Notes on Autotheory, Art Writing, and The Encounter with Carla Lonzi

I wanted to make a book that rambled a little, you know? It's what really bothers me about critics, where you won't find it, this sense of rhythm, this passing from one topic to the next. The critic is always so dogged instead. To me … I can't tolerate that sense of the mind hounding after one thing.

—Carla Lonzi, Self-Portrait¹

Self is in the middle, and it wants to slide away. I experience myself as alternately restrictive and expansive: restrictive when held to the expectation to reproduce myself as more-of-the-same, and expansive when I can stray, and make more of myself in excess of identity. Autotheory sublimates this tension. A hybrid, creative-critical genre, autotheory is writing and thinking the self in relation to the world by way of close encounters with others—people and things. It thrives on the encounter and thus entails departing from self-certainty; in this sense, it is an absent center or placeholder for what we are not, or not yet. Autotheory reflects becoming. We cannot anticipate the formal or aesthetic qualities of autotheory because we cannot predict the encounters that generate it; we lean into unknowing as an outlet from the melancholy of identity. Whereas autotheory has been censured as narcissistic life-writing that shores up and consolidates a self, it actually documents the self's dispersal, collaboration, and mutation in complex relation to the world. If narcissism "arises when libidinal cathexes are called in away from external objects," the I of autotheory is subject to the opposite pull, moving excentrically, unfailingly interested in others.² Autotheory views the ban on personal pronouns from critical discourse—which autotheory's own shaming as narcissistic life-writing demonstrates—as a twisted extension of the dubious claim to self-mastery at the heart of patriarchal logic.

Like the autotheoretical, art writing is another compound idea with space between its parts that I prefer to hold open. The influences of poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, critical race studies, posthumanism, the philosophy of science, and other deviant, interdisciplinary impetuses have de-formed a genre that was once all about securing the myth of the 'great man': the solely viable, entirely unoriginal ego-ideal under patriarchy. What if today's art writing isn't (only) writing about art so much as writing as art? To say so is to willfully obfuscate the category. Art writing-as-art shares key features with autotheory: its fuel is the encounter, and its trajectory is outward from identity.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) is said to have inseminated the Western art historical tradition. By staging the writing of art as a series of encounters with the "lives of the artists," he helped boost the artist's status during the Renaissance: from mere worker to singular genius. By pointing to the continuity between artwork and artist biography, Vasari rarefied both, inflating the value of the package. What's more, he secured his own status and remunerable occupation as the artists' savvy proxy if not intimate acquaintance.³ Griselda Pollock offers a salient reading of the classical artist biographer à la Vasari as masculine narcissist, trapped in a never-ending Oedipal loop, where idolatry of the artist-genius, the longed-for father figure, flows over into rivalry. In this conception, the proto-art writer identifies so strongly with the artist he admires that the boundaries between them interpenetrate, and the writing moves back and forth between distant adulation of the artist's works, and details from his life—yielding a hybrid text that evinces the writer's narcissistic fusion with his externalized ideal.⁴ What is lost—besides the contributions of all "others" who misfit the "great (White, property-owning) man" prototype, master of intellectual and cultural production—is the kernel of art writing's potential: namely, the movement away from sameness and recursion, from recognizable forms, into unauthorized contact zones. Rather than mediating art and artists, thus preserving hierarchies, roles, and statuses, the art writer-autotheorist, whom I fantasize, encounters them. In the space of exchange, a dynamic, collective "self...