Interview with Lucy Lippard, Art Writer

Lucy Lippard Recording: [00:00:09] What I'm going to do is read something little bits from a catalog that was actually a collaboration between myself and Jerry Kerns. It's a catalog of his show. I have been accused of writing sort of fiction criticism. I do consider this still to be criticism. It's all tied very much into the art, but it is a little odd for criticism. Good guys, bad guys. It's not so black and white. Everybody's got color now a golden girls in your future Mary in the sky with diamonds Madonna of Glitz, material girl, supermarket like a pop tart. It's only easy money if you take your prize and run away. Marilyn died alone, threatening to talk about presidential affairs. Madonna weighs gold, plastic crucifixes. Kim Phuc became a flaming cross. Maybe you didn't know her name. The pinup of the Vietnam War. The little girl running down the road. Her body smoking with napalm on her face. An expression of disbelief. Her left arm was charred to the bone as she ran for her life. Cameras rolled. She still lives there. She sleeps badly. Heat, sunlight and tension are painful…

Tamar VO: [00:01:19] This is the art writer Lucy Lippard, recorded sometime in the early 90s.

Reading her work out loud, and even just in this small excerpt, you can get a sense of how her writing steers the page that it sits on. And yet it's also buoyant, curious, as crisp and sparkling as seltzer. Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, Lippard's work incites activism. Entrenchment in the art scene and friendships have secured her a 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 the more than 60 years of writing about art in a way that centers 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 and the stuff they leave behind.

After the break, my conversation with legendary art writer Lucy Lippard.

+++  

Tamar: [00:04:18] Lucy Lippard. Thank you so much for joining me today. It is really an honor to have this opportunity to pick your brain. Um, I've read your newest book stuff instead of a memoir cover to cover, and I want to actually ask at the outset, who is this book for? Because it's it's so personal, it's so anecdotal and it's so visual. And as I was reading it, I was wondering, you know, is this for is this for art history as a whole? Is this for your grandchildren? Is it for you? Because it kind of reads like it's for all of the above.

Lucy Lippard: [00:04:56] Well, it's not for art history, which probably won't give a damn. I'm not [00:05:00] really an art historian. I'm more interested in art that's making history than art. That was. But I did do it to some extent for my son and grandsons who have not evinced much interest in family history. But hopefully this if they ever get interested, this will be there for them. And that goes for my cousin's kids too. I mean, nobody seems to care, but maybe someday when they get as old as I am, they will.

Tamar: [00:05:23] I actually had that written down that that idea that you say that you're not much of an art historian, that you were more interested in, in the art that was making history than the history that was already made? Um, and to that end, so I read this book and the names that are mentioned in it, one after another. To me, it's like a modern and contemporary 20th century art textbook has been turned upside down and shaken into a giant stock pot. You know, Duchamp, Matisse, Eva Hesse, Klaus. Oldenburg, Louise. Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, James Rosenquist, Ana mendieta, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt. Like, at a certain point, I stopped writing them down. Um, and we're used to hearing these names very cleanly, confined to their own movements and their own decades. And here they're alive and breathing and intermingling and friends and enemies and lovers and and sharing the same scene. And it makes you realize that it's it's art criticism that categorizes them, not necessarily them categorizing themselves. And I would love to hear you talk about how your own writing kind of separates them out and brings them back together.

Lucy Lippard: [00:06:44] All of us who write about art, I don't call myself a critic because I hate the word, because I save my criticism for capitalism, as I think I say in the book. But I mean, these people are friends of mine. And they they they live and they I don't know, like I say, I'm not that interested in categorization and art history and so forth. And this this book is about, uh, my interactions with them rather than their mighty roles in art history and so forth. I mean, they were they were people, like you said, they're human beings. So that was but I wasn't even trying to do portraits of people. I mean, they've all been written about all of the ones you mentioned so often that I don't have to. And I've written about them, and I don't have to tell people what they do or anything. I guess when you asked who this is for, it's, uh, it's for, you know, fairly well informed people who like art and who've been involved in art on some level, it's not going to tell outsiders that much about how it all works or anything. So they should read something else for that.

Tamar: [00:07:50] But you were writing about these people as you were friends with them?

Lucy Lippard: [00:07:54] Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

Tamar: [00:07:56] Did that affect your relationship with them at all?

Lucy Lippard: [00:07:58] No, not particularly because I when I'm writing a monograph on an artist, I always send it to them for corrections. And I say you can comment too, if you like, but I'm not necessarily going to change anything but 99% of people just like what it is. And correct a few things that I've got wrong. And so so it hasn't, uh, ruined any friendships that I know of.

Tamar: [00:08:21] What makes somebody a good artist versus what makes them a good writer about art? And do you think they're in in conflict or that they're that they're connected?

Lucy Lippard: [00:08:33] Well, there are a lot of people, uh, who write about art, who are also artists. Uh, Rob Storr comes to mind immediately. And there are a lot of other the artists who wrote like Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, John Judd. I mean, a lot of those people also wrote and they wrote well. And they also they wrote differently than. Criticism. I mean, I always like artists writings because they're. They're not trying to get inside anything that they don't know much about. They're just they live. They're living it. And they and they're they're often very good writers.

Tamar: [00:09:07] So did you ever run into that? You have this great line when you talk about, um, you were complimented in your studio art class and you thought, oh, maybe I should be an artist instead of a writer. And you brought the paintings to your parents and they said, writer.

Lucy Lippard: [00:09:27] They both liked art.

Tamar: [00:09:29] I mean, I also kind of made the switch from studio artist to to writer.

Lucy Lippard: [00:09:36] Oh, really?

Tamar: [00:09:37] Yeah. And and it's it's interesting because it was pretty clear to me my mom is an artist, and I am not. I, I was able to to render things. I was able to able to kind of go through the motions of art making, but I didn't really have a mind for it. I found that for myself, I was [00:10:00] too invested in outcomes in order to be a good artist. My mom is really great at thinking in terms of where something could go in a really unconstrained way, and I needed my argument to to cleanly land. And so in that way, I always felt like maybe artists and art historians are two very opposite brains. Has that been your experience?

Lucy Lippard: [00:10:28] Well, again, I'm not an art historian, and I started out thinking I would write fiction. So I guess my initial ambition was to be an artist, but not a visual artist or whatever. And so I always wanted to be a writer. I read a lot as a kid. I was an only child. I just figured that that was the best thing I could do, and that was what I was better at because I got funny little prizes, like in the eighth grade and then in college and so forth. So I thought, well, I'm for a good, great career in fiction. And then it turned out I wasn't very good at writing fiction, and I was looking at art and, and working in an art museum and so forth. And so I thought, oh, well, I'll just do this instead. And it's been it's been fun. I've enjoyed it. And I would have been a lousy academician. I mean, I never have really taught. And so I knew that I was going to just be a freelance writer.

Tamar: [00:11:25] Yeah. I was actually going to ask so you've, you've kind of famously made the decision to not get a PhD. Um, you know again that was a choice that I made. And, and I found that, that actually really unconstrained my ability to write about art. Um, what does that decision say about the kind of writing you wanted to wanted to do?

Lucy Lippard: [00:11:49] Well, I guess it just proved that I didn't want to be an academic. My father was at Yale and taught at Yale, and I heard a lot of complaints about academic, silly business. I mean, uh, funny little squabbles and so forth and so on. Anyway, so. And I thought, that's certainly not what I want to do. And I just liked writing so that it just seemed the natural course. But I think you're right that a PhD would have constrained me. I would have been forcing myself into an academic foreground, which I never wanted. So. And then I had a major authority problem. My mother always said when I was leaving house, leaving home for college, and she said, I'm not going to teach you to sew and to cook, both of which she was very good at. And although she was also did a lot of other things. But she said, because you don't like to be told what to do, so you can damn well teach yourself when you get around to it. And I never did learn to sew, but I'm not a terrible cook, So? So I didn't want to be told what to do about what I was writing either.

Tamar: [00:12:51] You've you've said that you love the quote “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”

Lucy Lippard: [00:12:57] Yeah.

Tamar: [00:12:58] And that feels like it kind of goes hand in hand with a way of writing about art that feels more accessible. What does that quote mean to you?

Lucy Lippard: [00:13:08] Well, I think a lot of art historians leave life out. And I didn't want to do that. I've always felt that, you know, I would have loved to have the art I liked. I would always like to see it get a broader and broader audience, which it didn't always get. And I suppose now with social media, artists have a much, much broader audience than they did before, but it doesn't seem to have improved the art world much. So who knows?

Tamar: [00:13:36] In your time as a writer and I keep wanting to say writer, not critic, because I also I find that word frustrating. Has Criticism and art writing changed in in your lifetime? You know, when you look back, do you see critics still as interested in the art that makes life more interesting than art, or are they getting kind of wrapped up in the in the academics of it all?

Lucy Lippard: [00:14:03] Well, I think a lot of critics have always been wrapped up in the academic. I don't read much art criticism anymore. I have to admit. I get art magazines, and I kind of look at the pictures, which is what most of my artist friends do too. So we don't get read that much. But, uh, and I don't keep up with the art world at this point, so I'm not sure you know what the trends are, but I think some art criticism is wonderful and is readable. And whether I agree with it or not, or I'm interested in the art or not, it's fun to read and some is just deadly dull. That's. And I'm not going to get into names.

Tamar: [00:14:39] Well, without naming names, what makes it fun to read?

Lucy Lippard: [00:14:43] Well, I guess it's when I know the art, or when the when the writer is really good at bringing the art to the fore, and not just what people have said about the art or biographical details, but but really getting into the art and looking. I mean, I think it was Ad Reinhardt that said something [00:15:00] like looking is hard work. I mean, and certainly for a lot of art, it doesn't come by in just a minute or a second or whatever. I see a lot of art that I can walk by and, and like, okay, and just walk by and then every now and then something really pulls you in. And that's the stuff I like. And I think writers have to more or less do this. I'm not saying I always succeeded in that, but but writers should bring the work alive to people, and that's part of the life in art thing.

Tamar: [00:15:33] Do you remember particular works of art that kind of cracked open to you, even if you didn't necessarily know anything about it, that really just kind of Grabbed you and made you curious.

Lucy Lippard: [00:15:45] I mean certain things. I often knew the artists. I went to studios. People were always saying to me things like, well, how do you always know what's about to happen? And I say, I don't. I just go to studios. Duh. You know, that's where it's happening. But of course, I lived with artists. I mean, I one of the things that, you know, I wrote about artists that I knew because I liked, I knew them and was friends with them because I liked their art. I didn't have many friends whose art I hated. And I don't have many artists. There's not much artwork I like where I dislike the artist. But. And now I don't know any of the artists, so that's fine.

Tamar: [00:16:23] A lot of what you're writing has focused on has explored, obviously feminism, conceptual art, that kind of dematerialization of the art object and the environment. Um, and the perfect intersection of all of these is the Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuna. And I actually had the opportunity to interview her about five years ago. And she actually mentioned you directly because we were talking about land art as historically a very masculine movement. And we were talking about her work in, you know, kind of as an opposition to that. And she pointed out that you had pointed out that her work preceded that by by exactly six months, which she was very grateful for, the, the specificity of that. One thing that she said in our interview, and maybe this can be a larger conceptual question, she said, quote, the trouble with feminism is that it's seen as only female. What do you think of that quote?

Lucy Lippard: [00:17:32] Well, I think it's a little utopian. I mean, I men would never have started the feminist movement. And so I think you have to listen to the women first. I mean, there are men who are feminists and there are men who claim to be feminists, and then there are men who hate feminism. And it's only the first batch you'd ever listen to. Really? But I it would be nice someday, maybe a great many men will be feminists. But even in the partners that I've had, there's always been a tiny bit of misogyny sneaking in. Like even when they're trying their best to be feminist. I think it's harder for men to be feminists because we feel it viscerally.

Tamar: [00:18:15] Yeah, it's tricky because a lot of the art, a lot of the second wave feminist artists, were really pushing boundaries in a way that that hadn't been seen before, and that was really hard for the world to kind of metabolize in real time. And you also mentioned in your book that the exhibition of Judy Chicago's Red Flag, the tampon being removed from a from a vagina that the museum posted a warning in front of it.

Lucy Lippard: [00:18:45] It wasn't really in front of me. They just put a thing up at the entrance to the show, but it was pretty clear what they were talking about. Or somebody told me that or something. But I think Judy's piece probably triggered that, so to speak.

Tamar: [00:18:58] Yeah. And and it's like, what what statement is the museum making by saying we want to show this art, but we also want to, you know, kind of warn you about it or protect you from it.

Lucy Lippard: [00:19:10] Somebody must have complained. And so they put that up. I mean, I don't think they ordinarily would have put that up. And it was the not the director of the museum. It was the director of the the museum foundation. So who I never met.

Tamar: [00:19:25] So but your response to that was, think for yourself.

Lucy Lippard: [00:19:28] Yeah.

Tamar: [00:19:29] Which I think is actually I think that's some of the best advice that any art writer can give a reader.

Lucy Lippard: [00:19:39] Or a viewer.

Tamar: [00:19:40] Or a viewer. How do we do that?

Lucy Lippard: [00:19:42] Well, I have no idea how you do that. I mean, I can't make anybody do that.

Tamar: [00:19:47] So let me ask you this. You say, um, also in your book quote, I loved the certainty of being a lefty activist. I believed we were right and had trouble understanding [00:20:00] why everyone didn't agree with us, and why some of those who did still wouldn't join us thanks to the complexities and nuances of everyone's lives. End quote. Um, and I hope that I'm right in reading that with with a trace of irony there and and being a bit facetious that the certainty of activism tends to kind of run headlong into complexity and and nuance. Am I reading it the right way? Because that's something that I've certainly found to be true.

Lucy Lippard: [00:20:33] No, that's a good way to read it. I kind of...A lot of people Would would just say when we were trying to get them out in the streets to for a demonstration or something, they'd say, oh, I can't, I've got a show coming up, or a critic is coming to my studio or something or other, and, you know, you had to understand that if you knew artists because things depended on that and so forth. But at the same time, then in the late 80s, I was in at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and there it was wonderful because the students didn't have these problems and we'd we'd something would go on, like the invasion of Iraq, and everybody would just jump up and come to the demonstration and didn't have to deal with this artist's problems. So that was very nice.

Tamar: [00:21:19] Of the way that you've been described as a writer, as an activist, does anyone kind of trump the other? Do you feel more like a writer or more like an activist? Do the two go hand in hand?

Lucy Lippard: [00:21:35] No. I'm more I'm more of a writer and my activism these days. In the last 30 years has been very much more local than than wheatpasting in screaming in New York streets. And and here I live in a very small village in New Mexico, and I'm involved in issues that wouldn't interest any artist that I know, probably, but except the ones who live here. So I'm I'm a writer. I mean, and I always say sometime curator because I've curated a lot, but they've been, you know, they're not giant museum shows. They were biennales or anything. They're just often in funny little places. And but I just did curated, co-curated two shows at Site Santa Fe. So that's an important museum. So I guess I'm growing up.

Tamar: [00:22:22] So do you still write a lot every day?

Lucy Lippard: [00:22:26] Yeah. But I'm still living on it. I mean, I'm still get commissions or decide to do things or whatever.

Tamar: [00:22:33] So do you enjoy it?

Lucy Lippard: [00:22:36] Oh, yes.

Tamar: [00:22:37] I feel like a lot of writers I know, they hate it, but they love it.

Lucy Lippard: [00:22:40] Oh no, I love it. I mean, I don't love every minute. I mean, it's what I've done all my life.

Tamar: [00:22:45] And what made it clear kind of early on that this was the best way to express yourself?

Lucy Lippard: [00:22:51] I don't know if I was even thinking of expressing myself, but like I said, I thought I was going to be a famous novelist and I wasn't, but I just like words. And I think it does have, as I mentioned before, have to do with being an only child. And there wasn't a lot of people around to talk to. So I read a lot and and reading just leads to writing. I know so many writers who just say, oh yeah, of course reading is the first thing and then comes writing. But I like words and I'm a much better writer than I am a talker. I just finished this morning editing an oral history I did for the Holt Smithson Foundation, and it was just deeply depressing. I mean, the transcript was all um, and er, and I mean, and maybe and I'm probably doing that here too. I promised myself I would never do that again, so.

Tamar: [00:23:41] Um, do you have a favorite word that always sneaks into your writing that you have to kind of pull out, like find a thesaurus and find something else?

Lucy Lippard: [00:23:49] No, I don't think so. Well, I do, but what's yours?

Tamar: [00:23:55] Mine is tidy. I didn't realize that I used it so often, like something will fit tidily or kind of cleanly into. I mean, I've already used it in this conversation, and and I just, I can't...my sister pointed out that I put it everywhere. Um, but I guess my brain is always doing that. It's always trying to kind of clean up what's in front of me, and then use that as a counterpoint to the next thing that I'm talking about. So I have my thesaurus for other words besides tidy.

Lucy Lippard: [00:24:23] I am totally different. I'm a lousy housekeeper. I live in a mess, my writing is probably a mess and so forth. So, but I do. I do find myself using some words over and over. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but I just wait, especially at this age. I sort of I think the sentence is flowing along and all of a sudden I know what the word is, but I can't remember it. And so I just leave, I say, and go on, and then the word comes back to me.

Tamar: [00:24:49] But but I do that too. I put a little underline and I know I'll come back to that. I actually, I went through that right after my kids were born. I [00:25:00] would find myself losing words, and it was really scary. You know, as a writer, it's like, that's a that's a scary thing to feel like you're losing your, you know, the gas in your tank.

Lucy Lippard: [00:25:11] Well, it's just particularly scary when you're almost 87 because you don't know whether this is just losing a word or something awful is beginning to happen.

Tamar: [00:25:19] So yeah, I can imagine, um, with with any luck, I'll get there too. Throughout your book, you, you talk a lot about your son Ethan, and he is this constant that weaves his way through the entire story of your life. Understandably. And you say until. Until his life becomes his story. And you also talk about the influence that your mother clearly has on you in in how you think through the world. And I actually wanted to ask you a bit about motherhood and your career, because this is a very personal question to me as a mother who is also an art writer and something that I wrestle with. What were some of the most challenging aspects of kind of reconciling both, you know, being a mother and being a writer? And did it also make your writing better?

Lucy Lippard: [00:26:16] I don't think it made my writing better. I there's a book coming out of my fictions, and in one of the things that I wrote for, I think a Chicago women's show or something was which had a title like Art and life or life or something. But so I wrote this thing called New York Times, and it was going through my day and it's and it's looking back, I think, gosh, I have it a lot easier now that I don't have a kid in the house and haven't had for a very long time, but I'm afraid I was more I probably was a lousy mother, but I but I loved hanging out with my kid because he's fun. But, uh, work was was definitely as important as the kid, but I, I know that sounds kind of horrible, but I think it was. And so it was really just more a matter of balancing than a matter of I didn't feel guilty that I was a lousy mother. Afterwards I thought, oh God, what did I do? But but for the most part, I put in the book that my favorite line, which is, this is my life and yours is coming because my life I was making our living, for starters. So there wasn't it wasn't a matter of my quitting writing to to be a mother. And I would never have, frankly, wanted to do that. I would have been a terrible, angry mother if I hadn't been working.

Lucy Lippard: [00:27:34] But yeah, I told I told Ethan that he was neglected. I didn't mean that. I left him alone for hours at a time or anything, but just that he was neglected in the sense that I was not a helicopter mother. There was a New Yorker cartoon recently. I don't know if you saw it, of two kids on marionette strings with their parents above it, and one of them, the kid, says, I kind of miss helicopter parenting.

[00:28:02] My parents let me loose a lot, too. I mean, in the 40s and 50s, when I was growing up, your kids were freer. I mean, we we went out and disappeared into the neighborhood, and nobody worried. And then we did all kinds of stupid things, but luckily they were not lethal. And and Ethan, my son was in New York, you know, getting drugs out of a hole from the in the wall in the Lower East Side and hanging out with people I didn't know and so forth. But he was he was basically pretty good at checking in. But one night I got a call from another mother in the middle of the night, I mean, 2:00 in the morning or something. And he was spending the night out with another friend, and she said, I know Ethan checks in with you. Where are they? But when the call came, I thought, oh my God, something awful has happened. But he sort of checked in and he was pretty good about that. But he's a friend.

Tamar: [00:28:59] When you said to him that he was neglected, what did he say back?

Lucy Lippard: [00:29:02] Well, I told him that years ago. And then somebody interviewed him about me and he said, I think something like, well, I was told I was neglected, but I have happy memories of my childhood. But I was told I was neglected. So he doesn't seem to resent it that much. And he has two kids of his own, so. And they're grown up now.

Tamar: [00:29:24] My son is named Calvin Samuel, actually, so I was really touched by the names of your grandsons.

Lucy Lippard: [00:29:30] Really? Yeah. How funny. How many kids do you have

Tamar: [00:29:35] Two. They're four and two.

Lucy Lippard: [00:29:37] Oh, that is good for you. I never wanted another one.

Tamar: [00:29:42] Well, it's. I think that that's actually maybe why I asked if it makes your writing better. I think that that is clearly a projection. Um, because I ask myself, you know, as a writer, the thing about [00:30:00] writing is that you could do it all the time and you'd only get better, and the writing would only get more practiced and would be a better career. Except the time that I have to take away to be with my children, I feel like the only. The only flip side is that it's opened up my my heart and my empathy so much that it's like what I lose in time. I like to think I get back in a kind of richness for how I view other people's work. Um, like, I feel like it's made me a better, a better viewer of art to have this kind of, you know, expanded sense of, of the world that that being a parent has given me.

Lucy Lippard: [00:30:54] Well that's lovely.

Tamar: [00:30:56] So I guess I, I ask that of other people.

Lucy Lippard: [00:31:00] I didn't want to have children. I was never going to get married. I was never going to have children. And then I got married because my mother, I was a daddy's girl. And my mother said, you know, your father would be very happy if you and Bob got married. I never did it again, but I did it the first. And then then we had Ethan later. And that was a surprise, too. So. But I'm glad it all happened, so I'm certainly glad I had him.

Tamar: [00:31:25] Yeah, that's what people usually say.

Lucy Lippard: [00:31:27] Yeah.

Tamar: [00:31:29] Um, in your book, you say that your paternal grandmother, Lucy Maria Balcombe, um, died before you were old enough to ask the right questions of her. Um, what are the right questions? What do you want your grandsons to ask you?

Lucy Lippard: [00:31:47] Oh, I don't they know me pretty well. I didn't know her that well. Uh, I only saw her, like, once a year or something, so I just would have loved to have known she was a normal school teacher in in Nova Scotia. She came. The family had left in the 1700s because they were Tories. And they'd gone to Canada. And I would just have loved to have known why she ended up in a factory, a shoe factory in Marlborough, mass. If she was on the path to be a teacher. That was the. That's the main question I would have loved to have asked her, and I never got to. And my father, I'd never asked my father either. So she was a lovely person, but I never knew her at all. I remember. She had a very squashy front sitting on her lap. I remember her breasts being squashed.

Tamar: [00:32:32] Oh, don't we all?

Lucy Lippard: [00:32:34] Definitely.

Tamar: [00:32:37] Are there questions that you want the world to ask you? I mean, do you think because you talk about age, you talk about what it is to be turning 87 and and, you know, I imagine thoughts turn toward legacy. And you've written so much. You have so much for the public to kind of dissect. Is it is it what you wanted to say? Are there more questions that you want the world to ask you?

Lucy Lippard: [00:33:02] No, I don't think so. In fact, I'd kind of like to be just be forgotten. And then I could just sit back and write another book. But but the legacy thing is, I. I just finished saying something about that and this whole Smithson thing, but it's never interested me much. Artists, of course, have to worry more about their legacy because they have all these objects that something has to has to happen. There's so many sad stories are coming out of the garage and into the dump. And and as a writer, my legacy is easy. It's the books and the writing. And if some of that survives, that's great. But I don't think much about legacy, and I dislike it when certain artists are forgotten or seem to be forgotten. And of course, they're usually women, or they get paid a lot of attention to suddenly when they're old or they're dead. But but I don't I don't have that. I mean, I'm not a great, iconic writer. I'm just a good writer. I mean, I wrote what what I needed to write for the 60 years I've been doing it, and it's not a big deal. And I don't think of legacy with a capital L at all. Kind of annoys me that all this legacy talk. So.

Tamar: [00:34:09] Yeah. So what are you working on right now?

Lucy Lippard: [00:34:15] Uh, what am I working on? I just finished doing this oral history for Holt Smithson. I just sent off. This is this morning. Sent off my, uh, monthly community newsletter that I do in Galisteo. And then I got to do Christmas cards and Christmas. I'm not fond of Christmas, but I have to do something about it . And then I have a bunch of deadlines starting up again in January. So that's, uh, and then I would really like to I, I at this age, you have no, no idea how long you have and whether it's worth starting another book and so forth. I was working on a book. I was starting a book on monuments called The Burden of Memory. And then so many good books, including a couple by friends of mine, were came [00:35:00] out about monuments. And I thought, well, I guess I won't do a monuments book. And then I got carried away with other things and but now. But then I, uh, a Colombian drag queen was visiting a friend of mine, and he said that I had 8 or 9 years to go because he read my tarot.

Tamar: [00:35:16] Oh, good!

Lucy Lippard: [00:35:17] I thought, oh 8 or 9 years I can write.

Tamar: [00:35:19] Yeah, that's that's like three books.

Lucy Lippard: [00:35:21] It's total bullshit. But anyway, so I think I'm starting to think about something called Whose Histories with a question mark, sort of in reply to all this ridiculous book banning and, and, uh, what have you. Critical stuff that they don't like, like. And, uh, so and the lovely thing about writing about art, which you probably know too, is that you get interested in something and you can always find artists who are interested in it, too. So I can I can think, okay, whose histories? I know I want to do a political thing. Uh, but then there'll be artists out there who are working with this, and I can drag them in and make the book about partly about them and partly about the histories and-

Tamar: [00:36:10] Which monuments struck up that desire?

Lucy Lippard: [00:36:14] Uh, well, all the Confederate stuff that was going on, what, 2 or 3 years ago, and then contemporary artists dealing with that and making new monuments and and then in Santa Fe, we've had a whole lot of monument stuff. There's an obelisk in the center of the plaza which has been torn down. And and somebody in the 70s, I think, uh, came along dressed as a workman. And the plaza's always got people in. It came along dressed as a workman and climbed in and chopped out, chiseled out the word savage Indians. Just savage because it was. It's a military monument to to Indian wars and so forth.

Tamar: [00:36:55] And yeah, I'm working on another project right now that is monument specific. And so it's been very much front of mind for me. Um, and I'm, I'm focusing specifically on the, uh, National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. Um, the lynching monument, which is unreal.

Lucy Lippard: [00:37:23] I've never been there, but I've seen pictures. It looks wonderful.

Tamar: [00:37:26] Yeah, it's one of the best, um, kind of physical interpretations of metaphor I've ever seen. And that, that makes being there a very powerful experience. So I guess there's nothing left to ask then about the stuff. What stuff can you not live without right now?

Lucy Lippard: [00:37:54] Oh, I don't know. I mean, I look around, there's so much of it. We've had bad fires last year, and so I have a sort of a go bag, but then I have a little list of of the art that not photographs because the negative probably exists. So a lot of what's in the room I live in is photography so early? An early, uh, piece by my son that's reproduced in the book that I think of as a prenatal memory. It's a sort of purple and black thing. Let's see what else the Sol LeWitt drawing that was on the cover of my book changing. I mean, I love everything in the room. I would have it. I would hate to see it all burned down, but I don't quite know what I would take with me. It's not one thing. Yeah, the family portrait, I guess I would be. That would be the first thing I should, because that was done in the 1840s and there's no reproducing that on any level. So and I got that as the oldest grandchild.

Tamar: [00:38:52] Something that I appreciate about your book that even in just talking to you, this kind of hammers home is that of all the names that I read out loud earlier, you know, who, like you said, has just had, you know, infinite ink spilled about them. You know, these are artists that everybody's heard of, that as an art writer who has written so much about them and who has interacted with them and has their art. What still is most meaningful is something from your children and and a family portrait that you've inherited. And and I think that there's something really powerful about that, that art and celebrity and legacy, you know, they have their own place. But that really the most kind of potent connection comes from the stuff that is connected to your own family. And and you feel that in the book. And I think it's a really beautiful piece of it.

Lucy Lippard: [00:39:54] If you've had a happy family. I've been very lucky. I've had a happy family.

Tamar: [00:39:58] Yeah, true.

Lucy Lippard: [00:39:59] Life. I mean. [00:40:00]

Tamar: [00:40:00] Fair point. So have I, so I guess that's why I say that.

Lucy Lippard: [00:40:04] But I'm looking around. I have Robert. I gave most of this stuff to the, to the museum. So some of the really great pieces are at the museum and I just kept, I tried to keep one thing by some of my closest friends, and I have a little Eva Hesse and a Robert Ryman drawing, and a Kaye Miller drawing and a Louise Bourgeois drawing, which which we just discovered about a few months ago. My, I have a friend who's helping me with archiving and getting rid of books to libraries and so forth, and and she's an artist. And so she, she said, look, I just found this kicking around and I think it's a Louise Bourgeois original. And I said, oh, no, it's probably a print. And she looked at it. She's an artist. She looked at it. She said, no, it's it's not, it's a drawing. I mean, that was fun. And so I have that hanging up. I haven't had that up for years. So that's fun to look at.

Tamar: [00:40:59] Your archivist might just have the best job in the world.

Lucy Lippard: [00:41:03] Well we'll see. She has two small children, so she's it's back and forth. I mean, we never know when one of them is going to get sick or the teacher is going to get sick or whatever, but she's wonderful, so. And she's a good artist, so.

Tamar: [00:41:19] Yeah. Well, I relate to that as well. Um, I guess this will be my last question. Why did you not want to write a memoir? Why did you want it to be stuff instead of a memoir?

Lucy Lippard: [00:41:33] Well, I'm sort of embarrassed about writing something about myself at all. But a memoir with all the, uh, you know, the. I've been through a lot of relationships. It's nobody's business how they worked out or didn't and so forth. And so I wasn't going to do any of that stuff. And people I mean, somebody asked me about Carl Andre at one point. They wanted to interview me about my relationship with Carl, and I said it wasn't a relationship, it was an affair. And there's nothing really to talk about. So. So that kind of thing. I was avoiding that, like poison. And, and I've had a couple of people interested in doing a biography and I've said no because I don't want them digging up all that stuff. Soon after I'm dead, I won't know it. So let the chips fall where they may. But. But I'm not interested in getting into all of that. So that's why it's instead of a memoir. I worry about friends who've given me things, and I couldn't find them or their or we didn't have room in the book for them or something. And then I think, oh dear. When I was a kid, I used to sleep with stuffed animals under each arm, and I worried terribly about each which animal had been there last night in the prime spot, right under, right up next to me. And their feelings would be hurt if they were not getting that spot again and so forth. So I worry about that with my friends.

Tamar: [00:42:55] Well, my four year old is the exact same way I think that starts...that's a very primal feeling to to make sure early on that you're, you're giving the, the people and the things you love their due.

Lucy Lippard: [00:43:08] Yes. That's a good way to put it. Well, maybe, maybe he'll be a writer.

Tamar: [00:43:19] Well, Lucy Lippard, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and for sharing your insights today and for the last 60 years.

Lucy Lippard: [00:43:32] Thank you. It was fun to talk to you.

Closing credits:

The Lonely Palate is produced by me, Tamar Avishai, with production assistance from Debbie Blicher. For more information, past episodes and all the images go to the Lonelyplanet.com where you can also learn more about commissioning episodes, buying merch, signing up for our monthly newsletter and booking virtual museum tours with yours truly.

You can also learn more about supporting the show at Patreon.com/Lonely Palette. No amount per episode is too little, and you really do keep the lights on here. One more time. That's Patreon.com/lonely palette.

The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of hub and spoke a collective of idea driven, mind expanding podcasts. Hub and spoke has been growing. We have a newsletter, we have a radio hour. We have a fiscal sponsor so that you can support us, tax deductible and even in a post-apocalyptic podcast environment. We are really looking forward to growing even more in 2024. Go to HubSpot audio to check us out, and we'll be back with new episodes of The Lonely Palette in the New Year.