Touchstones: Lucy Lippard’s Overlay and the Politics of Prehistory

Abstract “Touchstones: Lucy Lippard’s Overlay and the Politics of Prehistory” examines the critical context around Lucy Lippard’s remarkable 1983 book about contemporary art and the art of prehistory. A unique piece of art history that shuttles between archaeology and contemporary practice, the book is one of the most important critical works to emerge from the cultural feminist movement of the 1970s. The essay explores its distinctive model of “collaged” history, competing approaches to time and history in contemporary land art, how these reoriented notions of Minimalism and technology, and why Lippard believed that prehistory could become a powerful cultural and political resource. The essay also investigates the preoccupation with prehistory, a pervasive accent in the art of the late 1960s and 1970s, and one which provides an important context that goes beyond the limits of cultural feminism. Finally, the essay examines the position Lippard adopted in relation to the gathering criticism of cultural feminism which came from voices on the poststructuralist left; it also explores Lippard’s understanding of pluralistic approaches to media at a time when Rosalind Krauss’ essay on “Expanded Sculpture” sought to bring order and logic to the period’s diversity.