Dropout Subjects. Jill Johnston's and Carla Lonzi's Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969

The art critic is rarely discussed as central to the social history of art of the 1960s, and even less to the history of sexual liberation in the 1970s. This thesis is the first study of the historical connections between the two art critics Carla Lonzi and Jill Johnston’s simultaneous dropouts from art criticism in 1969, in the USA and Italy respectively. It provides a critical reading of
Lonzi’s and Johnston’s abandonment of art criticism as part of their engagement in the contestations of art institutions, political parties, universities, and the nuclear family that occurred in the context leading up to and following the global May 1968. Highlighting the art critic in this context, the study centers on Lonzi’s and Johnston’s refusal of the forms of representation that art and politics presupposed. Rather than striving to gain new forms of subjectivity within the context of art and the New Left intelligentsia, they dropped out.

In a period in which the idea of a crisis of art criticism emerged upon the abandonment of its formalist ideals, the thesis shows that these processes are rather part of a social crisis. Developing Walter Benjamin’s use of the notion of refunctioning, read through the dialectics of subjectivation and subjection, it attends to how Lonzi’s and Johnston’s experimental and collective forms of art criticism during the period 1962–1973 technically refunctioned their artcritical subjectivities through textual montages and textual performances respectively. The thesis underscores how these methods were ways for them to respond to the ongoing social crisis, which is analysed through a historical-critical lens. The purpose of the thesis is to outline
how Lonzi’s and Johnston's use of artistic means to pursue ends beyond art was, in fact, a striving for new sexual subjectivities. In 1970, Lonzi came out as separatist feminist, while Johnston came out as lesbian, and their early feminist writings became significant for the emerging Italian autonomous feminist and American radical lesbian movement respectively. The notions of deculturalization and disintegration were chosen by Lonzi and Johnston themselves to name their dropouts. The thesis concludes that these processes actualized new forms of social critique, materialized in a ‘cultural void’ of subjectivity itself: the dropout subject.