sharing lucy lippard

I heard and saw Lucy Lippard speak at Cowles last night and was typing my notes for myself and thought I’d share it with you all. Check out the link if you don’t know who she is, but basically she’s a well-known art writer/feminist/etc. who’s been publishing for years and years.

The talk was on Women and Water Rights--a symposium and exhibition going on at the Nash Gallery right now. You should check it out and also consider Vandana Shiva’s talk later this month (womenandwater.net)

(FYI I was taking notes in the dark and she spoke quickly.)

Snippets:

*Nobody from a land-based culture talks about landscape--the land is not something you look out at

It’s the arts' job to teach us how to see

Books of LL I want to check out: Get the Message, Lure of the Local

She lives off the grid in New Mexico….the basin is so complex that it denies analysis. Difficult to get water in her village. Their saying “water runs uphill towards $$”
Wallace Stegner quote: we can’t create water or increase it we can only..(preserve it…)

Book for families about water, using art: The Story of Las Padillas

All change is not progress

Artist Basia Irland work: Hydrolibros (http://www.basiairland.com/recent-projects/hydrolibros.html)--book made out of ice with seeds in it, in a river~~ receding/reseeding

Early feminists (2nd wave she means) said women have to be secure in themselves first, then take it out to the rest of society

EcoArt--takes courage to fly in the face of art and conditioned ideas about quality, commodity

Nature is everything on earth--including culture, including the children of nature who create culture

Water issues are less gendered in the U.S. In many places it is tied in with rape, war, violence...women as gatherers of water

She prefers to focus on content- and context-based projects

You’re either with the status quo or against it--you are being a role model either way

The places we desecrate and the people who live there--must pay attn. to. The poor and disenfranchised, must listen to them. Not just “listen to the land”

Women are socially conditioned to be caretakers---we mights as well run with it instead of theorizing ourselves into denial (!!)

Women=Nature vs. Man= culture...boo. Need to know more about our relationships to each other instead.

Urban-suburban-rural….

Land for profit and entertainment and pretty marketing images

Modern garbage artists are using the detritus of society homeopathically

Cleaning up after civilization: quote from an artist (missed the name) “the morning after the revolution, who will pick up the garbage?”

Subsuming the hubris of ego and waste (garbage artists)


Betsy Damon (http://www.keepersofthewaters.org) super rad water cleaning park in shanghai---25 public installations along the river, with Tibetan, American, Chinese artists--uniquely successful project in china, accomplished by a middle-aged US female on her own without any funding from major institution. (I looked her up and she has done several projects in China as well as in Duluth!)

Water crisis will make the petroleum crisis seem like child’s play

Water: human right or commodity

STORYTELLING!

Woman who put “acupuncture dots” around town on the water lines in new orleans

LL curated a show in bolder on climate change: “weather report”--she unintentionally chose more F than M artists. “women are more likely to make public art to commemorate and collaborate with the community”

As long as the right wing doesn’t scare people into putting their heads in the sand, I think it’s okay to say ‘get the hell off the tracks, a train is coming” (re: climate change)

Long-term thinking is in short supply

Environmentalism used to be considered by the left as a sort of political suburbia…

In the US we are educated to think that art is powerless even though images from the mass media shape our entire culture--
difference between arts and mass media:
Artists have names, mass media is anonymous, artists have no $, media has mucho money and power

She is inspired by DIY young collectives

Advocates Bioregionalism as opposed to nationalism

San Francisco--a group called Future Farmers http://futurefarmers.com/about/

collaboration is a form of collage in a social context

She and her off-the-grid friends call farmer’s markets “farmers boutiques”
In the city--easy to forget where things came from

Zen saying: you want to know about water? Take a drink.

Place means a lot of things to people--not always good.

Public Arts St. Paul--creating a symposium pairing artists and scientists who then go out into the landscape together and talk…(hunting and gathering, they called it)

We won’t blush if you don’t flush.

How to make it as a writer all these years?
**The real trick is to keep your standard of living very very low and you can do whatever you want!

(She said writing books for 30 years she has basically made about -20 cents/hour. Ha!)