The Brooklyn Rail

“Why is this not a memoir? Because I have never had any interest in writing one, spilling the dramas and all the ups and downs.” These are the opening lines of Lucy R. Lippard’s long-awaited not-memoir memoir. A slim hardcover volume, the book has an airy layout with color photographs lining the margins of every page, each numbered to correspond with an appendix of “Illustration Notes.” “Decades ago, I thought about writing object-induced memories—using the stuff I live with to tell an oblique life story.” These photographs (illustrations) amount to the objects, the “stuff” of Lippard’s life story. In part this is an “easy way out,” as she admits, and in part it’s by necessity, as age makes memory fade and objects serve as means of recollection.

While the illustrations do move the story forward, the book is more a matter-of-fact account of the writer’s life than a catalogue of objects. These illustrated events include covers of Lippard’s many publications, including her “almost unreadable experimental novel” I See/You Mean, the extremely well-known Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object “and on and on … a 96-word title,” and Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, after which, Lippard notes, “once the mea culpas are over, it is much harder for White women to talk about Whiteness than about Blackness and Brownness.” These short reflective nuggets are peppered throughout the book, evidence of Lippard’s time spent reflecting as much as collecting memories and experiences that she gathers into Stuff.

Events that would be strung out in chapters in a traditional memoir: her marriage to the artist Robert Ryman, the birth of her son, and numerous other love affairs, are noted with brevity and without much context (“After I was stalked by an ex-con with whom I’d been involved, I moved in with Bob [Robert Ryman] on 10th Street and Avenue A” and later, “fellow activist and genius conceptual art entrepreneur Seth Siegelaub moved in with me”). These are accompanied by more personal mementos: a dimly lit and closely cropped photo of the couple on their wedding day, Lippard in a knee-length green dress; a black-and-white photo of Ryman with their newborn in their Bowery home; and photos of their son playing.

It’s not just the personal events in her life that Lippard treats with this levity, but her own art historical and professional advancements and relevance. “I never was much of an art historian. By then I knew that I was more interested in art that was making history than in history already made,” she writes early on. While this may be true of her own perception of her role in art of the 1970s and ’80s, from 2024’s perspective, no one would dispute that Lippard not only made history with her writing, curating, and organizing, but that these writings are now foundational parts of art history, including many of the books noted throughout this collection. Her role as a regular writer for Art International is noted with a black-and-white photograph of Lippard standing pregnant: “Max [Kozloff] recommended me [for the position], and I wisely did not inform the Switzerland-based editor that I was very pregnant, which would have been a deal breaker.” Lippard accounts her awakening to feminism and the formation of several feminist organizations in addition to the artists’ book non-profit Printed Matter (“The mid-1970s were a time when I couldn’t sit down at a kitchen table with co-conspirators without another group being formed”). Of the latter, she notes in the illustration notes, “With few exceptions, my extensive collection of artists’ books is no longer in the house, leaving a big hole in the ‘stuff.’ It was recently donated to the New Mexico Museum of Art.” This raises an important subtext to the book: although the memoir itself isn’t as much about stuff as is about life events, the numerous photos of books, photos, and cluttered rooms alludes to a problem plaguing many artists, writers, and creatives of Lippard’s generation—where will all the stuff go?

The question of how to ensure one’s stuff is properly stewarded for future use and research remains unanswered by Lippard and many others. “Some 200 boxes have been sent off to the Archives of American Art, libraries, schools, prisons, historical societies, the Nevada Museum’s Center for Art + Environment, and thousands of books to any place that will take them,” Lippard notes of her own stuff. As for what remains, and herself, “I still have no plans, continuing to hope that I leave Galisteo feet first,” she ends the book. While she addresses this issue with the same wry humor, this collection at least offers one attempt to save these stories and this stuff.