Any attempt to give an account of the histories of feminism and art in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century inevitably stumbles upon the figure of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), a renowned art critic throughout the 1960s, who would later become the most emblematic figure of Italian feminism. Lonzi’s intellectual and political trajectory is marked by her withdrawal from the art world in 1970, as she founded the radical feminist group Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt) with Italian artist Carla Accardi and African-Italian journalist Elvira Banotti. Her feminism is therefore defined by a radical negativity, which expresses itself in her refusal of the profession she had successfully carried out for over a decade, as well as in her search for alternative ways of writing and living in which patriarchal institutions, such as art, could be challenged. In both her writings and her political practice, the undoing of ‘woman’ and the critique of the affective labour traditionally performed by women became crucial aspects of the collective transformative process she promoted.

During the 1970s Lonzi elaborated the political and existential terms of her withdrawal from the art world and her profession as an art critic. Rivolta Femminile was one of the very first feminist groups in Italy whose practice was based on separatism and autocoscienza (consciousness-raising). Between 1970 and 1972 Lonzi wrote a number of texts that marked a turning point for the Italian women’s liberation movement on account of their unprecedented ability to address issues of sexuality and revolutionary politics, and that called for a cultural revolution based on woman’s becoming a subject.1 In particular, the radicalism of her 1970 pamphlet Sputiamo su Hegel (We Spit on Hegel), with its daring title and provocative deconstruction of Hegelian master–slave dialectics, was crucial in establishing Lonzi as the most prominent feminist thinker of her generation in Italy.

From 1970 on, the critique of art’s patriarchal structures became the basis upon which Lonzi develops a feminist practice of withdrawal from the roles and expectations structuring her life. In particular, her continuous search for valuable forms of disobedience against the patriarchal organization of life was based upon the refusal to comply with the male mechanisms of reputation and success. Lonzi’s desire to establish non-hierarchical relations and communities explicitly countered the patriarchal emphasis on the idea that social roles define one’s subjectivity, instead positioning the subject within a network of relations.

In addressing Lonzi’s positions, my aim is to emphasize the entwinement between her critique of art as ideology and the antiwork politics that her withdrawal implied. Lonzi’s understanding of the relation between art and life is one of the fundamental issues she raised throughout her writings, and more poignantly in her late work. In Vai Pure (Now You Can Go), her excruciating 1980 dialogue with her lifelong partner, the artist Pietro Consagra, Lonzi elaborated a feminist critique of art considered as a sum of institutions, power relations, forms of sociability and labour that structurally oppress women. Throughout her writings, the relation between art, life and professional activity is developed through personal relationships, in a way that directly connects life and politics. Lonzi’s existential feminism is rooted in the crucial significance of lived relationships for her political practice, as much as her perspective on art always takes into account personal history, intimacy and emotions.

Lonzi’s writings from the late 1960s until 1980 provide a unique perspective on the political intensity of the conflicts that are played out in the private sphere. The awareness of the seizure of personal relations within art (and work), upon which social interactions are organized, becomes the primary ground for her struggle for recognition and social transformation. Her various interactions with artists demonstrate art’s structural link with male prerogatives and woman’s oppression in a way that precludes any possible redemption. Whereas by the end of the 1960s Lonzi wanted to emphasize the difference between artists and workers, as these two figures eventually coincided, she constantly appears to be claiming autonomy for herself. One of the most striking aspects of her dialogue with Consagra is the ways in which the artist seems to be literally confined within the values of the art world, while Lonzi embodies a desire for a life beyond pre-established rules, habits and systems of value.

 

The art–life problem

Carla Lonzi’s shift from art criticism to feminism might appear unexpected, if one did not take into account Lonzi’s complex process of disengagement from and unravelling of her professional identification as an art critic. Her art criticism was marked by a self-reflexive position that led her to challenge art criticism’s institutional framework and languages. Lonzi objected that art criticism had become a patronizing and authoritarian activity, and tried to devise innovative ways to write about art, in which she could feel closer to the creative process. Throughout the 1960s she tried to experiment with a form of relational writing by turning to the artists: she promoted dialogues and increasingly avoided discussing the art work via formal analysis and aesthetic judgement. In 1969 she published Autoritratto (Self–portrait), a book based on the principle of montage, consisting of a series of tape-recorded conversations with fourteen artists, which she had transcribed and then stitched together in a way that ruptures the continuum of each dialogue.2 The result is three hundred pages of aleatory conversations, interspersed with a number of photographic images taken from the participants’ private albums. Lonzi herself participates in the conversation, but she poses barely any questions; nor does she explain the artists’ artworks. She rather speaks for herself, in her own voice. Autoritratto is based on the idea that the work of art criticism is relational and therefore challenges the modernist fiction of a disinterested and neutral aesthetic judgement. Personal history and intersubjective encounters replace the social and epistemic structures defining art criticism, as these were based on the critic’s detachment and observation.

Autoritratto already foreshadows Lonzi’s impending withdrawal from the role and profession in which she had been involved since graduating from the University of Florence in 1956. The dialogic format adopted in the book was a way for her to escape the alienation she experienced in the role of the passive yet authoritative observer, which was inevitably located outside of the creative process. As a matter of fact, art criticism’s repressive function concerned not just the artists, but also the critic herself, whose subjectivity and desire had to be contained within the fiction of an institutional role:

Instead of being the one who is available and in need, the critic becomes a judge and creates therefore a whole hierarchy. And throughout this activity that he ends up developing, he actually repeals the starting point from which he had started, thus becoming a completely phony person.3

Lonzi’s understanding of art criticism’s activity as deceptive recalls the fiction of an unmarked universal perspective, even though at the time she didn’t clearly identify it in terms of gender. One of the main issues emerging from the book is precisely how the dismantling of the function of art criticism allowed the opportunity to rethink art beyond the institutional framework in which its meaning was secured. As opposed to a profession based on the production of ‘futile commentaries’, Lonzi is interested in the relation between the art work and the ‘gestures of life’, or, to put it differently, the possibility ‘to live one’s life in a creative manner, instead of obediently comply to the models proposed by society’.4 The focus on relationality thus became a way for her to connect the creative process to the facts of life, as if art could exist outside of the institutional chain of roles, habits and obligations.

The critic’s own alienation with respect to both profession and life thus becomes the crux of Lonzi’s argument throughout the book. While discussing her own estrangement from art criticism, she turned to the artists who became a sort of countermodel for the liberation she was seeking for herself. During the 1960s, while she was assembling Autoritratto, Lonzi had endorsed the artist’s autonomy and freedom in opposition to the institutional role of the critic. In line with modernist ideas about art’s autonomy, she considered the artist as an exemplary figure of a life beyond work. At the time, Lonzi believed that art was the only viable escape from the alienating forces organizing human life, and that the artist’s ability to evade identification with a role, category or profession was a decisive aspect in her understanding of art’s autonomy. The ability to connect directly with life rather than with an institutionalized role paradoxically posits the artist in antagonism towards the art critic’s ‘repressive control over art and artists’. For these reasons, the artist had nothing in common with the worker, an idea that Lonzi translates via the notion of the artist’s ‘authenticity’, as opposed to the critic’s ‘phony profession’ and coercive function.5

Art institutions, including art criticism, try to contain and neutralize the artist’s freedom; for this reason artists need to move away from the institutions in which their activity is distorted, and rather address life as such, as Lonzi claims in a passage from Autoritratto:

The art problem is always a life problem; it’s not a cultural problem. Do you see what I mean? It doesn’t concern the university. People are tired of playing the public or the apprentice; they want to enter the thing, or rather, they feel like they are already in.6

This notion of art as an activity encompassing all aspects of life, and the ensuing refusal of art’s allocated spaces (the museum, the gallery, the collector’s private homes) was a crucial aspect in the contestation of the modernist legacy in the late 1960s. It was within this framework that Lonzi also condemned the mechanisms of the selection and evaluation of art, considering them to be excessively compromised owing to their association with the institution.

In Autoritratto, Lonzi’s relational practice was the ground upon which she accomplished the process of undoing her own role as a critic, a process that ultimately propelled her to the centre of the political turmoil of the time. Yet, the book also became a source of disappointment as the artists themselves were not ready to follow the same path. In most cases, they failed to engage in the various forms of politicized practices and radicalism that had blossomed in the wake of 1968, and refused to challenge their own artistic vocabulary, which was, broadly speaking, very much based on a variety of strategies that aimed at destabilizing the modernist legacy from within.7 According to Lonzi, the disappointing nature of her undertaking with the artists concerned their unwillingness to address their (male) privilege in society, with the accompanying consequence that they proved incapable of examining their own alienation, namely the fact that their lives revolved around the art world’s mechanisms of reputation and success.8

By the early 1970s Lonzi had become aware of this divide: ‘The artist’, she writes in her diary, ‘is far too loaded with myth.’9 Accordingly, during the 1970s Lonzi’s understanding of her relation with artists underwent a dramatic overhaul: she felt she had been betrayed and victimized by the artists’ imposture, while the artist’s freedom at this point had proved to be far too compromised in its entanglement with ideology and became therefore politically unacceptable. Lonzi’s feminism is in many ways based on her changing ideas about the artist, which precipitated her withdrawal from both the institutional position she had occupied as an art critic and the arena of art as such, which, during the 1970s, she came to equate with the quintessence of a social structure based on male privilege and woman’s structural exclusion. Hence, upon her return to these issues in the 1970s and early 1980s, the artist has become first and foremost an alienated worker.

 

The sexual division of artistic labour

Lonzi’s ambition to redefine art criticism as a practice informed by the facts of life turned out to be an inadequate response to the transformations that were affecting Italian society by the end of the 1960s, and she ultimately decided to opt out. And yet Autoritratto foregrounds her specific understanding of politics as identified with the existential space of the relations that form the fabric of life. During the 1970s she constantly returned to some of the issues addressed in the book, most notably to the questions of art, life and work. This is perhaps the central subject of Lonzi’s last book, Vai pure. Dialogo con Pietro Consagra (Now You Can Go: A Dialogue with Pietro Consagra), which also marks a return to the conversation format, this time as a one- to-one dialogue with her partner, the artist Pietro Consagra. The book, published in 1980, comprises the transcription of a tape-recorded dialogue, which records the crisis of the long-term relationship between Lonzi and Consagra.10 The conversation took place in Lonzi’s Rome apartment and is carried out over four days, between late April and early May 1980.

The discussion revolves around issues of art, work and love. Lonzi and Consagra painfully scrutinize how they relate to each other and examine, albeit in radically different directions, the political significance of what happens in the personal sphere. They address topics such as the difference between creative and reproductive labour, the male artist’s subjectivity and woman’s attempt to be recognized as an autonomous subject. The point of contention concerns the divergent manner in which each of them understands the terms of their relationship. On one side, Consagra seems to be content with his own circumstances, with their range of established habits, privileges and obligations, which constitute his life and relationship. Lonzi, on the contrary, tries to tackle the structural violence of a situation in which she feels trapped and disempowered. As she states in the introduction, the book intends to break the secrecy surrounding the heterosexual couple: the decision to disseminate the conversation was therefore a form of disclosure.

During the dialogue, Lonzi returns to the meaning of her withdrawal from art, and underlines her precarious situation in comparison to Consagra’s privileged position as a successfully established artist: ‘Well, I just want you to realize this condition of ours: of you as a cultural figure, and of myself, living at the mercy of a world without control, which is the private…’11 While her activity accords with her life, thus remaining unnoticed, Consagra’s circumstances are entirely registered by the mechanisms of social and cultural approval. For Lonzi, these are consistent with patriarchal structures – such as individualism and competition between men – from which women are excluded. The discussion revolves around Consagra’s identification as an artist – and how this determines every single aspect of his life – as opposed to Lonzi’s search for a strategy of disidentification from the roles that organize human activity. According to Lonzi, an artist’s life is regulated by creative labour in a way that blurs the distinction between life and work: one is an artist twenty-four hours a day. Artists thus embody the paradigm of the individual whose life – relations, affects, time and sexuality – is entirely at the service of the affirmation of their creative personality.

Vai pure is reminiscent of Lonzi’s past disillusion with the artists and the experience of Autoritratto. As opposed to what she had maintained in the 1960s, now Lonzi clarifies that the artist’s autonomy can only exist at the expense of woman’s freedom, since it needs to dismiss the relational dimension of life and repress it into the private sphere. In analysing the conflict between art and life, Lonzi opposes the male artist, as the unique protagonist, to the woman’s desire to be recognized as an autonomous subject. Vai pure opens up with the deadlock between Consagra’s identification as an artist and Lonzi’s refusal to fulfil the accompanying tasks required by the creative personality: the affective labour traditionally performed by the artist’s wife or lover. Lonzi had withdrawn from all the tasks that, in her everyday life, involved her role as an artist’s partner, such as attending exhibition openings and other events that punctuate the art world’s social calendar. This was a source of frustration for Consagra, who affirms his desire for assistance:

I missed someone by my side during my social life as well, in my work, in my worries. … I couldn’t stand the loneliness while I was with a woman who didn’t help me when I desperately needed help: company and encouragement when I felt lonely, or when I was travelling for my exhibitions, or in my studio.12

No wonder that Consagra explicitly qualifies a woman’s role in the creative process as subordinate.13 What he considers as his legitimate needs are in fact the male prerogatives against which Lonzi is struggling, as in her view the artist’s autonomy is now based on women’s exclusion and confinement to the role of the caring other.

According to Lonzi, ‘the limited space’14 of art is where relations are rendered invisible in favour of the artist’s ‘protagonism’: the myth of his originality and coherence, according to which artworks can be considered as mere expressions of an absolute self. Interestingly, in confronting the power structures in which her relationship is entwined, Lonzi constantly refers to the modernist ideology of the artist as a cultural hero, as well as to the structures of male narcissism that entail women’s exclusion.15 This is perhaps the reason why, in Autoritratto, Lonzi assembled a number of dialogues that were originally recorded separately in a way that creates the fiction of an ongoing, collective exchange, as if the artists were actually talking to each other. In doing so, Lonzi demonstrates that she no longer believed that art is an individual and solitary endeavour, as much as she opposed the critic’s exclusive entitlement to assess the art work. The book emphasizes instead the idea that the creative process is entangled in a multiplicity of relations.

In keeping with this line of reasoning, Vai pure takes as its starting point Lonzi’s awareness of the relational labour she performs, as a woman and the partner of an artist, and how her activity participates in a creative process from which she is virtually excluded. In a way, it can be said that in Autoritratto Lonzi sought to reinvent art criticism precisely by turning the critic’s authoritative function into relational labour. This move ultimately allowed her to connect with the artists outside of the institutional role she wanted to challenge, while at the same time producing a network of encounters and dialogues. In the 1960s she believed that her endeavour had somehow also allowed her to claim creativity for herself – via the relations she was able to generate – while by the time of Vai pure she had come to realize that, in the field of art, a woman has no other choices than remaining silent or speaking a language of self-negation. At best, a woman can occupy the role of the listening other, art critic or lover, both spectators of someone else’s accomplishments. Lonzi draws on her personal experience while suggesting a parallel between her role as an art critic and as the artist’s partner, as in both cases woman facilitates the creative process thanks to her assistance, understanding and support. Alternatively, a woman can also try to become an artist herself, therefore having to confront the inadequacy of the existing criteria and systems of validation. Women artists inevitably stumble upon their need for approval from male institutions and artists; therefore they end up being trapped in their own alienation as they endorse a social role that ultimately oppresses them.16

While discussing the artist’s demand for an unequal relation, Lonzi points at the existential dilemma she is facing between the contradictory desires for love and for autonomy:

I don’t know where this way of feeling is taking me, but I cannot overturn the priorities between our needs. … because what I want is love for my autonomy, which is not love of my dependence and of my service.17

Even if the dialogue with Consagra might at times convey the kind of recriminations one would expect from a couple on the edge of a break-up, its significance lies in its ability to expose the constitutive power differential within the heterosexual couple, as well as the cultural structures involved in the conflict between art and life. Lonzi contests that the relationship is subsumed within the creative process, as Consagra only acts for himself, or rather for the art work, which literally ‘dictates the agenda’.18 The artist’s masculinity wraps itself with the distinction connected to his privileged status over women, which entails the fact that the personal sphere is appropriated and sublimated in the creative process. In other terms, art is inseparable from what Lonzi calls ‘male protagonism’, which generates the power imbalance she is fighting against. In the modern tradition, this imbalance could typically be translated as the division of labour within the artist’s studio, as exemplified in the eroticized relation between the artist and his model. Sublimation rhymes with domination, Lonzi seems to suggest when she underlines that this configuration of the creative process turns women’s work into a symbolic function, another way of excluding them from the sphere of subjectivity.

Here, significantly, Lonzi refers to the case of Zelda Fitzgerald as an emblematic example of this pernicious apparatus’s destructive consequences. Zelda Fitzgerald found herself at the mercy of a man who instrumentalized their relationship for the sake of his own literary production, a fact that eventually culminated in her mental distress. Zelda lost her mind because she was isolated, disempowered and unable to find the support she would have needed for herself, as ‘there were no feminist groups’19 at the time. On the contrary, Lonzi can avoid collapsing because feminism provides her with the necessary strength to resist the self-annihilation required by the creative personality. The artist’s protagonism requires that women disavow themselves in the private sphere, while in the public domain they are expected to perform their own sacrifice by acting as muses, sources of inspiration and supporting partners, which Lonzi refuses to do. Hence she tries to dismantle the function of art as an ideology, while at the same time finding herself in the position of having to struggle against art’s destructive effects on her life.

 

A life beyond work

Lonzi’s refusal of the affective labour requested by her artist partner is predicated upon a practice of ‘deculturation’, a term she coined in the early 1970s, as she was trying to conceptualize her own withdrawal from her professional activity as a form of disidentification.20 This the core of Lonzi’s idea of liberation and refers to the process of undoing the roles that determine women’s existence. In order to engage with her own desire for transformation, womanhood must be collectively undone starting from the roles, stereotypes, gestures and all the categories that both oppress and define ‘woman’. In this respect, a practice of deculturation corresponds with a process in which women dare to abandon what they thought they knew about themselves. Refusing the role of ‘woman’ opens up the possibility of imagining a different becoming, which is no longer based on man’s approval. Deculturation is therefore key to Lonzi’s notion of the subject as it emerges from a process of unravelling oneself in a sort of radical negativity, or, in other words, in the refusal to be or to become a woman.21 One of her crucial contributions has consisted precisely in undoing ‘woman’, as both a political endeavour and a lived experience.

The figure of the ‘clitoral woman’ that Lonzi envisions in the early 1970s suggests precisely the revolt against ‘woman’ as an already-available product, which is, in Lonzi’s vocabulary, the ‘vaginal woman’, whose sexuality is entirely captured within the mechanisms of social reproduction.22 These two opposing figures need to be understood as political fictions indicating a path towards the affirmation of a ‘non-conformist sexual identity’,23 as the clitoral woman allows for the establishment of a link between the refusal of reproductive labour and a radical critique of patriarchal institutions such as the heterosexual couple, romantic love, the nuclear family, and so on.24 Lonzi identifies these social structures as ‘culture’.

Throughout the 1970s Lonzi would keep on unravelling the threads that interweave womanhood with a number of roles and tasks encompassing the social as well as the intimate sphere. In doing so, she always took her lived experience and the relations in which her life was enmeshed as the main concern of her political endeavour. The notion of rapporto (relationship) therefore emerges as a crucial and recurring keyword in her writings. Rapporto can be considered as the nucleus of Lonzi’s feminist practice as it foregrounds the relational dimension of subjectivity and the political necessity to transform the way we relate to one another, especially within the personal sphere.25 In promoting dialogues and relationality, Lonzi sought to generate a process of mutual recognition in which a new subjectivity can unfold, as opposed to the notion of the subject as an autonomous and universal individual inherited from the modernist tradition. In opposition to a life based on the artist’s distinction and privilege, Lonzi proposes the radical alternative of a non-instrumental relationship, where being together can be something like a ‘means without an end’.26

Lonzi’s conversation with Consagra is an attempt to change the relations that perpetuate the roles oppressing women. Against the patriarchal organization and seizure of life, Lonzi counters her desire for a society based on a collective and participatory being together, liberated from the conditioning of social approval. This is a central aspect in the conflict opposing her to Consagra, as what she is striving for is not a mere egalitarian utopia. In Lonzi’s terms, the meaning of rapporto refers to the very possibility of living otherwise, of a life that is able to resist the mechanism of valorization and capture typical of the artist’s existence.

The problem of the irreconcilable conflict between rapporto and art is the main issue addressed in the fourth and last day of the dialogue comprising Vai pure. Lonzi and Consagra meet again after two weeks have passed since their last recording. The general tone of the discussion has now shifted from the polemical mood that had prevailed in the previous chapters, towards a certain fatigue prompted by the shared feeling that the couple have now reached a point of no return. Consagra is willing to admit, for example, that yes, in his view, ‘human relations are only possible if they are connected to this commitment to the object’, whereas Lonzi reaffirms her perception that his identification as an artist and his work in general hinder the relation.27 Consagra, in turn, now acknowledges that ‘work is a bit against human relations’, and that ‘art is the symbol of a type of work that requires us to participate in a myth.28 While recapitulating the reasons for their crisis, he says: ‘Our disagreement arises from the pleasure that you want to have in a relation – because you create a relation that tends to this, and everyone enjoys it – and what I propose in exchange, which is not pleasant to you.’29 However, for Lonzi, Consagra’s proposal is not just unpleasant, it is ‘unliveable’, precisely because she seeks to live a life that is something different from work, which her partner is unable to understand. For Lonzi ‘art grows and disseminates to the detriment of human relations’,30 inasmuch as these are inevitably instrumentalized within the logic of the artwork. Lonzi laments the fact that their relationship is predicated upon the primacy of Consagra’s work in a way that invades all aspects of their life as a couple, as she argues in the book’s final pages:

You must understand that our whole life is structured by work, all of it, that we are never together for ourselves. It’s just a pause, a rest from work. The vital, conscious and active moment, the promised land is work… You don’t have a schedule, you don’t have a job, you don’t have obligations, but you create a more constraining situation than if you had a job and a boss.31

Vai pure ends with a farewell that gives the book its title (‘you can go’ is Lonzi’s concluding remark addressed to Consagra) and with the unresolved dilemma of life and work, a dilemma that had occupied Lonzi’s thinking ever since she had started to contest her role as an art critic. The book’s final passage shows the extent to which life’s subordination to the logic of work has emptied the relationship of any independent meaning, whereas Lonzi strives for a relation that can exist beyond the obligations and habits that make an artist’s life. Her disagreement indicates the possibility of living a life where relations are not disciplined within the logic of work, which implicitly, and inevitably, suggests capitalist productivity.

In this respect, Vai pure also returns not just to some of the issues she had raised as an art critic, but also to her early feminist writings, in particular the first Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile, written in the spring of 1970. Several passages of the manifesto discuss the critique of reproductive labour within the framework of an anti-work politics that emphasize women’s hidden and under-recognized labour, while at the same time claiming unproductivity’s independent value. For Rivolta Femminile, the refusal of work32 translates a political strategy of withdrawal from social expectations:

We identify in unpaid domestic work the help that allows both private and state capitalism to survive. … We detest the mechanism of competitiveness and the blackmail exercised in the work by the hegemony of efficiency. We want to put our working capacity at the disposal of a society that is immune to this. … Attributing value to ‘unproductive’ moments is an extension of life proposed by woman.33

These paragraphs resonate with the transnational ‘wages against housework’ campaign, which gained momentum in Italy in the early 1970s, thanks to the writings and activism of a number of women who articulated a feminist discourse that was otherwise very remote from Rivolta Femminile’s positions.34 Rivolta Femminile’s and Lonzi’s ideas can therefore be discussed in the wider framework of the refusal of what Silvia Federici called the ‘labour of love’, namely the relational and affective labour women perform in their everyday lives.35 According to Federici, wages against housework are the first step of the struggle against woman’s social role, and thus against work itself.36 The demand for wages renders reproductive labour visible, which is the condition to start struggling against it. In denying housework the status of labour, capitalism has transformed it into an act of love and has identified women with the tasks they have to accomplish. Federici challenges woman’s assimilation with reproductive labour, as well as the very notion that love can be nothing else than work. In a similar way, Lonzi also counters the idea that woman’s work is unproductive and at the same time opposes the perspective of a life reduced to work. However, contrary to Federici, she is not interested in analysing woman’s subjection within the Marxist framework of class relations, because in her view identifying women with class would put them back within a structure that actively operates towards their exclusion.37

In keeping with her existential understanding of woman’s oppression, Lonzi rather aims at overturning woman’s association with unproductivity and transforming it into a political programme. Throughout Vai pure, the manifesto’s critique of reproductive labour and its anti-work politics becomes the crux of Lonzi’s argument against Consagra’s exclusive focus on the artwork. Hence, the artist emerges as an alienated individual whose existence is based on the perfect coincidence between what he is and what he does, thus becoming a paradigmatic figure of contemporary labour, self-absorbed and competitive. Lonzi’s desire to be loved for her autonomy instead of her service offers instead a radical alternative to the idea that relationships operate within the logics of production.

Lonzi’s ideas about the artist’s masculinity and the function of art as ideology can be productively addressed within the broader critique of art that has been at the centre of much of feminist art history and criticism since the 1970s. Feminist art historians of her generation in the Anglo-American context – such as Linda Nochlin or Carol Duncan – pointed out the material conditions that have excluded women from artistic production, indicating within the sexual division of artistic labour a crucial aspect of art’s ideological apparatus.38 However, what differentiates Lonzi’s position is not just the fact that she abandoned art (i.e. she never became a ‘feminist art critic’, as did, for instance, Lucy Lippard), but also that her critique is the result of a mediation with her lived experience and, more importantly, with the kind of transformative relations with which she tried to experiment, be it in the art world, in the feminist group or in the intimacy of a love relationship. While reflecting upon the political significance of women’s relational labour, Lonzi was particularly interested in stressing the performative role women play within the theatre of male culture. This aspect is crucial to my understanding of Lonzi’s positioning against art as the basis upon which she imagines and embodies a new feminist subjectivity.

The dialogue with Consagra remains somehow held in suspension, as there is no possible resolution of the dilemma between art and life that had occupied Lonzi ever since assembling Autoritratto. Lonzi’s trajectory and radical search for alternative modes of living leave us with a set of open questions with no easy answers. Her political and existential project is certainly fated to remain utopian, as it appears entangled in a number of contradictions. Needless to say, Lonzi’s anti-work politics was made possible by her relative privilege of being able to avoid work, even though this made the conflict between dependence and autonomy even more inextricable. One could also wonder how the conflicts that are played out within the heterosexual bourgeois couple, no matter how exemplary of a cultural structure, can be transposed to society at large. However, in opposing life to art, and thus to work, Carla Lonzi expresses a desire for a life liberated from the power relations that organize social interactions. Her ability to correlate life and politics can still be relevant today, as the barriers between the personal and the productive spheres are increasingly dissolving, and feminist movements around the globe keep on experimenting and imagining new ways of living and being together.

 

Notes

1. See Carla Lonzi, ‘Sputiamo su Hegel’ (1970), in Sputiamo su Hegel, La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974, pp. 19-61; ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, trans. G. Bellesia and E. Maclachnan, in P. Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G.F.W. Hegel, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1996.

2. Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, Bari: De Donato, 1969. The artists’ names are also mentioned on the book’s cover: Accardi, Alviani, Castellani, Consagra, Fabro, Fontana, Kounellis, Nigro, Paolini, Pascali, Rotella, Scarpitta, Turcato, Twombly. On the process of assembling Autoritratto, see Laura Iamurri, Un margine che sfugge. Carla Lonzi e l’arte in Italia, 1955–1968, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016, pp. 167–213.

3. Lonzi, Autoritratto, pp. 47–8. Lonzi always uses the male person when discussing the figure of the art critic. All subsequent quotations from Lonzi’s texts are translated by the author, unless otherwise indicated.

4. Ibid., p. 48.

5. Ibid., pp. 7, 44. On Lonzi’s notion of authenticity in relation to art and feminism, see Giovanna Zapperi, ‘The Making of a Feminist Subject: Autonomy, Authenticity and Withdrawal’, in Francesco Ventrella and Giovanna Zapperi, eds, Art and Feminism in Post-war Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, London: Bloomsbury 2020, pp. 89–110.

6. Lonzi, Autoritratto, pp. 203–4.

7. See Alex Potts’s discussion of Arte Povera artists’ ambivalent strategy towards the modernist notion of art’s autonomy and the art–life relation, in Alex Potts, ‘Disencumbered Objects’, October 124, Spring 2008, pp. 169–89; and Alex Potts, ‘Autonomy in Post-War Art: Quasi-heroic and Casual’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, pp. 53–7.

8. All the artists involved in Autoritratto are male with the exception of Carla Accardi, with whom Lonzi discovered and embraced the feminist movement in a process that is chronicled via Accardi’s interventions in the book. A founding member of Rivolta Femminile, Accardi was instrumental in Lonzi’s becoming a feminist, as she would later recount in her diary: ‘Rivolta Femminile was born out of two persons, [Carla] and I, who had questioned male subjectivity precisely because we had positioned ourselves as subjects: [Carla] as an artist, and myself as a consciousness of a different identity.’ Carla Lonzi, ‘14 August 1972’, in Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta femminile 1978, p. 40. However, contrary to Lonzi, Accardi did not step out of the art world and refused to give up her identification as an artist, which ultimately caused the end of their friendship in 1973.

9. Lonzi, ‘12 May 1973’, in Taci, anzi parla, p. 378. For a discussion of Lonzi’s use of the term ‘myth’ and its reference to Roland Barthes’s writings, see Francesco Ventrella, ‘Carla Lonzi e la disfatta della critica d’arte: registrazione, scrittura e risonanza’, Studi Culturali, vol. 12, no. 1 (2015), pp. 83–100.

10. Carla Lonzi, Vai pure. Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1980; Milan: et al., 2011. All subsequent quotations refer to the 2011 edition. Carla Lonzi and Pietro Consagra met in the early 1960s and had lived as a couple for almost twenty years. Pietro Consagra (1920–2005) counts among the most significant Italian artists of his generation, mostly known for his abstract sculptures, his closeness to the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and his engagement in post-World War II formalist aesthetics in Italy, most notably as part of the artist collective Forma 1, which considered itself both Marxist and formalist.

11. Lonzi, Vai pure, p. 81.

12. Ibid., p. 13.

13. Ibid., p. 7.

14. Ibid., p. 49.

15. See Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s concomitant deconstruction of the artist’s masculinity and privilege in Rozika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Pandora, 1981; London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

16. Lonzi, ‘3 December 1975’, Taci anzi parla, p. 1174.

17. Lonzi, Vai pure, p. 9. On the dilemma between love and autonomy in Carla Lonzi’s Vai pure, see Lea Melandri, Una visceralità indicibile. La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni settanta, Rome: Franco Angeli, 2000, pp. 43–50.

18. Lonzi, Vai pure, p. 10. 19. Ibid., p. 103.

19. See Lonzi, ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, p. 288. In the English version the Italian deculturizzazione is translated as ‘shedding of culture’. Cf. Sputiamo su Hegel, p. 47.

20. Following this line of reasoning, Lonzi’s writings could be productively addressed within the framework of what Jack (Judith) Haberstam has called a ‘shadow feminism’, or an alternative feminist project whose genealogy may be traced back to the 1970s with figures such as Monique Wittig and Valerie Solanas. See Judith (Jack) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 4, 123–45.

21. See Carla Lonzi, ‘La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale’ (1971), in Sputiamo su Hegel, pp. 102–3.

22. Carla Lonzi, ‘Itinerario di riflessioni’, in M.G. Chinese, C. Lonzi, M. Lonzi and A. Jaquinta, È già politica, Milano: Scritti di Rivolta femminile, 1977, p. 22.

23. Liliana Ellena, ‘Carla Lonzi e il neo-femminismo degli anni ’70: disfare la cultura, disfare la politica’, in L. Conte, V. Fiorino and V. Martini, eds, Carla Lonzi: la duplice radicalità, Pisa: ETS, 2011, pp. 136–7.

24. Maria Luisa Boccia, L’io in rivolta. Pensiero e vissuto in Carla Lonzi, Milano: La Tartaruga, 1990, p. 119.

25. Claire Fontaine, ‘We are all Clitoridian Women: Some Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy’, e-flux journal 47, September 2013.

26. Lonzi, Vai pure, p. 115.

27. Ibid., p. 116.

28. Ibid., p. 117.

29. Ibid., p. 121.

30. Ibid., p. 131.

31. The expression ‘refusal of work’, especially in the Italian context, might refer to the autonomous Marxist tradition of Operaismo (or Workerism). However, Carla Lonzi, who was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during her youth, was vocal in criticizing Marxist politics. On Carla Lonzi’s formative years, see Iamurri, Un margine che sfugge, pp. 26–34. On Italian Operaismo and its legacy, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto, 2017; Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds, Autonomia: Post-political Politics, New York: Semiotexte, 2007.

32. Rivolta Femminile, ‘Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile’ (1970), in Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds, Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 39.

33. See Maud Anne Bracke, ‘Between the Transnational and the Local: Mapping the Trajectories and Contexts of the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1970s Italian Feminism’, Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 4, 2013, pp. 625–42.

34. See Silvia Federici, ‘Wages against Housework’ (1975), in S. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2012, pp. 15–22. On  the feminist refusal of work from a Marxist-feminist perspective in Italy, see Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminist, Marxism, Anti-work Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

35. Federici, ‘Wages against Housework’, p. 19.

36. This is one of the main points addressed in ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’, where Lonzi deconstructs the Marxist–Hegelian understanding of revolutionary politics.

37. See Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971), in Women, Art, and Power, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 145–78; Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early 20th Century Vanguard Painting’, Artforum, December 1973, pp. 30–39.

 

FROM
THINKING ART
MATERIALISM, LABOURS, FORMS
EDITED BY PETER OSBORN
CRMEP BOOKS, 2020