Today my essay on Feminism in Revolt, an edited collection of Carla Lonzi’s work, will come out on Full Stop. I have long been fascinated by Italian feminism, in particular because of the way its writing is often experimental and outside the academic realm. Italian feminism, too, has an entire different universe of concepts unrelated to American feminism which has a hard time thinking past “gender” as a concept, even if it collects a lot of modifiers along the way. It ends up being very monotone and not at all interested in what it means to live and how one might want to do so.
In my essay on Full Stop, I explore the significance and experimental nature of Lonzi’s writing. She is rarely treated as a writer–only as a critic and feminist. But I think she is an artist, using her life to create new and surprising works. In this post, I’m going to follow a thread that got cut from the essay because it is far more relevant to my blog’s usual themes of living and (not) working. Lonzi’s enactment of feminism, to me, has close ties to an anti-work ethic that many miss if they take her self-narration at face value. Lonzi, at least in the excerpts that we have in English, doesn’t necessary use the language of the anti-work left, which has a strong presence in Italian leftist thought.
In teaching Lonzi for the first time, I was reminded of how distant Italian feminism is and how useful it is to give some context. Lonzi lived from 1931-1982 and was the cofounder of a group of Italian feminists called Rivolta Feminile. The group experimented with different kinds of consciousness-raising as a way to extract themselves from what they saw as a male-dominated culture. This culture had little respect for different ways of being or living, and its subjectivity was often geared toward profit and the harm of others. One of the key aspects of Rivolta Feminile, like that of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s philosophy, was that developing autonomous relationships between women was a valid political practice that could create different kinds of freedom. Freedom is often what we see Lonzi searching for in her writing, though she called it “authenticity.”
Her first book, Autoritratto, or Autoportrait, is a collage of interviews she did with mostly male artists and one woman artist who was also involved with Rivolta Feminile, Carla Accardi. The book is not very enjoyable, in my opinion, but it does mark the end of her career as an art critic. What concerned Lonzi about art-making was the way it destroyed relationships. The language of her critique came from a feminist perspective, of course, critiquing the figure of a male artist’s autonomous subjectivity forsaking the real background that enables and produces him. This would include any women that reproduce his labor. Lonzi also tires of being the critic in that it puts her in service of the art and art world rather than her own subjectivity. In other words, she had to submit her subjectivity to a commodity, even if a special kind of commodity, and that she found intolerable. Refusing the exploitation, she left art criticism altogether.
She affected a similar kind of leaving with the publication of Vai Pure, a dialogue with her long-term partner, the artist Pietro Consagro. The book is transcription of video recordings that Lonzi took of their final argument. It is, quite frankly, an amazing document. Using her personal experience, Lonzi shines a light on conflicts in relationships that seem universal: the lack of understanding, a lack of gratitude, and a lack of care. But in the context of feminism, this argument takes on a heightened significance as Lonzi is struggling to live out feminism in her day-to-day life with a man she feels does not appropriately appreciate her. Vai Pure is often very funny as Pietro demands examples from Carla as she lists her grievances and as Carla struggles to explain to him the stress of trying to be a feminist while also being partner to a man who doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about feminism.
Within the written work Pietro publishes he does not (to her mind) acknowledge her role in his art sufficiently. Instead, his work operates on a liberal assumption: “Everyone creates an image of himself, a resumé, grants himself himself his preferred identity” while everyone in his liberal circle, clinging to the “abstract originality of the individual,” consents to the idea that ‘I don’t talk about you, you don’t talk about me” (246). This is an insane basis for art, let alone society. In reproducing the abstract individual who sells his labor willingly and freely (note the language of resume here), Lonzi accuses Pietro of colluding in capitalist subjectivity.
If that point seems a little, well, abstract, there’s another critique that Lonzi makes which seems even more heartbreaking in its universality and simplicity. Keep in mind that Consagra is an artist, an original freelancer who has some control over his labor. In a translated excerpt of Vai Pure not included in Feminism in Revolt, Lonzi delivers a huge blow:
I don’t know how to name it. We eat lunch with the feeling that you have to go to the studio, you come back in the evening with the feeling that you must recharge your batteries and in the morning you are off to the studio again … Even when we are at Elba Island [on holiday], you don’t want to go climbing on the rocks, because you want to work on a drawing, on a project, on something, and you accuse me of stealing time from your work. You give me the remainder of your time in the afternoon. We don’t walk around the island, we don’t take walks, we meet people only and exclusively for work, we have restricted the world for ourselves to the people that are interested in your work, whoever they are, clever people or idiots, but it is the work that counts. 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. (Excerpt translated by Claire Fontaine, in e-flux.)
Even the artist lives his whole life around work, making time for his partner rather than living his life and making his art an accessory to it. Lonzi has no patience for this; it hurts her deeply to come second to Consagra’s art process.
Lonzi estranges us from the typical vision of art as an expression of human greatness or creativity. From the perspective of relationships, art is an inhuman process, merely an extension of capitalist production, if a highly specialized one. It is no different than other forms of labor for pay, it just arrogates prestige to itself.
Lonzi’s entire oeuvre is dedicated to the question: what kind of art can we make if we are unwilling to destroy our lives and relationships? While it’s true that art might outlast us, do we really want to live our lives as if we are already dead?
Kaelie Giffel 