From various sources:
1 Obituary:
Lee Lozano, 68, Conceptual Artist Who Boycotted Women for Years
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 18, 1999
Lee Lozano, an eccentric artist who pursued Conceptual Art and painting in the 1960's and then left the New York art world for self-imposed exile that included an embargo on contact with other women, died on Oct. 2 in the Dallas Health and Rehabilitation Center in Texas. She was 68 and lived in Dallas.
The cause was cervical cancer, said Mark Kramer, the artist's cousin.
Ms. Lozano was a quixotic, confounding rebel whose decade long New York career seemed always to involve pushing one limit or another. Her early paintings, executed in an Expressionistic cartoon style, confronted issues of sexual and painterly decorum. They featured a robust messiness, distorted close-ups of the body, intimations of violence and suggestively exaggerated images of tools.
By 1967 she had taken the systemic approach of Minimalism, making nearly monochromatic ''Wave'' paintings based on wavelengths that pushed the limits of visual perception. In the mid-1960's she also began to execute a series of life-related actions (she didn't like the word performance) that tested, among other things, her stamina, her friends' patience and the conduct of everyday life. These works reflected her friendship with Conceptually inclined artists like Sol LeWitt, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Carl Andre. They also reflected an increasing disenchantment with the art world that bordered on hostility.
Many of these pieces were proposed or recorded in written works that she considered drawings. Sometimes she designated everyday activities like thought, conversation or marijuana smoking as art, attracted by the idea that they were unsaleable and democratic. Her ''Throw-Up Piece'' proposed throwing the 10 most recent issues of Artforum, the leading magazine of contemporary art, in the air and letting them fall where they may. In ''Transistor Radio Piece'' she listened to a radio while attending a panel discussion on art.
In 1969 and 1970 Ms. Lozano began a steady withdrawal from the art world in works that she titled ''General Strike Piece'' and ''Dropout Piece.'' She decided to boycott women for a month or two as a means of improving communication with them. For unexplained reasons, she continued this piece to the end of her life, despite the great inconvenience and, one supposes, even greater rudeness.
Ms. Lozano was born Lee Knastner in Newark in 1930. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. A brief marriage in the late 1950's to an architect, Adrian Lozano, ended in divorce. She leaves no survivors.
Ms. Lozano had her first exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1966 and was then associated with the Green Gallery. In 1998 her work, long absent from the New York scene, returned when three SoHo galleries, Mitchell Algus, Rosen & Van Liere and Margarete Roeder, each showed a different phase of her painting. At the same time the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford exhibited her ''Wave'' paintings and notebooks. All the dealers and curators involved with these exhibitions were men.
2 Frieze :
Lee Lozano
P.S.1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, NEW YORK, USA
Lee Lozano left the art world almost 30 years before her death in 1999, ending a decade-long career in New York that included drawing, painting, Performance and Conceptual activities. In spite of the accomplishment of her paintings, she is best known (in so far as she is known at all) for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks. In General Strike Piece, begun in 1969, she decided to withdraw from the art world, and recorded the process by documenting the last times she visited museums or attended gallery openings. That same year she began a month-long ‘boycott’ of women, which she then extended and continued for the rest of her life.
This survey of Lozano’s work – the first major effort since her death – included a wide selection of notebook pages, drawings and related paintings. Lozano’s paintings have drawn new praise in the last few years (David Reed called her ‘Wave’ paintings, 1967–70, ‘one of the three great series of American painting’, placing them in the esteemed company of Barnett Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’, 1958, and Andy Warhol’s ‘Shadow’ paintings from 1977–8), and her Conceptual works prefigure many relational aestheticians of the 1990s (such as Christine Hill and Rirkrit Tiravanija). Nevertheless she remains an enigmatic and elusive figure, fraught with contradictory positions on questions that challenge efforts to canonize her work.
Lozano was born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey, in 1930 and attended The Art Institute of Chicago before settling into the New York scene in the early 1960s. Many of her early drawings share the formal humour and line quality of Philip Guston’s later works on paper, and her gendered icons evoke early Claes Oldenburg in their cartooned stylization. With a few exceptions, however, most of the drawings in this show seemed unremarkable and almost insistently immature (in development rather than style). Although Lozano’s emotional investment is evident, her cutting anger begins to feel dulled into a mannered passion, dampened and constrained by the limited iconographic approaches she takes in the drawings. Phalluses of all types are paired with funnily irritated one-liners such as ‘fuck you it’, or with other suggestive formal equivalents (a crucifix, a flashlight) that sometimes amount to more than a silly visual pun, but often don’t.
The notebooks shed light on the rigour of Lozano’s regimented approach to painting, and describe some ideas for paintings that anticipate the obsession with subjectivity that would characterize later stoner artists such as Charles Ray. A note from 1968 suggests that ‘if the canvases are on warped stretchers, let them be hung on specially built warped walls’, which could easily have described a convex self-portrait photo for which Ray built a convex wall to match. Lozano also proposes a series of paintings, each to be executed while stoned, drunk or sober, for the sake of comparison. (She also envisages painting while tired, horny, sick or in love.) Lozano examines basic questions of perception on both sides of the table – the altered mental state of the artist (is it visibly manifested in the work?) and the viewer’s knowledge of this state (does it affect our perception of the work?).
Included among the notebook pages are her better-known Conceptual projects, such as Dialogue Piece (begun 1969), for which she invited people over to her loft for conversations, including those whom she ‘might not otherwise see’ because of the General Strike Piece then underway. This convenient loophole existed within another artwork, which poses some complications from a critical perspective. If we are to evaluate General Strike Piece on its relative asceticism and doctrine of negation, how do we accommodate relaxations of the project’s rigorous constraints if conducted in the course of a different ‘piece’?
More challenging is Lozano’s seamless intermingling of artifice and real life. ‘I will be human first, artist second’, reads a 1971 note, though she had already rendered this distinction practically meaningless. To whom, in any case, is this declaration addressed? Perhaps the most disturbing and interesting aspect of this show was her conspicuous consciousness of audience, co-existing alongside sentiments that seem pointedly reclusive. ‘Note to myself’, she writes in one case – lest we think the thought was intended for us. It’s a bit like discovering that the diary you’ve been peeking into has been written with you in mind. How much of this is as honest as it might first appear? Honesty, though, seems beside the point. Lozano’s confusion between private thought and performed emotion, both in art and in life, remains richly nuanced, intriguing and irresolvable: all characteristics of enduring art.
Very little is known about Lozano’s life after she moved into self-imposed exile in Texas in 1972. Even less is certain of her struggle to stay true to her last two projects. The strictness and boldness of her goals for General Strike Piece and the boycott of women demand that we evaluate these pieces by the degree to which she maintained her stringent programmes. Quite deliberately, Lozano didn’t want us to know more. Why not honour that choice? The most responsible appraisal of this troubled artist’s final exit from creative life may be to offer no reading at all – a refusal to engage with a work critically, albeit under the guise of criticism.
Peter Eleey
Dear Seeb,
December 4th, 2007 ·
The artist Lee Lozano wrote in her notebook on December 20, 1969: “Confinement is the near root of all my rage.”
Recently, I’ve been trying to imagine her name as a verb. Lee Lozano. Do you know her work? I think you would like it. She’s mostly known for her tool drawings and paintings—big graphic sucker punch hammers and silvered screw drivers with dicks and cunts (I know I’m being crude, but it’s fitting).
One drawing is of a cross necklace hanging between two breasts. The cross at the end is morphing into the head of a penis. Next to this image Lozano scrawled “A tits man he was not.”
She exhibited in New York from 1965 to 1971. She was kind of a big deal, which is amazing since most people never know who I’m talking about when I mention her name. She had a one-woman exhibition at the Whitney in 1970—huge Wavepaintings that were mathematically planned and loosely based on electromagnetic wave theory.
Lozano would work on one canvas for days, non-stop, applying flat waves of paint after flat waves of paint. A reviewer for Artforum described the works as “off-putting” and ”oppressively decorative.” Lozano wrote to a friend: “Turns out the Artforum critic is a Bennington girl!” Bennington is a college in Vermont that was known in the 1960s for its interest in formalism. Rosalind Krauss, for instance, is a Bennington girl.
Lozano was tough, but I think this review hurt her. She moved to Dallas and quit making work the next year. She “dropped out.” The act of leaving was her last definitive piece.
I think the art world missed her. Sometimes I think I miss her, even though I know she could never miss me. She quit speaking to women in 1972.
Carl Andre missed her. In 1983, Andre wrote that Lee Lozano, born Lenore Knaster, now wanted to be known as “E” for energy. In a notebook page dated 1964/67 Lozano created a list titled All Verbs: “ream, spin, veer, span, cross, ram, peel, charge, pitch, verge, switch, shoot, slide, cram, goad, clash, cleave, fetch, clamp, lean, swap, butt, crook, split, jut, hack, break, stroke, stop.“
What happens when someone leaves? Are they forgotten forever? Does dropping out mean leaving the people you love? Can agency exist in absence?
She wrote in her notebook on May 9, 1968 “Once and for all, the sum of myself to date is in terms of the verb.”
As “E” she left the world of pronouns forever. Andre wrote, “To me matter must stand on its own, not be an image, not disappear when the lights go out. Lee could and did make pigment matter. I thought that unholy. We argued. Her paintings were and are right. “
And then,
“I was wrong, Lee Lozano’s notebooks of the 1960s contain some of the most beautiful depictions of matter I have ever seen. Then, mattering pigment was no longer enough. Matter outside of the mind became unimportant. It became necessary to dye the canvas of the brain. Lost were four vowels and four consonants. Literally. “
What Andre isn’t saying here, although I think it is felt, is that Lozano was mad. It is rumored that she went crazy and in 1999 died homeless and alone. This is a familiar story, but you can hear Andre’s regret.
She was a shifting yet truly honest character, Lee Lozano. No paper tiger for her. She wrote on May 9, 1968: “Art does not need to be monumental, but movement (change) does.”
Love,
Katie,http://weirddeermedia.com/2007/12/dear-seeb/
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