Self-portrait of a Woman: Carla Lonzi's Autoritratto. (original) (raw)
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Staging Interruption Quotation Montage and Feminist Thought in Carla Lonzi s Autoritratto
The Italianist, 2023
This article reads Carla Lonzi’s collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature and formal strategy that is fundamental to the text’s nascent feminist sensibilities and praxis, and to the alternate personal history it imagines. Interruption functions as a structuring principle and mode of critique that is generative rather than destructive: by interrupting the content of audio interviews and re-staging her experiences textually, Lonzi creates a space where the acts of listening and dialoguing are revealed as essential to creative expression and auto-narration. Although the text predates Lonzi’s radical feminist writings, it engages with gestures central to Italian second-wave feminist discourses: namely, the personal and communicative goals of autocoscienza. In part, this article addresses how the social and historical critiques within Lonzi’s feminism find earlier expression in the narrative techniques and ambivalent self-assertion in Autoritratto.
Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2011
‘‘Spaces of self-consciousness’’ examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi’s career.
Maria Bremer, BOOK REVIEW Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Third Text Online, http://www.thirdtext.org/bremer-carlalonzi, 22 October 2021
Responding to specific contemporary challenges posed by ecological threat, decolonial movements, global capitalism, and the ensuing entanglement of gender, ethnicity and class, feminist perspectives have recently integrated notions of intersectionality and positionality, while revising materialist and semiotic trajectories and developing material culture approaches. The expanding spectrum of feminist concerns has concomitantly put the historiography of feminism to the test, leading to the uncovering of blind spots and biases. Under a self-reflexive lens, persisting anglophone and Western foci, as well as universalising presumptions of an undifferentiated gender experience across class, ethnic and national divides, have come to the fore. Against this backdrop, a renewed historiographical engagement with Western second-wave feminism requires a questioning, rather than a replication, of homogenising epistemic categories and comprehensive narratives. 1 It is in this vein of thought that the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, edited by art historians Francesco Ventrella and
Carla Lonzi: Encountering American art
Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy :The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, 2021
Carla Lonzi was more committed to artists than art, to creativity rather than criticality; her notoriety resulted not only from her brilliance as an art critic and art historian but also from her decision, in 1970, to shed what she deemed the false consciousness of criticism. Unable to resolve the contradictions between life and art, experience and culture, she abandoned one career, opting instead for the politics of feminism and becoming a guiding force in the Italian feminist movement. With the painter Carla Accardi and the writer Elvira Banotti, she launched Rivolta Femminile, one of the earliest Italian feminist groups, producing the manifesto Sputiamo su Hegel. In December of that same year, she published 'La critica è potere' (Critique is power), her final essay on criticism, in which she states her affinity with artists as opposed to the persuasive power of critics. 1 Prior to 1970 Lonzi's exceptional faculties were largely focused on the realm of art in almost 200 critical works. Having escaped from the 'paternal swindle'-to adapt her phrase regarding fathers, professors and priests-Lonzi became one of the most important voices for contemporary Italian artists. Her book Autoritratto (1969) is crucial to our understanding of some of the central figures and issues underlying Italian contemporary art. In the preceding decades, Lonzi also fixed her exacting gaze on developments outside Italy
Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy. The Legacy of Carla Lonzi
2020
For several years now, the name of Carla Lonzi has been breaking out in art history after a comparatively long-time silence. Art critic, poet and feminist, Lonzi’s work evades easy definitions. Renewed interest in her writing led to two major scholarly publications written in Italian, alongside international responses from contemporary art historians, curators, artist exhibitions, conferences and reading groups. This recent attention to Lonzi has instigated new conversations around radical feminism, contributing to the delinking of an Anglo-American canon frequently associated with major accounts of the feminist movement in art. The developing discourse has also, and this is crucial, started to disseminate a feminist vocabulary that produces dissonances within mainstream strategies of presenting the relationship between art and feminism in the contemporary art world across generations and geographies.
Women's portrait of the self Introduction
2016
The articles in this issue are the fruits of research carried out by scholars from a variety of disciplines (literature, history of the arts, sociology, and philosophy) in Europe and the United States. They are the product of several related ongoing projects: a series of literature seminars at the Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee and of art historical seminars at the INHA, a symposium at the University of Southern California, and another series of lectures at the Louvre. While eschewing any claim to comprehensive coverage, these articles take on important issues and questions that appeared during a period stretching from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The volume as a whole takes a cross-disciplinary approach to phenomena that are often poorly understood and underestimated, and the authors collectively employed a wide range of available methods in an effort to better reflect human diversity and speak to the broadest possible audience. The fragmentary na...