Resistance Through Absence: Strategies of deculturalization, separatism, refusal and withdrawal

This panel explores strategies of separatism and withdrawal as political and artistic practices employed by marginalized communities, artists, thinkers, and scholars. Throughout history, individuals and groups have chosen to disengage from dominant systems of power—cultural, political, or social—as a form of resistance and to foster separate spaces for alternative identities and practices. Whether in the form of a boycott, refusal, or withdrawal, these approaches have shaped the search for personal and collective identity. In doing so, we will ask: Can such strategies be effective tools for transformation, or do they risk becoming detached from systemic change.

Session Convenors:

Giulia Schirripa, University of York

Elena Sinagra, University of York

Speakers:

Luisa Lorenza Corna, University of West England, Bristol

Parallel Withdrawals

In 1973, architect Marta Lonzi, sister of feminist art historian Carla, wrote a letter to her professor and colleague Ludovico Quaroni, informing him of her decision to resign from her university position and leave academia entirely. Marta’s choice and her words resonate strongly with a similarly significant departure close to home: Carla Lonzi’s exit from the art world in 1970. This paper explores the little-known parallel trajectories of the two Lonzis, highlighting key moments that led to their decisions to abandon their professional circles. Central to this examination are the ‘final’ documents that marked each departure—Marta’s letter to Quaroni and Carla’s essay The Critique is Power. In the second part, I will consider the recipients of their letters and messages, specifically the figures of the art critic and the architect. I will analyze how both sisters deploy Roland Barthes’ concept of myth to question the critic’s and architect’s social personas and their complicity with patriarchal value systems.

Nontobeko Ntombela, The University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Valerie Desmore’s Refusal(s): Art Practice as Biomythography

The South African-born British artist and fashion designer Valerie Elizabeth Helene Desmore, who is said to have risen to fame in South Africa in 1942 at the age of sixteen, left South Africa in 1945 to pursue a career in art in the United Kingdom. This move was prompted by the infamous South African race bar, through which she experienced ‘racial persecution’. Feeling rejected, her exile in the United Kingdom resulted in a career change from visual arts to fashion, only to return to visual arts again in her senior years. This oscillation between visual art and fashion is what I examine in this paper as ‘absenting’, which articulates a choice to reciprocally reject (depart from) that which rejected her (denied her access) by choosing to pursue another career. The fact that she disappeared from the South African art scene for over 50 years meant that her ‘absenting’ offered a kind of ‘inner journey’, enabling her to create art away from public view—art that tells her autobiography and mythology. This career trajectory attests to the innovative ways she responded to her career limitations. It indicates how she used strategies of refusal while exercising the choice of self-determination and self-writing. Absenting and refusal thus become generative notions that expand the framework for constructing a biomythography. By examining the work of Valerie Desmore, this research asserts a renewed, gendered positionality for Black South African modern women artists more broadly.

Frida Sandström, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

‘Disintegration’ and ‘deculturalization.’ Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969

In this paper, I will discuss the coinciding drop-outs of American art critic and lesbian activist Jill Johnston, and Italian art historian, critic, and separatist feminist Carla Lonzi in 1969. Abandoning a formal critique of art, they directed their attention toward to informal relationsidentities, and modes of expression in art and life. Johnston’s and Lonzi’s respective notions of disintegration and deculturalization, coined at the moment of their drop-outs, not only concern the relation between the critical subject, modern artforms, and their respective undersigning subjects or spectators. The two critics were rather increasingly emphasizing how sexual subjects form social relations, and forms of imagination. Effectively, they question what it means to be a subject in 1969.

Disintegration and deculturalization are not theoretical concepts but self-invented notions for the urgent self-reflective description of the practice of each of their drop-outs. They derive from a discourse around art’s massification as part of the cultural industry’s development during the 1960s but are given new meaning when instead of describing artforms and practices, rather signify social activities and experience. Tracing the genealogy of these notions along with the immanent and social critiques of art and society that Johnston and Lonzi expressed during the late 1960s, I show how art criticism is transformed into social critique as a consequence of their withdrawals from and refusals of the practice. Critiquing the life that conditions critical activity to begin with, Johnston and Lonzi refunction the subject of the critic by means of the auto-erotic.

Jamie Danis, University of Cambridge, England

Title: What Silence Equals: Zoe Leonard and Refusal

This paper considers silence as a political strategy for refusal in American art, with Zoe Leonard as case study. Considering Leonard’s practice in conversation with the rhetoric of “SILENCE=DEATH,” the paper addresses Leonard’s Strange Fruit (1992–97) and her use of a memorializing silence; this allows an understanding of silence’s role in refusing forgetting and withdrawing from narrativization. The paper addresses the relationship between silence,

withdrawal, and refusal—addressing both intersections and disjunctures—with specific attention to the efficacy of silence as a strategy. Throughout, the paper considers the distinction between silence (freely chosen) and silencing (enforced), as well as between refusals by marginalized people (such as queer communities) and those in power (such as the Reagan administration). It considers Leonard’s practice both in the contemporary context of silent protests such as die-ins and the longer American tradition of silent protest. The paper argues first that silence and refusal are appropriate frameworks through which to think about specific moments in Leonard’s practice, specifically Strange Fruit. This includes consideration of the withdrawal Leonard undertook in producing the artwork and the refusal of historicization in its installation. It then argues that that silence can be tasked with serving a mourning or memorializing function (e.g., “moments of silence”), can stand in for that which is “unspeakable,” and can serve as a disruption of affectively noisy atmospheres by means of refusing expected or stabilizing speech acts. Finally, it addresses silence as a means of refusing the neat narrativization and historicization often demanded by memorials.

Patricia Manos, Harvard University, USA

“I Would Prefer Not To:” Two Case Studies in U.S. Artistic Solidarity with Chile and Vietnam Between 1970 and 1974

The Museum of Solidarity was founded in Santiago, Chile, by the newly elected Unidad Popular, left-wing coalition government in 1970, and filled with works donated by sympathetic contemporary artists from around the world. After the closure of the museum following the 1973 U.S.-backed coup, the fate of the donated artworks was uncertain. Building on original archival research, this paper evaluates the efforts of U.S. art historian Dore Ashton, to recover artworks gifted to the museum by leading, post-World War II U.S. artists in a show of solidarity with Chilean intellectuals and activists suffering brutal repression by the military junta of Augusto Pinochet. It compares Ashton’s efforts to those of Robert Morris and Poppy Johnson, co-chairs of the 1970 New York Artists’ Strike Against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War, aimed at protesting U.S. intervention in Vietnam, as well as censorship of the war’s domestic critics. This paper argues that the New York Artists’ Strike achieved its short-term goal of raising awareness about the connection between the advisory boards and funders of art museums and the Vietnam war effort, but also created a blueprint for artist activism in the U.S. going forward. The success of Ashton’s efforts owes to both her participation in an interdisciplinary Chile solidarity movement acting in concert with Latin American activists, and her decades-long involvement in the international, politically heterogeneous International Association of Art Critics (AICA), a professional organization whose left-leaning members had nevertheless formed the first cohort of Solidarity Museum curators and advisors.