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In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
Читать онлайн.Название In the Company of Rebels
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isbn 9781613320976
Автор произведения Chellis Glendinning
Издательство Ingram
Back note on Lucy’s photo postcard. Courtesy of Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Meanwhile, Lucy herself was taking to heart a truism of the conceptual art movement: life itself is as much a work of art as a painted canvas or a sculpted chunk of marble. She was plunging into the political movements of the times and has been involved ever since. In a 2006 interview with artist/curator Julie Ault, Lucy wryly recalled, “This was … a point in my own life when I couldn’t sit down at a table with people without starting an organization.” A believer in collaboration whether in art or politics—what she terms “social collage-making”—she was a co-founder of Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, Heresies, Artists Call against U.S. Intervention in Central America, as well as the Women’s Slide Registry and two performance-art street troupes.
Lucy was born in 1937 in New York City and raised there as well as in New Orleans, New Haven, and Charlottesville, Virginia—the daughter of Margaret Cross Lippard, an energetic liberal involved in such issues as affordable housing and race relations, and Vernon Lippard, dean of medical schools. The only child of two voracious readers, she decided at an early age that she wanted to be like the people behind the books: a writer. She graduated from Smith College in 1958 and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts with a master’s in art history in 1962.
I met this incisive mind when, by happenstance, we both moved to northern New Mexico. She built her tiny eco house in Galisteo in 1993. When I asked her about her vision for such a bold project, she surprised me.
“I built it with no vision whatsoever,” she said. “One guy called it ‘the shack by the creek.’ It has expanded a lot since the original 16’ × 24’ footprint; there’s now a book-and-paper-inundated workroom and a tiny guest room. And the trees I planted have grown. I love the interior—a light-filled room with high ceilings and a sleeping loft. It reminds me of loft living in NYC where, after escaping from East Village tenements in the 1960s, I spent most of my adult life. I’m still off the grid, but I’ve stopped hauling water now that I finally got on the community system.”
The Heretics Collective of Heresies magazine, 1977. Courtesy of Lucy Lippard.
When the house was finished enough to move in, Lucy proceeded to become a member of the partly Hispano, family-oriented desert village. Again boldly, she launched El Puente de Galisteo, a newsletter aiming to preserve local identity against the invasively gentrifying forces of economic globalization. Meanwhile, she became a Research Associate at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and a member of both the Galisteo Archaeological Sites Protection Act working group and Galisteo’s Community Planning Committee and Water Board.
Lucy is a petite, athletic woman, maybe a tad like the roadrunners that speed across the upland desert. Wisps of salt-and-pepper hair fly around her face like ideas leaping into flight, her thick eyebrows add a hint of distinction—and she loves to hike.
One summer day we made a trek under New Mexico’s turquoise cathedral of sky to see the petroglyphs in the Galisteo Basin. Dodging red rocks and fissures of erosion, she told me about New York’s feminist art movement of the 1970s, a period she described as “one of the most exhilarating ongoing experiences I’ve ever had, and it changed my life.” Aside from working in the Heresies collective, she was a founder of the bookstore/gallery Printed Matter. Its purpose was to publish and sell artists’ books that would offer “the page as an alternative space,” hence lifting art out of the sole domain of educated museumgoers to a wider audience. She was so dedicated to the intention of the project that she refused to include for sale her own “weird little novel” I See/You Mean because it didn’t fall within the definition of an artist’s book. I told her that someone should write her biography, and she shrugged off the prospect with characteristic self-deprecation and humor.
She was always doing that, shrugging off praise. The truth is that, during the years I have known her, she along with partner anthropologist Jim Faris were forever soaring off to give a lecture, receive an award, attend a meeting, or accept an honorary degree. “I’m as hectic as ever. Now we have to go to Australia,” she would explain as if the trip were a dreaded burden.
Lucy’s Galisteo Fire Department shot, 2001. Photo credit: Richard Shuff. Courtesy of Lucy Lippard.
But one trip was never a burden. That was the annual jaunt to “summer” in Maine. Lucy has gone to Kennebec Point in Georgetown, Maine every single year of her life. Being the ever-active archivist, she does not just go boating and hiking and read novels like the other “summer people”; she’s become something of a historian of the area as a gift to the generations whose roots are implanted in the seacoast soil.
Her 1997 book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society is a tribute to the paradoxical urge toward having a sense of place while moving from locale to locale in an itinerant society. The book boasts two simultaneously running displays of text plus many illustrations with lengthy captions. The main text consists of a discussion of issues such as historic preservation, mapping, archeology, photography, cultural differences, toxic contamination, and today’s public-art movement. Along the top edge of each page runs ‘’the vein of Maine”—Lucy’s personal observations about Kennebec Point and how the issues highlighted in the main text play out there. Then, throuout the book, are photographs of place-based art, with captions that relate them to the same issues. The point—and clearly the way she herself integrates the demands on a person who has lived in, come to know, and loved many places—is to be receptive and accountable to the place where one finds one’s self.
Speaking of accountability to place, shortly after its publication in 2014 Lucy sent me a copy of Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. In this essay she uses the same twist of thinking being developed during the days of Heresies in which disparate phenomena are linked by history, theme, or place—and thus revealed. The starting point is gravel pits in the U.S. West as a metaphor for the tragedy of what is happening in this portion of the continent. The journey includes Galisteo, Santa Fe, and the Navajo Nation as well as September 11’s Ground Zero in New York City, the Nevada nuclear bombing range, and Hoover Dam in Arizona. Each locale is elucidated as a face of contemporary, capitalist-fueled perception of land—what one might call unintentional “art,” contrasting with the deliberate land art that poets of imagery are creating to draw attention to the madness of seeing land as inanimate, useful, and disconnected from consequences.
She and I have shared not just place, but time; we both celebrate our birthdays in the spring. Aside from meeting for the occasional goblet of wine at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe and the yearly Thanksgiving fests at Sabra Moore’s Abiquiú abode, our birthdays bring us together. She was born in 1937, I in 1947—so I look to her for advanced notice of the twists, turns, triumphs, and potholes on the road to aging.
Needless to say, to celebrate, we send postcards.
SABRA MOORE: APRONS AND ART
(1943–)
I grew up with the tinges of historical forces at play within my own family—racial secrets, violence, war, labor, sexism and class were background forces that have motivated me as an artist and activist….
—S.M., LETTER TO CHELLIS GLENDINNING, 2015
Sabra Moore made the same trek from New York to New Mexico as her co-conspirator in the feminist art movement, Lucy Lippard. Specifically, she moved to a desert