First English Translation of Carla Lonzi's 1969 'Self-Portrait' Examines Art Criticism's Crisis

Carla Lonzi's 1969 book 'Self-Portrait' receives its first English translation, marking the Italian writer and feminist activist's definitive departure from art criticism. After a decade working as a critic, Lonzi concluded that criticism perpetuated class systems and isolated art from lived experience. The book assembles interviews with 14 artists recorded between 1965 and 1969, including Jannis Kounellis, Lucio Fontana, and Carla Accardi, into a single, meandering conversation. Published by Divided Publishing with translation by Allison Grimaldi Donahue, the work preserves the raw, unedited quality of dialogue, featuring half-formed thoughts and digressions typically removed for clarity. Lonzi subsequently focused on feminist activism and co-founded the collective Rivolta Femminile, writing about art only in her diary. The text has been compared to Lee Lozano's 'Dropout Piece' and Amy Fung's 'Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being' as part of a lineage of critiques abandoning conventional criticism. Lonzi's interviewees occasionally express dated views, including casual racism and misogyny, yet their discussions reveal an art system whose stratifications remain relevant today. The book proposes that criticism's perpetual crisis stems from the critic's personal struggle, caught between roles as amplifier, translator, or obfuscator of artistic work.