It is hard to disagree with Elena Ferrante after reading Carla Lonzi’s Self-Portrait. Published in 1969, this text marks Lonzi’s withdrawal from her successful career as an art critic. In 1970, she founded the separatist feminist collective Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt) with artist Carla Accardi and journalist Elvira Banotti. In their Manifesto (1970), she invited other women to sabotage patriarchal culture and institutions: “Man’s strength lies in his identification with culture, ours in rejecting it. To identify woman with man is to nullify the last path to liberation.” Among the most original and iconoclastic feminist revolutionaries in Italian history, Lonzi argued that gender equality alone could not lead women to authenticity and liberation, but instead risked assimilating them into an androcentric society controlled by men.
Lonzi’s corpus of writings, which defined a moment in Italian feminism whose importance cannot be overstated, deserves fame on literary, historical, and philosophical grounds. Forty years after her death, however, most of her works are out of print. Yet, partly due to their inclusion in Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, Lonzi’s books are now undergoing a rediscovery both among younger generations in Italy and in the anglophone world. It is my hope that Allison Grimaldi Donahue’s excellent English translation of Self-Portrait represents the beginning of Lonzi’s international renaissance.
Written at a moment of crossroads between Lonzi’s career in the art world and the first sparks of her feminist awakening, Self-Portrait is a subversive and experimental book. The volume, which is described as a sort of “banquet” by Lonzi herself, was produced by transcribing, reassembling and collating recordings of Lonzi’s interviews with fourteen major artists working in Italy. Interspersed with pictures of Lonzi, her son, and her interlocutors, the book also functions as a photographic album. The English translation splendidly preserves the musicality of the Italian language, and fully renders the text’s colloquial, meandering, and digressive nature.
Composed at a time when both the roles of artist and critic were almost entirely the preserve of men, Self-Portrait reflects the patriarchal nature of its context: as Allison Grimaldi Donahue points out in the Translator’s Note, the speakers’ exclusive use of masculine pronouns to refer to artists and critics demonstrates that these figures were always assumed to be male. Only one of the interlocutors, Carla Accardi, is a woman; the others are men whose lengthy monologues frequently overshadow the author’s presence.
Art is experienced by Lonzi as “an invitation to participate, addressed by the artists to each of us.” Consequently, she believes that critics, those individuals who live closest to artists, should be inspired to produce “movements of life” and live creatively, imaginatively, “not in obedience to the models that society proposes over and over.” Lonzi’s rebellious critical vision is predicated upon a utopian wish “that everybody will be [ . . . ] artists” and that “people will live in a creative way, [ . . . ] in a way that isn’t detached, [ . . . ] that is, alive.” The art critic, Lonzi writes, as a result of his belonging to an institution, tends to “acquire an attitude of power,” becoming “a little bureaucrat, a little careerist, an industrious person [ . . . ] who from that little territory he possesses, trespasses onto things that humanity has toiled at much more [ . . . ] deeply, and says his piece and then returns to small-minded things.” Painter Carla Accardi concurs with Lonzi: in most volumes of art criticism, she notes an “anxiety man has, the scholar, the sage, the philosopher, of non-resolution, of not being able to give definite answers.” As a result, this individual is, for Lonzi, “completely inauthentic,” a passive and detached “judge” who loves nothing more than organizing, categorizing, and creating hierarchies.
Throughout Self-Portrait, Lonzi eschews the narcissism of the critic and refuses to capitalize on the power and privilege afforded by her profession. Instead, she chooses to dismantle the solipsism, authoritarianism, and loftiness of critical discourse, undermining the traditional function of her role. Far from centring herself, Lonzi paints a self-portrait that is polyphonic, choral, relational—a palimpsest of several people, pieces of art, figments of conversations, and moments in time. The text’s destabilization of the illusion of an autonomous, bounded self—that of the art critic and artist, as well as that of any individual—is one of its most pertinent features.
Conceiving of the critical act not as a separate academic exercise but as an integral part of artistic creation, Lonzi experiments with a style of writing that emphasizes horizontality, collaboration, and unruliness. Since integrity, coherence, and immaculateness are associated with oppression, Self-Portrait embraces fragmentation and open-endedness. Part memoir, part interview, part photographic album, part art writing, part philosophical dialogue—this hybrid and eccentric text defies classification within conventional generic categories. The blending of words and images mirrors Lonzi’s effort to transgress the boundaries of her profession, to expand her medium to breaking point, and to free herself from societal fetters. In its anarchist aesthetics, the book encapsulates Lonzi’s radical politics, resisting any effort to impose order and refusing any form of hierarchy and authoritarianism.
As it transpires from even a cursory reading of Self-Portrait, much of Lonzi’s feminism stems from her formative passage through art criticism. The text is impregnated with the buds of Lonzi’s most original feminist ideas; in particular, the urgency of her need for authenticity, and her privileging of self-effacement, separatism, deculturalization, and refusal as strategies to resist patriarchal control. The meditation on the critic’s spectatorship as a paradigm of passive participation will soon become a reflection on women’s function as objectified witnesses of male culture. With its emphasis on orality, Self-Portrait also anticipates Lonzi’s popularization of autocoscienza (“consciousness-raising” or “self-consciousness”), a collective, non-hierarchical feminist practice that entailed talking solely among women with the purpose of learning from one another and forming transformative alliances.
Although today Carla Lonzi is well-regarded as a feminist thinker, she is still unrecognized as a gifted writer of literature. Yet, with its inventive synthesis of the visual, the verbal, and the aural, and its reframing of critique as a creative endeavour, Self-Portrait takes on the status of artistic work of great literary value. The English translation of this text heralds a new opportunity to consider Lonzi’s legacy as an author, as well as a critic and philosopher. I wonder, for example, about the extent of Self-Portrait’s influence over Elena Ferrante, whose characters appear to agree with Lonzi that authentic writing should “imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things,” and must contain “many harmonious phrases, many unharmonious, the chaos inside and the chaos outside.”
More than fifty years since its first edition, the English translation of this text preserves the fiery, unsettling power of Carla Lonzi’s voice, conveying her radical and uncompromising nature, her unfailing capacity to detect any traces of inauthenticity, and her unsparing struggle against her own complicity with the status quo. Self-Portrait evidently arose from Lonzi’s desire to craft an authentic feminist language and critical method capable of transcending the confines of a patriarchal artistic tradition. In Lonzi’s eyes, this experiment failed, leading her to boycott an institution that she deemed inextricably tangled with male domination. Yet, we can still find glimmers of hope in Self-Portrait, which retains its potential as an invitation to embrace “rich possibilities, [ . . . ] great moments of exaltation and happiness, of opening.”
