Ms Frida Viktoria Sandström

Research project: Art Criticism as Social Critique

Abstract

The work-in-progress title of my PhD thesis is "Art criticism as social critique. The disintegration (Johnston), deculturation (Lonzi) and objection (Piper) of art critical subjectivity in Italy and USA, 1965-1975."

In what way does social critique concern art criticism in the context and period of 1965–1975 USA and Western Europe? What does social critique tell us about the "law of movement" of art criticism? The three cases are Jill Johnston (1929–2010), Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), and Adrian Piper (1948–) – all providing different examples of social critique during the period of study, and in a US-European context. This period and context are marked by manifold changes in the manifestation of a capitalist mode of production and corresponding social movements, in which the analysis will be situated and contextualised. 

In my study of the writings of the three cases, I will analyse their ideas on and practical reconfigurations of the practice of art criticism, part of a refusal, critique or occupation of critical subjectivity and hence of identity, including the concept of art. I understand this approach as part of an overarching engagement with the conditions of possibility for a subject of an aesthetic judgment in general and the social reproduction of this subject in late capitalist modernity, in particular. A subject that in this historically specific context also includes the subject of social critique.

What I attempt to point out in Johnston's, Piper's and Lonzi's activity is therefore not something like an ‘after' criticism, but rather the manifestation of a problem inherent to art critical subjectivity. Therefore, I ask how social critique may concern art criticism in the way that praxis concerns theory, and vice versa. By nature of this dialectics, the enquiry must be handled on two levels, theoretically and historically specific. I will therefore situate my theoretical references in the historical specific context of their writings, which here includes the context of the cases themselves. This makes theory a question of praxis, and art criticism a question of social critique.