Maybe you didn't know her name, the pin up of the Vietnam War, a little girl running down the road,
1:05.7	her body smoking with napalm on her face and expression of disbelief.
1:10.2	Her left arm was charred to the bone, As she ran for her life, cameras rolled.
1:15.0	She still lives there.
1:16.0	She sleeps badly.
1:17.0	Heat, sunlight, and tension, or paintings.
1:19.0	This is the art writer Lucy Lippard,
1:21.0	recorded sometime in the early 90s, reading her work out loud. And even just in this small
1:28.4	excerpt, you can get a sense of how her writing seers the page that it sits on, and yet it's also buoyant, curious, as
1:37.4	crisp and sparkling as seltzer.
1:41.4	Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s,
	...

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