Book review: La storia dell’arte dopo l’autocoscienza. A partire dal diario di Carla Lonzi

For some years now, Carla Lonzi’s thinking has been at the centre of renewed attention in artistic studies and practices, in Italy and abroad. In this theoretical context, some questions have become increasingly urgent. How to deal with Lonzi’s legacy? Asked also in consideration of her Archive (now accessible for public consultation at the Archives of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome), which will help to build new relational spaces in the future for the creation of new female subjectivities. How to start from the concept of sexual difference in order to reflect on ways of expressing desire and woman’s need for freedom, but more broadly for all gender identities? And how to define spaces of resistance to the homogenization and stereotyping imposed by the media? And still: what continue to be the vital issues that arise from an encounter with the practice of consciousness-raising understood as a radical individual experience? This last perspective of investigation is the central point of reflection in Carla Subrizi’s book La storia dell’arte dopo l’autocoscienza. A partire dal diario di Carla Lonzi [The history of art after consciousness-raising. Starting from Carla Lonzi’s diary]. By focusing attention on Lonzi’s diaries, titled Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista [Shut up, no, speak. Diary of a feminist] (written between 1972 and 1977, and published in 1978), the author interrogates Lonzi’s profound legacy. She identifies, in the thinking of consciousness-raising and in the writing processes of the feminist thinker, a proposed method for the study of art history