Page 57 - Studio International - March 1972

Supplement Spring 1972 articles do stand beyond their publication
deadlines. It is too bad that her articles on Tony
New and recent books Smith and Ad Reinhardt had to be expurgated
(as bases of books she's currently publishing in
Germany and America), especially since she
Long change relative to contemporary 'unrealizable was obviously influenced by their work and
Changing, Essays in Art Criticism, by Lucy projects'. There's some fashionable thought in setting standards and raising issues
Lippard. 32o pp. E.P.Dutton, New York. $2.45. trend-spotting and style-labelling ('Eccentric relative to other artists. In these cases of
Abstraction', 'Perverse Perspectives', and individuals, such associations are usually
Lucy Lippard is short, gutsy, bouncy, bright, 'Rejective—i.e. `minimal' —Art'). There are sufficiently clearly distinguished not to be
and she probably talks, thinks, and types faster some excellent exhibition reviews : `Notes on irritating. But when she sets forth to elucidate
than Any Girl (pace Women's Lib) in the Dada and Surrealism' is as serious and new `movements' it is maddening to find her
artworld West. She's sort of a high-octane provocative as the MOMA exhibition catalogue constantly coughing up aspects of Dada and
paradigm of what the late Alan Solomon and itself; the reviews of the Washington `Scale as Surrealism as if they were some sort of
Barnett Newman called 'the Lady Critics', Content' and New York `Sculpture in the arthistorical parentage respected by artists
those art-history trained writers who form an Parks' shows became more-than-just-reviews like Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Keith
influential populace in the New York Art World. by sparking off her stimulating discussions of Sonnier (in `Eccentric Abstraction') or—worse
By the time she was thirty, Lucy had done a scale and the notion of `public art'. And there — to find On Kawara, Atkinson & Baldwin, Mel
brilliant M.A. at New York University's are some of the earliest printed, factually Bochner, Dan Graham, Carl Andre, Joseph
Institute of Fine Arts, compiled the scholarly detailed, and sympathetic discussions of Kosuth and a Cast Of Thousands in that
catalogue for the L.A. County Museum's 'The individual artists as varied as Larry Poons, misleading-by-negations publicity piece titled
New York School' (1965), organized and James Rosenquist, Sol LeWitt, Robert `The Dematerialization of Art.' Her art-
written most of the first informative survey of Mangold, and Lawrence Weiner. Stimulating sociology interests —which enlivened her analyses
Pop Art (1966), written a book on The Graphic stuff, particularly at the time when it was of Stella's and Olitski's development by
Art of Philip Evergood (1966) and the catalogue journalistically fresh and hot-on-the-heels of informed and sympathetic discussion of artists'
for the Jewish Museum's exhibition of 'Ad the creation or exhibition of the work attended problems with `success' and critical acclaim—
Reinhardt Paintings' (1967), married an to. But extracting it all from the relative have, in the last printed essays (from 1970)
excellent quiet-spoken artist (Robert Ryman, ephemera ofperiodicals (mostly Art International expanded to the point where her studious
from whom she is now divorced), had a child, and the Hudson Review) for the more attention to art is dominated by her sympathy
picked up a Contributing Editorship to Art permanent objectivity of book-form raises the with down-trodden minority groups in society
International (1965) and dropped it for a serious question with which Lippard herself at large and by her exposure of the
Guggenheim Fellowship (1968) —and written begins her `Prefatory Notes' when she Establishment System. This is no longer art
two-thirds of the essays collected in Changing. wonders ... if any of them need see the light criticism, but critical cultural documentation
The range of the twenty-one essays in this again'. highly influenced by the form and concerns of
volume is more wide-ranging in subject matter At present I would say 'yes' to about a third some of the art ignored.
and provocative issues than is usual in art of the essays —not a very good batting-average I suspect that much of my criticism of these
critics' collections of their selected works. There for a retrospective exhibition. There are essays is not dissimilar to Lucy's own. In the
is a study of art criticism itself, arguing for ingenious and provocative ideas scattered last two years or so she has abnegated magazine
flexibility of criteria, variety and change. There through all the essays, but they are seldom essays for writing and compiling books and
are some thought-provoking 'historical' developed with self-critical fullness. The best organizing and determining exhibitions : which
studies of 'Dada into Surrealism: Max Ernst' parts are those where it is obvious that the is a sort of critique by rejection of the type of
(the topic of her M.A. thesis and excellent), author has listened to a particular artist and work collected in Changing. That she has changed
`primitive' African relative to early really seen and thought about his work her mind on most everything in the book is
twentieth-century European art, and through that filter : the Mangold, Poons, articulated in her opening comments `On the
eighteenth-century 'visionary architecture' Rosenquist, and confusingly-written LeWitt Book's Form' :

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