Essay Abstracts

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Shaming the Devil
Lucy R. Lippard
“Writers, like other artists, supposedly aspire to ‘tell the truth and shame the devil,’” states Lucy Lippard in her opening essay, “Shaming the Devil.” “But telling the whole truth, and telling it so well that people want to listen to it...that’s the challenge.”

Lippard responds to the writers’ essays (her title is taken from one of them) about the three art and civic dialogue projects that she didn’t see herself. Her role in this project is once-removed, devoted to the explication of the issues rather than description of the pieces. The issues are those that have shaped her own choices: the dilemma of writing about art while being accessible to a broad audience; issues of authority in writing and who has it; multiplicity of viewpoint and how to negotiate different opinions (including those of funding sources); place-specific vs. “merely regional” art; and the ironies of “reciprocal ethnography.” “If the ‘lucky-you-I’ve-come-to-make-art-for-you’ syndrome has finally, with consciousness rising over the years, given way to ‘lucky-you-I’ve-come-to-make-art-with-you,’ the ultimate goal of ‘lucky-me-I’ve-come-to-learn-from-making-art-with-you...if-it’s-something-you-think-will-be-useful-to-you?’ still needs some fine-tuning.”

Lippard recounts a defining moment in her own writing life in 1980: “discussing how to get three branches of hitherto isolated art together: community arts; street, guerrilla, and political arts; and the progressive avant-garde. The so-called high art world, even the politicized, ‘radical’ branch of it, was thoroughly ignorant of groundbreaking work being done around the country (especially in the theater community) and somewhat dismissive of the achievements of community-based artists working not only with but for expanded audiences, deliberately avoiding the art world career loop. None of these groups, in turn, knew much about some bold attempts within the art world to transform and/or escape it—models buried in conceptual, performance, feminist, and some public art.”

The beginnings of the fledgling “movement for cultural democracy” in the ’60s and late ’70s have led to the present sophisticated processes of Animating Democracy initiatives, and Lippard makes this link. Because she has been directly involved in this history herself, her analysis is immediate and lively. She asks questions such as “Are theory and thinking the same thing?”—noting the danger of “locking ideas up into boxes to which not all of us have the key.”

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