Lee Lozano, 'No title,' 1969, oil on canvas, four parts, each 107 x 244 cm
'Her paintings had all the things Donald Judd didn't want: color and shape and brushstrokes. They were marvelous, but they didn't fit in any movement... Lee was always a figure who slipped between stools. But I don't know if she would have ever fit into anything anyway--even her conceptual work looked extreme compared with other art at the time... But Lee was extraordinarily intense, one of the first, if not the first person (along with Ian Wilson) who did the life-as-art thing. The kind of things other people did as art, she really did as life--and it took us a while to figure that out,' Lucy Lippard
Last week Hauser & Wirth in London opened an exhibition of a select number of works by the American artist Lee Lozano. In the 1960s Lozano was a key figure in New York, moving in the same male-dominated circles as Carl Andre (who described Lozano as 'the world's largest collector of minor works by me'), Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci and Robert Morris. But by the mid-70s, having shown her work regularly in the US, Lozano made an unwavering decision to turn her back on the art world. Friends and acquaintances reported seeing her wandering around New York looking like 'a bum', allegedly high on LSD and dope, about which she once said: 'Make a good score, a lid or more of excellent grass. Smoke it 'up' as fast as you can. Stay high all day, every day. See what happens.' (Drug-taking was a subject she also explored in her work - 'Grass Piece' from 1969 examines the consequences of smoking excessive amounts of marijuana.) In 1971 Lee Lozano moved to Texas where she led a reclusive existence until her death in 1999 at the age of 69.
'See the extremes - that's where all the action is' was one of Lozano's mottoes, and whether it was pushing the limits of her own work conceptually or taking strident, sometimes masochistic, political positions, it represented a kind of raison d'etre by which she strove to live and work. After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Lozano moved to New York in the early 60s and embarked on what would turn out to be a brief but intense career as an artist - in fact, it was more or less coming to an end in 1969 when at a hearing of the Art Workers Coalition she decided: "I will not call myself an art worker but an art dreamer and I will participate only in a total revolution simultaneously personal and public."
Over the brief 10-year period during which Lozano was making work, she experimented with several very different styles. In the early 60s she was making cartoon-like figurative drawings and paintings with sexual imagery and a rich, creamy use of paint. She depicted tools in a sexually charged manner, often accompanying her works with pieces of text about her life, or lewd comments related to specific works which alluded to sexual exploitation and violence. In the mid-60s her work became more minimalist and abstract, culminating in the most significant series from this period, 'The Waves' (1967-1970), which was created according to a mathematical system she devied which determined the number of wave forms in each of the eleven paintings in the series. Her friend Sol Lewitt has recounted visitng Lozano in her studio and being shown 'The Waves' for the first time: 'I used to visit Lee Lozano's studio pretty regularly. On some of these visits, she would present you with three objects - abstract objects, like small cubes - and tell you to arrange them on a tabletop. I remember her doing the "Wave" paintings, which I was very impressed with - and their premise. When they were first shown, everyone agreed it was a major statement.'
At the same time Lozano was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the art world, as is evident in her 1969 'language' work 'Throwing Up Piece' in which Lozano gives instructions to toss in the air the 12 most recent issues of Artforum. A year later she decided to stop speaking to women, an act that was originally intended as a work of art which would last for a month but in fact went on for over 25 years until she died. Why she did this is not entirely clear. Was she making a protest against a male-run society in which women were subordinates and has little power? Or was it an attack against the feminist movement which Lozano felt at that point had failed to improve the situation for women? According to Sol Lewitt who knew her during this phase of her life, 'The thing about not speaking with women went way beyond an art project. I remember sitting in a restaurant with her once and a waitress came to the table; not only would Lee not talk to her, she would hide her eyes. She had an extreme dislike for the company of women, thought they were evil. When she came to my studio, if my girlfriend opened the door, Lee would turn on her heels, run down the stairs, and be gone. Her wounds were self-inflicted; the withdrawal from the art world and the anti-feminism.'
Since her death in 1999 there has been a small Lozano revival with a retrospective of her work organised by the Kunsthalle Basel in 2006, an exhibition at PS1 in New York in 2004, and a number of books dedicated to her work. Hauser & Wirth's exhibition of her work will be on view in London until 5 May.
Rebecca Wilson
Hauser & Wirth
196a Piccadilly
London W1J 9DY
T: +44 (0)20 7287 2300
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