The Brooklyn Rail

Where did art history live in the 1970s? Inside a fantastically hackable machine called the slide projector, partly. At a recent talk in Albuquerque, feminist artist and longtime New Yorker Harmony Hammond recalled persuading university librarians to insert art by women into instructional decks used by “the boys.” Her friend Lucy R. Lippard, an established art critic and activist, projected slides by women artists on the façade of the then male-dominated Whitney Museum.

Both women now live far from New York in Galisteo, New Mexico. Their arrivals there (Hammond in the eighties, Lippard the nineties) perplexed the art establishment; after battling for recognition and getting it, why spirit yourself away? Lippard in particular had bolted over and over—away from MoMA’s halls after cutting her teeth there as a young staffer in the late fifties, then off to Boulder in the eighties for recurring stints as a visiting professor.

And yet the farther Lippard, Hammond, and their circle scattered from the ostensible center, the deeper they wound into new editions of the art history textbooks (and slide decks) they once had to crash. Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind is its own dense text, at times threatening to bottle the tempestuous figure it celebrates. But this rare display of Lippard’s vast collection ultimately affirms that you can’t fully close institutional walls around her.

Lippard isn’t precious about her collection; she calls it “stuff,” evoking the way works rolled into her life like any quotidian object. They’re gifts or jetsam from now-famous friends and collaborators: Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, On Kawara. Many works pooled in her SoHo apartment (dubbed the “sniper’s nest”) where she spent decades freelancing for publications as varied as Artforum and The Village Voice, often seeing twenty or thirty exhibitions a week.

Curator Alexandra Terry carves the two-level Radical Whirlwind from more than five hundred artworks, artist’s books, and ephemera from Lippard’s 1999 gift to the New Mexico Museum of Art. The ground floor is devoted entirely to artworks, arranged into five crystalline historical pillars.

The opening passage, “A Concrete Actuality,” examines Lippard’s lithe support of both minimalism and post-minimalism in the 1960s. In one corner, she assists Ad Reinhardt in declaring his works the “last paintings,” as exemplified by the severe screen print Untitled (Black Square) (1964). On a far wall, she champions Eva Hesse, whose ink-and-graphite garden of concentric circles reactivates the picture plane and hints at her sculptural wildness.

A zone called “The Dematerialization of Art” is anchored by Sol LeWitt’s crisp Steel Grid 3 × 3 × 3 (1979), a baked-enamel sculpture that bridges minimalism with his defining 1967 essay on conceptual art. As Lippard analyzed Lewitt’s late-sixties cohort of conceptualists (Joseph Cornell and Douglas Huebler appear here) and their fixation on ideas over objects, she was already surging toward a new consciousness.

Around the corner, “Feminist Art: A Revolutionary Strategy” and “A Massing of Energies” chart the 1969 uncorking of Lippard’s insurgent impulse and its aftermath. In her own telling, she was radicalized “late” through feminist and anti-Vietnam War discourse, but soon led groups like the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee (organizer of the aforementioned Whitney action in 1970).

Here Hammond enters with Bag IX (1971), a wearable paint-on-cloth sculpture embodying her career-long, conceptually charged exploration of fringe. Lippard’s umbrella widens to cover feminist artists (Beverly Buchanan, Alice Adams), artist’s artists who achieved late success (Louise Bourgeois), and artists who rose amid the globalization of the contemporary art market (Cecilia Vicuña, Öyvind Fahlström).

Lippard’s political awakening inspired the show’s title; the “radical whirlwind” is what neoconservative critic Hilton Kramer blamed for sidelining her from becoming an “important” art historian. It’s true that her frequent pivots kept her on culture’s jagged edge for decades, “[trying] to establish new centers on the margins,” as she wrote in a 1996 catalogue essay the last time her collection was shown.

Leap forward three decades and Lippard’s “off-centers” have centralized—at least in progressive discourses. The tight sections and chunky didactics of Radical Whirlwind’s first floor, closing with a passage on land art called “Beyond the Gallery,” give the impression that Lippard’s lava is cooling. Even parts of the exhibition design, positioning framed works on platforms like slides flashing from the proverbial deck, seem to cast otherwise fiery works backward into history.

Is the text finally set?

Not if the unruly second floor has anything to say about it. Here, Terry amplifies artist-writers’ voices to a degree that feels rare in contemporary art museums. The sweeping section “Artist’s Books: A Visual Form” scales back on didactics and lets niche publishing projects (including from the Lippard-cofounded nonprofit Printed Matter, Inc.) howl on their own.

The show’s culminating storm of bound and unbound ephemera—books, posters, buttons on Lippard’s iconic vest, and (digital) slides—adds oxygen to its “radical” argument just as new fascist currents render Lippard urgently important all over again.