Don't Need You: Conceptual Art, Feminism, and their Discontents

This dissertation examines the concurrent emergence of Conceptual Art and varied formations of the feminist movement, often referred to as Second-wave feminism, during the late 1960’s and through the 1970’s in the United States. This study exposes (rather than reconciles) tensions, contradictions, and occlusions in the dominant historical methods and limitations of what constitutes “feminist art” and considers the “failure” of conceptual art. Through textual, visual, and archival methods, I explore concepts of individualism versus collective identity; rebellion and refusal; essentialism and ‘womanhood’; rage; sexuality and self-pleasure; and subject and objecthood in three case studies. The first chapter is focused on critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard and her watershed conceptual project Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966-1972. I cross-examine Lippard’s notion of “dematerialization” with Argentinian conceptualist Oscar Masotta’s formulation, effectively revealing incompatible political stakes of artistic production and “radicalism” in the United States and Argentina, as well as Lippard’s often overlooked (and unfulfilled) socialist feminist politics in the larger schema of liberal feminism. The second chapter explores the concept of “anti-intellectualism” in the life and practice of Adrian Piper and offers new ways to engage with her work, such as The Mythic Being (1973-1975), beyond commonplace approaches that are hinged on identity, highlighting Piper’s status as an immutable intellectual and her unrelenting follow-through of conceptual art’s mandate. The last chapter examines Lee Lozano’s wild, intense, and brief career as a painter and conceptual artist, centering her 11 private notebooks and early drawings, as well as her infamous action, Boycott All Women (1971); I focus on Lozano’s rejection of feminism and eventual drop out from the art world as an unprecedented and often misunderstood pursuit of extreme self-definition at the expense of all other personal, intimate, social, professional, and institutional relationships. This analysis contributes to recent studies on dominant and mainstream forms of feminism uncritically prevailing in art historical discourse and concludes with the urgency of recognizing and redeeming the values of individual subjectivity and refusal of the status quo. As Lee Lozano wrote, “I want to believe I have power and complete my own fate.