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List of contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Against Culture: Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy, F Ventrella (University of Sussex, UK) and G Zapperi (Université de Tours, France)
Art Writing Against Art
1. Carla Lonzi: Encountering American Art, Judith Russi Kirshner (Independent Scholar, USA)
2. Magnetic Encounters: Listening to Carla Lonzi’s Tape Recordings, Francesco Ventrella (University of Sussex, UK)
3. (Post-)Normative Silence, Sabeth Buchman (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria)
Creativity and the Feminist Subject
4. The Making of a Feminist Subject. Autonomy, Authenticity and Withdrawal, Giovanna Zapperi (Université de Tours, France)
5. Turbulence Zone: Diasporic Resonances Across Carla Lonzi’s Archive, Liliana Ellena (European University Institute, Italy)
6. ‘I Thought Art Was For Women’: Interview, Suzanne Santoro (Independent Scholar, Italy)
Art as Relation
7. The End of an Affair: Carla Lonzi and the Politics of Rapporto, Leslie Cozzi (Baltimore Museum of Art, USA)
8. Reimagining the Family Album: Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto, Teresa Kittler (University of York, UK)
9. The Beato Angelico Cooperative. A Feminist Art Space in Rome, Katia Almerini (Independent Scholar, UK)
Genealogies and Resonances
10. Free Escape, Elisabeth Lebovici (Independent Scholar, France)
11. Feminism and Art ca.1970: Writing [Art] Otherwise, Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds, UK)
Index
About the author
Francesco Ventrella is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. He is the co-editor with Meaghan Clarke of Women and the Culture of Connoisseurship, a special issue of Visual Resources on (2017). His articles on art historiography, aesthetics and sexuality have appeared in European Journal of Women’s Studies, Studi Culturali and Art History. Giovanna Zapperi is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Tours, France. She is the author of the award-winning study The Artist is a Woman: Marcel Duchamp's Modernity (2012) and of Carla Lonzi: An Art of Life (2017). With Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez she has curated the exhibition Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and Feminist Video Collectives in France, 1970s-1980s (Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2019-2020).
Summary
A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi refused art, she articulated how feminist spaces and communities drew strength from creativity.
The eleven essays in this book document the artistic and feminist circles of postwar Italy, a time characterised both by radical protest and avant-garde aesthetics, using primary and archival sources never before translated into English. They map Lonzi’s deep connections to the influential Italian Arte Povera movement, and explore her complicated relationship with female artists of the time, such as Carla Accardi and Suzanne Santoro.
Carla Lonzi’s written work and activism represents a crucial, but previously overlooked, feminist intervention in traditional art history from beyond the Anglo-American canon. This book is a timely and urgent addition to our understanding of radical politics, separatist feminism and art criticism in the postwar period.
Foreword
First examination of Carla Lonzi and her contribution to feminist art.
Additional text
Carla Lonzi is little known in the anglophone world, her writing little translated, and her revolutionary feminist praxis overlooked. Here, artists and writers explore aspects of her thought, her activity, and her impact. Fifty years after she quit the art world, and facing renewed crises in cultural, sexual, class, and racial politics, we have much to learn still from her strategies of refusal and assent, kinship and difference.
