Lee Lozano: Kunsthalle Basel.
Molesworth, Helen
Lee Lozano
KUNSTHALLE BASEL
THOSE WHO KNOW of Lee Lozano know she ditched the art world and
stopped talking to women. But the fact is most people don't know of
her, because she ditched the art world and stopped talking to women.
Feminism taught us long ago that history is written as much through its
exclusions as through its master narratives. This has certainly been the
case for art history, whose neglect of, and outright hostility to, women
artists is amply documented. It is doubly odd, then, to come across the
problem of Lozano, for the version of '60s and '70s art that
most of us carry in our mind is marked by the total absence of her short
but major career. "Lee Lozano: Win First Don't Last Win Last
Don't Care," a traveling retrospective curated by Adam
Szymczyk, aims to change all that. In this exhibition Lozano's
oeuvre lands upon us so fully and with such finitude--its beginning,
middle, and end splayed out for all to see, all at once--that it's
hard to process.
Lozano, born in 1930, was active as an artist for only ten years.
She graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960, settled in New
York the same year, and, from 1961 to 1971, moved in rapid succession
through gestural figuration, hard-edge figuration, hard-edge
abstraction, task-based painting, and word-based conceptual pieces.
These "styles" were enacted in oil paintings and through a
seemingly rapacious drawing habit. In 1969 she began a conceptual piece
called Untitled (General Strike Piece, Feb. 8, 1969), which was
predicated on her systematic severing of all connections to the
commercial art world. It's a hilarious drawing in which she
documents exhibitions not participated in, parties not attended (we
should all be so lucky). Around this time she also decided to BOYCOTT
WOMEN, as she succinctly put it in another untitled work. By late 1972
she had packed her bags and moved to Dallas, where she remained until
her death in 1999. Her exclusion, unlike so many others, was willed,
conscious, and an ongoing work of art.
But I've gotten ahead of myself, which is easy to do with
Lozano. It's difficult to pace yourself through her decade when you
know how her story ends. Indeed, the two major exhibitions of her work
to date (the other, at New York's P.S. I, in 2004, "Lee
Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961-1971," was curated by Bob Nickas and
Alanna Heiss) have both suffered a similar fate, a difficulty finding
the narrative line through the work. Like the P.S. I show, which
included about 150 works, Szymczyk's exhibition, weighing in with
212, evinces an aversion to editing--as if the curator is trying to
compensate for Lozano's long absence through sheer bulk. This is
understandable but also problematic, because it disallows ways of
thinking about the work's potential to trouble and rearticulate the
legacy of '60s and '70s art.
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Consider, for instance, a group of paintings and drawings Lozano
made between about 1961 and 1964, that show us the human form morphing
with and becoming a variety of mechanical and inanimate objects. Deleuze
and Guattari's theories of the hookups between machines and bodies
seem mild-mannered compared with Lozano's whacked-out erotic
porosity. Penises sprout from ears and are propelled out of revolvers.
Toasters get plugged into cunts. Assholes spit Swingline staples. Tits
harden in excitation to cocklike turgidness. In which
permanent-collection galleries of a museum shall we hang these pictures?
Maybe they should be installed in a room with an abstract painting by
Philip Guston and a Willem de Kooning "Woman" picture? In a
series of drawings of her studio, also made in the early '60s,
electric sockets, water spigots, and radiators are conduits not only of
energy and heat but of a sexual life force that appears ready to
vaporize the architecture. Next came the tool pictures--hammers,
wrenches, vice grips, all lushly painted and lustily suggesting the
violent, combinative nature of sexual desire. It's around this
point, as you moved through the Kunsthalle Basel galleries, that you
began to realize that the inanimate is not a working concept for
Lozano--everything possesses some kind of energy, life, or drive. This
is true not only of content but also of form. In her graphite-and-crayon
drawings, Lozano's line conjures the great Bob Dylan lyric from
"Visions of Johanna": "The ghost of electricity howls in
the bones of her face."
But the expressionist paint handling of the first tool paintings
gave way to increasingly hard-edge cold ones. The warm browns and creamy
passages of white, the wet-on-wet paint application, fade out as
Lozano's palette turns to a chilly, mean, gunmetal gray while the
tools are magnified to fill canvases as large as six by thirteen feet.
Ambitious to the core, Lozano was friends with the likes of Carl Andre
and Hollis Frampton, and it's hard to avoid seeing these works as
her attempt to broker a deal between the intensely erotic passion of her
art and what suddenly seems like the puritanical sublimated industriousness of much Minimalist sculpture. I write "suddenly
seems" because I think one effect of encountering Lozano's
entire oeuvre at this moment is a kind of infinitely interesting
recalibration of all that we thought we knew. Figures like Robert Morris
and Donald Judd start to look nothing short of prudish.
Curiously enough, the hard-edge paintings gave rise to
Lozano's first significant works of conceptual art, drawings she
would come to call "language pieces." In an untitled 1964-67
work, Lozano made a list of titles for her paintings with the subheading ALL VERBS. Note the date: The work was completed before Richard
Serra's now-canonical 1967-68 Verb List; surely it's worth
mentioning that they knew each other. Unlike Serra's Protestant
to-do list of artistic activities, Lozano's verbs, carefully
handwritten in all caps, flush left, laid down on the page with the
precision of a typewriter, suggest sex (ream, ram, butt), sport (pitch,
slide, stroke), speed (veer, charge), and violence (cleave, clamp,
breach). The simultaneity of her painting and conceptual practices poses
some significant curatorial challenges. The paintings are massive, the
language pieces (most done on the readymade ground of 8 1/2 x II inch
paper) inherently modest, and the fact is they don't look good
together. It feels like they were made by different people, so ingrained
in the discourse is the putative hostility to painting on the part of
Conceptualists. At the Kunsthalle Basel, Szymczyk bravely tried to
integrate the painterly and the conceptual, hanging one or two language
pieces in rooms otherwise populated by paintings and figurative
drawings. But the paintings dominated in the end, and the majority of
the conceptual work still wound up relegated to two small dark rooms,
leaving the viewer, I fear, without a clear sense of what is shared, and
hence at stake, between them. It's a flaw that was partially
redressed by the show's exceedingly useful catalogue, which
includes previously unpublished statements by the artist and her peers.
(Full disclosure: As part of its compendium of essays on Lozano, the
volume includes a reprint of an article I published in ArtJournal in
2002.)
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One possible effect of this division is that a gallery that could
have been a focal point of the show--a large room of hard-edge abstract
paintings made between 1964 and 1968, in which the image of the tool has
been completely sublimated into the metallic sheen of paint on
canvas--wound up being utterly mystifying. Lozano used a paint with a
high ferrous oxide content, which gives the paintings a tripped-out,
druggy, nearly extraterrestrial glow, but despite their technical
bravura they look dead on arrival, a weak moment in an otherwise amazing
oeuvre. The coldness of the palette, the monumental scale, the loss (or
repression?) of erotic energy, combined with the utter mastery of paint
handling, result in pictures that are corporate to their core.
Accordingly, they evoke Frank Stella's work of the same period. But
whereas Stella was ultimately to embrace the corporate lobby, Lozano
disavowed the grim demise of painting's purchase on the public
sphere by turning deeply inward. She did so largely, I think, through
her investigation of painting's intersection with language and the
body. Hence the space of the studio, which had always been important for
Lozano, became even more so.
Her language pieces had become increasingly task oriented, a
running list of self-assigned activities, from masturbating to smoking
pot, to perform in the studio. The most important, and ultimately
long-lasting, was Untitled (Dialogue Piece, April 21-December 18, 1969),
for which she invited people to the studio for the sole purpose of
conversation. She kept a log of who came and whether or not the
conversation was any good. At the same time, she was working on the
"Wave Paintings," abstract compositions of undulating shimmery lines painted over the course of self-assigned periods of time
(culminating, with 96 Wave, 1970, in a continuous three-day painting
session). These works were meant to function as metaphors for the
electromagnetic spectrum, the collision of space and time. In an early
drawing for the "Wave Paintings," Lozano wrote, GIVE UP
PUBLICITY, a statement in sympathy with General Strike Piece, in which
she had resolved to "gradually but determinedly avoid being present
at official or public or 'uptown' functions or gatherings
related to the 'art world.'"
The "Wave Paintings" were a consummation of much of what
Lozano had been after. With them, her active working body has become the
eroticized tool, the embodied and sexualized agent of production. They
were meant to be installed in a dark-walled room, illuminated by
spotlights; their viewing had been conceptualized by Lozano as a
complete physical and intellectual environment, not a merely visual
experience. As you walk back and forth in front of them you realize that
they read differently from the left and from the right, like velvet
brushed against the grain. Indeed, their surfaces are nothing short of
paint transformed into corduroy. Lozano's interest in the body as a
holistic intellectual, psychic, and visceral apparatus was perfectly
synthesized in these pieces, which are at once expressive, hard-edge,
and conceptual (they're indebted to the physics of color).
It's easy to imagine that they must have felt totally complete, so
complete that Lozano could experiment with the idea of not painting
anymore.
But it wasn't only painting that she would ultimately be
finished with. If to give up a burgeoning art career is a rejection of
capitalism, then to "boycott" women is a refusal of
patriarchy's brutal gendering of the world. (While such a gesture
is far from sisterly, it is definitely feminist.) Once again Lozano was
to turn her own body, her entire being, into a tool of sorts, one
committed to fashioning what she would call a "total personal and
public revolution." She was a tool dedicated to making her own
world, one in which dialogue trumps matter, friendships win out over the
market, and gender and power are rightly recognized by absence as much
as presence.
What absence now engenders Lozano's presence? We all know that
at present the art world is almost exclusively governed by the forces of
the market. What with the fairs and the steroidal explosion of Chelsea,
it's no wonder that even the New York Times realizes that the
current model of success for many artists is monetary. Can the interest
in Lozano be anything but the flip side of this coin? It's up to us
to heed Lozano's cautionary quip, "Win first don't
last." But the oxymoronic "Win last don't care" is
worth taking to heart as well. In the face of an autocratic regime bent
on totalizing knowledge and war, many feminists have called for
explorations of failure--as the only viable form of practice under
today's political and market conditions. Lozano offers a model not
of failure per se but of a very particular form of achievement, in which
when you win last and don't care, you are capable of becoming a
tool that transforms the rules of the game.
HELEN MOLESWORTH IS CHIEF CURATOR OF EXHIBITIONS AT THE WEXNER
CENTER FOR THE ARTS IN COLUMBUS, OH. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
"Lee Lozano: Win First Don't Last Win Last Don't
Care" travels to the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, Oct.
7, 2006-Jan. 21, 2007.
