I See/You Mean

by Lucy R. Lippard

I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identi¬fication devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men¬: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. As a feminist-socialist, she has been active in dissident artists’ groups and co-founded several women’s art organizations. She is a member of the Heresies feminist publishing collective, a contributing editor to Chrysalis and Art in America, and a co-founder of Printed Matter.

Genres: Fiction, Art, Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics and place and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations. A 2012 exhibition on her seminal book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object at the Brooklyn Museum, titled "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art", cites Lippard's scholarship as its point of entry into a discussion about conceptual art during its era of emergence, demonstrating her crucial role in the contemporary understanding of this period of art production and criticism. Her research on the move toward dematerialization in art making has formed a cornerstone of contemporary art scholarship and discourse.

Co-founder of Printed matter (an art bookstore in New York City centered around artist's books), the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and other artists' organizations, she has also curated over 50 exhibitions, done performances, comics, guerrilla theater, and edited several independent publications the latest of which is the decidedly local La Puente de Galisteo in her home community in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has infused aesthetics with politics, and disdained disinterestedness for ethical activism.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm surprised that in the end I liked this as much as I did, considering how distanced I felt through almost its entirety. In the last stretch certain similarities to Woolf's The Waves (primarily re: characterization & even narrative) suddenly occurred to me, & I wish it had earlier to give me a reference to anchor my thoughts around. I was feeling pretty certain I would end up declaring this something of an of-its-time curiosity, but now recognize there's actually something sticky to it; I'll likely want to return someday.

They have told each other the stories they tell everyone else and now they will decide whether they are going to risk telling the stories they tell themselves.

[Raquel Mullet Escribano · Rating 4 out of 5]

estoy muy triste pero me ha gustado un montón

[inés · Rating 2 out of 5]

Supongo que de haber leído este libro en su época me hubiese parecido más rompedor, pero también os digo que he leído cosas de la misma época que me han parecido mil veces más revolucionarias que esto. Y aunque me ha gustado formalmente, en cuanto a contenido creo que meh, se me ha hecho demasiado segunda ola y demasiado feminismo blanco.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is really cool and interesting but I think too cool and too interesting for me

[arrate gain · Rating 5 out of 5]

solo puedo pensar en volver a leerlo

[vickykitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy revelador a veces y un poco tostón en otras

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

READING VLOG

If a camera could write, this is how it would see people, listen for them, flesh them out through flash, saturations and grainy details. 35mm brilliance with the dance steps of a Sol Lewitt painting. These are people deconstructed, made 2D yet incredibly valid with their anxieties over femminism, queerism, and every single "ism" that was forming out there on a New York rooftop in the 70s and 80s.

And the sea. Coming back to it. Ending with it. Undoubtedly, I think we always photograph the water whenever we see it. It's bound to us, our eyes, and in its eternal expanse beyond the horizon as sunrises and sunsets gloss over choppy tetherings, bouyant in peace, I finally understand how the camera sees. How lonely it is in its observations, in its desire to see beyond its retina, to feel compassion beyond its cold, technical body. It just wants to be seen as much as it sees.

[Ziortza Pereira · Rating 5 out of 5]

En esta novela se tratan temas muy diversos: el amor, el feminismo, la maternidad, arte, el concepto de imagen, las relaciones interpersonales y de poder, lgtb+, la obsesión...
Todos los temas están muy bien llevados pero lo cierto que para mi eso es lo de menos. Lo que más me interesa es como está escrito.
Lippard en esta novela nos presenta un experimento literario. Son textos collage entre textos originales de la autora y otros tantos de diferentes fuentes (I ching, revistas, textos cientificos...). Tiene atisbos de dadaismo y surrealismo, así como escritura "stream of conciousness".
Si tuviera que definir esta novela diría: ARTE CONCEPTUAL.
Al leerla tengo la sensación de estar leyendo una fotografía o los fotogramas de un video. Es difícil de explicar y que suene normal... Si las fotogafás tuvieran palabras, la elección de palabras, la narrativa, sería similar a la de esta novela.
Otra cosa que quería destacar es que me ha resultado tremendamente simbolista. Recurre continuamente al I Ching y al Horoscopo que tienen un peso simbólico en sí. Sin embargo las refencias al mar, las olas y los espejos son las que me han llamado la atención.
Según mi interpretación cada vez que habla del mar, del óceano, o del agua está hablando del paso del tiempo y la experiencia de la vida, pero también me hace pensar en la libertad, en lo desconocido y en el más allá. Si no me equivoco para las civilizaciones antiguas el mar era el origen de la vida y el lugar de recogimiento para la muerte.
En cuanto a los espejos, me hacen pensar en el pensamiento en sí, la autocomplacencia, autoconocimeinto, ¿narcisismo humano?
Necesito seguir digeriendo esta novela.
Sin duda la recomiendo. Sobretodo por cómo está escrita. Me parece un buen libro de referencia para mejorar la escritura propia.
La voy a releer, sin duda.

[Erik Duemig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all just text, but feels like a mixed media piece. Interchanging between visual descriptions of photographs, dialogues, journaling, diagrams of relationship vectors described in text, narration, and found text this book is structurally super avant-garde and artsy—in, I think, a very cool way—and utilizes Lippard’s unique skills at curation, as well as art and cultural criticism, to enhance the narrative. There is an author’s note in the back of the book discussing the found text:
“Italicized fragments, as welll as occasional sentences and phrases, have been culled and collaged from a range of ‘found material’ clipped from miscellaneous newspapers, magazines and books on oceanography, weather prediction, graphology, teenage crime, feminism, natural childbirth, palmistry, PreColumbian magic, and the horoscopes of friends. Among the sources are the I Ching, The Luescher Color Test, a Kodak manual, instructions to a Tarot pack, a comic strip, The Drama Review, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Harper’s, the Radicalesbians Collective, Mao Tse Tsung, R.D. Laing, Marshall McLuhan, Karl Kerenyi and C.G. Jung, Helene Deutsch, Heinrik Ibsen, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Gertrude Stein, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Dan Graham, Ben Spock, Elizabeth Bing, Alan Watts, Jorge Borges, Jack Tworkov, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Wood Crutch, Gerhard Neumann and Willard Pierson, and Latvana Greene.”
Lippard herself has called this “[her] weird little feminist novel.” On the back of the book, she’s quoted as saying, “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented and visual form came out of the contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of the 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

[Intza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aunque le haya puesto un tres, he de decir que me han encantado muchas partes del libro. Las conversaciones, las discusiones, los mapas relacionales que surgen entre los personajes y desde donde actúan los unos con los otros me ha parecido muy real y muy guay de leer, me ha sorprendido bastante. Me ha gustado también que se vea claramente el punto de vista feminista que presenta la autora Lucy R. Lippard durante casi todo el libro, y la complejidad de la atracción sexual que sienten los personajes. El uso del color para explicar los sentimientos y algunas reflexiones sobre la imagen o la fotografía, hacen ver el pensamiento artístico de la autora, cosa que agradezco mucho en una la lectura.

Aun así el libro como tal, me parece bastante ortopédico. Aunque las decisiones de la autora sean intencionales, muchas veces me costaba entender quien hablaba con quien y de donde surgía la conversación. Cada párrafo es como que habla de una cosa diferente; una descripción de una fotografía, la carta astral de E, un sueño de A, un recuerdo de D, conversación de A y B...
Me han cansado mucho sobre todo las descripciones fotográficas y sentir que tenía que leer muchos párrafos para encontrar algo que me pareciese realmente interesante.

Mi sensación general ha sido que había que excavar para encontrar.

[lia 🐩 · Rating 4 out of 5]

me daba mucha curiosidad qué tipo de literatura podía escribir una curadora / escritora de arte como lucy lippard, en realidad quería leer six years pero está muy caro, vi este y siempre me gusta lo que publica consonni así que dije va. yo veo / tú significas es una novela experimental, la mayoría del texto son descripciones minuciosas de fotografías (dice ahí mismo: “un libro visual hecho de palabras”), los personajes (un grupo de amigos) tienen por nombre letras, hay muchos listados y repeticiones. es muy español (madrid, la playa), importa la astrología y la espiritualidad (el i ching, el destino), hay párrafos muy interesantes sobre el lesbianismo. de pronto no me sentía tan conectada pero las últimas páginas tienen una belleza tan contundente que me hizo replantearme todo lo que había pensado del libro.

“siempre estoy atrapada por lo que se queda a medias y lo impreciso”

“me gusta la idea de poder follarme al agente follador con la parte más claramente femenina de mi cuerpo”

“sigo teniendo la sensación de que todavía no he empezado a vivir”

“¿cuántos puntos harían falta para llenar el espacio cúbico que hay entre nosotros?”

“¿me prometes que me escribirás sobre lo que ahora no puedes contarme?”

“puede, incluso, que descubra la paciencia”

[piangevole]

me ha costado bastante leerlo de seguido, lo que ha servido para que se magnificara aún más la sensación de fragmentación de este collage. Siento que no he llegado a conectar del todo pero a la vez me ha acompañado mucho (y creo que va a seguir haciéndolo). Tiene cosas muy interesantes en muchos aspectos y me ha dejado con ganas de revisitarlo y pensar en él, pero no sé si tendré la energía para leerlo entero otra vez 🤕

por ahora a seguir digiriéndolo...

[Ted Landrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this new edition of a feminist classic spin on the 70s 'new novel' is a cool diversion from all the escalating war talk!

Is 'I See / You Mean' better than Robbe-Grillet's 'Snapshots'? Lippard's lens is less diabolic so far; but you'll have to decide for yourself.

This reader recommends them both.

[Linde Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

over nostalgie, ouder worden, vrouw zijn, een spiegel vormen voor elkaar en de mogelijkheid tot gelukkig zijn (maar dat misschien toch niet echt zijn)

een 7/10 die dichtbij de 8/10 leunt

verwacht geen consistente verhaallijn maar een mixed media piece met veel visuele beschrijvingen, conversatie en gedachten

[Lorenzo Galgó · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simplemente la recomiendo muchísimo, el libro se autodefine como, una serie de puntos dispersos en una playa, escenas, visiones, bodegones y conversaciones íntimas que Lucy Ve y que tú significas, de verdad, enamorada.

[Manuela g-a · Rating 4 out of 5]

no le lei en el mejor momento creooo

[Becca Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. I liked this a lot but in sentences not as a novel.

[manasa k · Rating 5 out of 5]

catching up on reviews…this is a book about perception! forces you to infer and read between all the lines to figure out these characters. i feel like the plot was almost like a more conceptual sally rooney novel (struggling creatives in the city who overthink themselves into oblivion). observationally cutting much of this still describes what running in these circles can be like 40 years post publication.

[Toria · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the first few pages, I almost dropped the book as a needlessly-challenging read. It's experimental in sections, with written descriptions of geometric point-line relationships reminiscent of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing instruction set.

More than just an obtuse gimmick, Lippard even addresses the question of the varied possible experiences of reading the very visual descriptions, in one of the strangely vulnerable diary-like paragraphs included among a collage of descriptions, dialogue, narration, and quotations. It really works.

I was delightedly surprised by how well these sections were interwoven and metaphorically balanced with the more traditional parts of the novel, and with the honesty and introspection written into the character's dialogue and narration. The novel smoothed out and became quite compelling, beautiful, personal, and feminist, with the experimental geometric bits contributing to a powerful reading experience.

[Gandalf3000#$ · Rating 5 out of 5]

totalled me, what an epic piece. Lucy lippard is a genius. read in the sky overlooking the train tracks at my brothers house

[jd · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like this kind of book.