Early in 2024, I got to interview one of my favorite writers, the critic Lucy Lippard, about her book Stuff: Instead of a Memoir, for the Art Angle.

The book covers Lippard’s life via the objects in her house, and is well worth picking up. In our conversation, we touched on a lot: her early memories of the New York art scene, including a meeting with the art critic Hilton Kramer, later the founder of the conservative journal The New Criterion and an antagonist; her role in the origins of Conceptual art, which including a brief time as the roommate of Conceptual art dealer Seth Siegelaub, who helped create an audience for the movement; her turn to political activism, including organizing a famous fundraiser for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the Vietnam War at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1969; and what inspired her to become a part of the Feminist Art Movement later, in the 1970s.

Instead of transcribing the whole thing, we are trying out a new format of bringing out a few favorite passages. But there a lot more in the interview. You can listen to the entire podcast on the Art Angle.

On Lippard’s origins as a writer

“I sent [the art critic Hilton Kramer] some things. As soon as I got to New York, I thought, I’m a writer, I can do this. And of course [the writing] was really ignorant about the art world, and he just advised me, ‘you write well, and when you’ve been around for a while, then you should start writing’…. I didn’t do anything for about four years. I didn’t submit anything—and that was a very good idea. In the meantime, I was getting an education hanging out in studios and got to know what I was writing about.

The other big influence on my writing, which I don’t know if I did justice to this in the book or even mentioned, was my father, who was smart and loved art. [He told me] that if he’d just known about art when he was coming up as a working class kid, he might’ve ended up in art instead of being a doctor and a medical educator and so forth. When I started writing for Art International, he said to me that he was very proud of me. He said, this is interesting, but I don’t really understand what you’re talking about.

I thought, do I really want to alienate all my non-inner-art-world audience? And I thought no. I slowly managed to have a clearer style, and that was very important to me.”

On art dealer Seth Siegelaub, and the new model of art created by Conceptual Art

“I never think of him as a dealer. He was a very bright guy. He had been a rug dealer, and became an art dealer quite successfully, because he was smart. He thought of ways to bypass [art’s] usual trajectory—you know, you show something, you go from a critic to maybe a gallery to maybe a museum to maybe a retrospective, and so forth and so on; that’s a sort of art world trajectory for success. He found a way of bypassing that, by publishing things in little books or in booklets and magazines and so forth that got the art out without all of that stuff going on. And the idea was that the artists wouldn’t have to kiss ass all the time and they could be freer and do what they wanted. And to some extent, that worked, because some of this work would never have even passed as art before Conceptualism…”

On helping organize an anti-war benefit at Paula Cooper Gallery, and art and politics in the ’60s

“Robert Huit, who’d already been politicized, and Ron Walin, who was with the Socialist Workers Party, and I got together. Paula must have instigated this on some level… I can’t remember how that all happened, but [Huit and Walin] were both more political than I was, or they knew more about being political than I did. The show was primarily major Minimalist artists and the statement we wrote… said something to the effect of, ‘By presenting the best work we can do, we are backing up our politics.’

That was an interesting idea that didn’t stick with me much. There became this whole business about ‘My art is my politics,’ and to some extent that was absolutely true: The people who didn’t want to have anything to do with politics, their art was their politics! The status quo was their politics. And the Vietnam War, of course, was triggering all of this. For the rest of us, we had to figure out a way of deciding what we were doing and how what we were doing was worth something, politically. But that was the first step, to use the best work that you had to back up a political cause.”

On becoming a feminist

“I guess it was writing the experimental novel, the only published novel I’ve ever done, called I See/You Mean. I already knew about the feminist movement. There was a group called WAR in the Art Workers Coalition—Women Artists in Revolution. They weren’t exactly my bag. For some reason they didn’t do it for me. I was sympathetic, but I wasn’t involved because I thought I was one of the boys. Then I went to Spain and was writing this novel, and when you’re writing fiction, you really have to think. Unlike in art criticism, in fiction, you have to look into yourself. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m a feminist.’ It was really that book.

Then I came back and the actual trigger was Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, and Faith Ringgold, who were starting something already. I joined and we did the Ad Hoc Women Artist Committee.”