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

Tirsdag d. 24. februar gæster Frida Sandström Det Jyske Kunstakademi med et foredrag om sin PhD.-afhandling Dropout Subjects. Jill Johnston’s and Carla Lonzi’s Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969, fra 2025.

Tirsdag d. 24. februar kl. 16.00-17.00
Sted: SpLab, Det Jyske Kunstakademi, Kalkværksvej 30
Gratis adgang

Om Dropout Subjects:
The thesis takes its point of departure in the two art critics Carla Lonzi’s and Jill Johnston’s parallel abandonment of art criticism in the USA and Italy, both in 1969. In continuation of and yet in response to the 1968-movement, Johnston’s and Lonzi’s ’dropouts’ were manifested in the reformulation of their own social subjects as critics and women respectively and evolved in what I describe as ’dropout subjects’. These dissident subject formations emerged ‘unexpectedly’, to borrow Lonzi’s formulation, and mobilized a ‘cultural void’ of representation, against systems of representation such as the legal, political and art historical – and without attempting to be integrated in any. Discussing some of the artistic methods employed as ‘placeholders’ in Johnston’s and Lonzi’s dropouts, I will introduce the form of social critique that ultimately replaced the formal art criticism that they concurrently abandoned. As I will argue, such critique is inherently self-critical and hence questions the forms of subjectivity that art criticism, parliamentary politics and the legal system depend on in the first place. In my view, Johnston’s and Lonzi’s dropout subjects therefore materialize the way in which late-avantgarde methods were deployed for the purpose of feminist and anti-colonial thinking in this period and context, a history that remains to be related to our present moment.

Bio:
Frida Sandström is a writer, critic and researcher based in Copenhagen. Sandström’s current reserach centers on the transformation of avantgarde methods and cultural critique amid the conjunctions of anti-colonial and feminist thinking in Italy and France in the 1960s and 1970s. Since November 2025, she is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Florence, part of the research group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual. Sandström’s research has been published by De Gruyter, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Kultur & Klasse, Brill, Afterall, Philosophy of Photography and e-flux. She publishes art criticism and essays frequently, in anthologies and journals such as Art Monthly, Frieze, Metropolis M, Camera Austria, Critic d’Art and Arbetaren. Sandström has been a contributing editor of the Swedish art journal Paletten since 2015 and her curatorial, critical and artistic projects often evolve in collaboration.