Crit Cross #28: Dropout Subjects

Dropout Subjects – Art Criticism as Social Critique After 1968
– Frida Sandström in conversation with Rose‑Anne Gush –

What happens when art criticism refuses its own framework?
In 1969, art critics Jill Johnston and Carla Lonzi independently abandoned the field of art criticism in the USA and Italy. Their gestures did not mark an end, but the emergence of new forms of feminist, political, and social critique — resonances that continue to shape critical thought today.

This edition of Crit Cross features a presentation by Frida Sandström, drawing on her PhD thesis Dropout Subjects. Jill Johnston’s and Carla Lonzi’s Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969 (2025).

The presentation explores how Johnston’s and Lonzi’s parallel departures from art criticism, in the context of and in response to the post‑1968 moment, constituted radical reformulations of their positions as critics and as women. Rather than withdrawing from critique, they mobilized what Lonzi described as a “cultural void” — resisting dominant systems of representation such as art history, politics, and law, without seeking integration into any of them.

Through a discussion of the artistic and textual strategies that replaced conventional art criticism, the presentation addresses forms of critique that are inherently self‑critical and that question the very subjectivities upon which art criticism and political institutions depend. Seen from this perspective, Johnston’s and Lonzi’s practices reveal how late‑avant‑garde methods were reactivated for feminist and anti‑colonial thinking — a history that continues to resonate in the present.

Join us this May as we warmly welcome

Frida Sandström (Sweden) – art critic and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Florence
Rose‑Anne Gush (Austria) – art historian and theorist, and occasional artist and curator, currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK), TU Graz

Crit Cross. A Forum on Art Criticism is an open discussion platform dedicated to contemporary critical writing, organized three times a year by Verein K since 2018. Its aim is to foster sustained, socially critical dialogue in Vienna through shared reading, discussion, and exchange.

Crit Cross #28 is organized in cooperation with Depot and will take place on site.