Until recently, Lee Lozano – who later called herself only »E« and was one of the most radically freethinking and aesthetically fascinating artists in the New York avant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s – was relatively unknown. The rediscovery of her work began with the now legendary exhibition series »Matrix« at the Beaux Art Museum in Hartford in 1998, where two sets of works by Lee Lozano were shown, bringing about a long overdue correction to the historiography of art. Her conceptual phase featured centrally in this presentation1: her conceptual paintings, the »Wave« series, which consists of eleven pictures conceived according to a strictly mathematical systems and executed in one go, and the »Language Pieces«, concisely recorded instructions to herself and sequences of actions. Writing in capital letters on squared paper – occasionally she copied them from her notebooks -, Lozano tried to depict the idea of »art and life«, sometimes in quite detailed fashion in diary-like notes, and sometimes very briefly. In an essay for the brochure that accompanied this exhibition, James Rondeau calls the »Wave« series a »logical, pre-set system«, thus positioning Lozano’s art in proximity to Sol Lewitt’s conceptions.2
The short period in which she was active (1961-1971) covered an unusually wide range of artistic interests and practices before she chose to give up art. In this summer, Lozano’s large body of works began to receive broader attention outside the USA for the first time. The Kunsthalle Basel, in cooperation with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, set itself the ambitious task of providing a comprehensive insight into Lozano’s work, and realised this goal in an impressive exhibition. The accompanying catalogue - along with historical texts, it also contains short texts by the artist as well as a transcription of a lecture Lozano gave on 16 July 1971 for David Askevold’s class at the Nova Scotia College, at the time regarded as a Mecca of conceptual art - is the first really good examination of her various groups of works. It was also in Halifax that the »Halifax 3-State Experiment« was carried out: the idea of repeating the lecture given in the NSCAD in three different states – sober, under the influence of marijuana and on LSD, while she had the pupils of her eyes photographed by the students.
Almost at the same time as the presentation in Basle, the Kunsthalle in Vienna opened another exhibition on Lee Lozano and Dorothy Iannone, also an American. An interesting concept, combining two artists who could not be more different with regard to their artistic approaches and concepts of life. While Lee Lozano was always in quest of extremes and constantly seeking the pleasure of provocation, finding in it the strength and stamina to transgress borders, Dorothy Iannone almost hysterically abandoned herself to the ecstatic love of one man, with all the consequences. What lends the exhibition its coherence are the visual representations of sexuality. With Lozano, the cocks and cunts, depicted in abstract, expressionist manner, are rude, crude, obscene, caustically humorous, while in Iannone’s works they occur in comic-like, lavish picture panels and narratives – it is striking that Iannone’s depiction of all-permeating love, the penetration of the lovers, does not correspond to the representation of the classic dichotomy of man and woman, but to the concept of unisex (beings) fashionable at the time.
Both the Basle and the Vienna exhibition feature early works by Lee Lozano – blasphemous drawings and paintings that undermine the »law of the Fathers« and the symbolic order of authority and religion. In the New York of the early sixties, they weren’t exhibited. Sabine Folie, the curator of the Vienna exhibition, expatiates on the reasons why this phase is so little prominent: in a climate informed by a kind of conceptual art that was tame in comparison, or at least barely touched on questions of morality and authority, and by affirmative pop art, the drastic exaggerations of Lozano’s statements would not really have gone down well. Lozano’s return to the canon of conceptual art as cleverly engineered by the curator James Rondeau did not occur with her expressionistic early works, which bring to mind late Philip Guston, until almost a decade later.
The phase of Lozano’s work from 1964 that included »Tool Drawings« and »Tool Paintings« shows a drastic formal change influenced by the burgeoning minimalist movement in New York. However, sexual themes do not disappear; instead, »the latency of the visceral shafts and the obtrusiveness of the various screws and threads boring into space only serve to heighten the sexual allusions.«3 Todd Alden adds: »Lozano’s >radicalisation of Eros< belongs in the intellectual context and the sphere of utopian challenges that were expressed in Marcuse’s book >Eros and Civilisation< (1955/1961) and found revolutionary potentials in disturbing places. In this influential Marxist dialogue with Freud, Marcuse claims that >the reactivation of polymorphic perversion< could work against the destructive character of industrial culture and lead to the creation of an orphic culture, that is, to a society that is not based on utility, production and work, but on aesthetics, sensuousness and play.«4
In the mid-sixties, destabilisation and emancipation set in. The classical concept of a »work of art« was questioned more than ever; a process of dematerialisation began. During this period, Lozano, who had studied philosophy and science in addition to art in Chicago, started on her »Language Pieces«, which connected up with her obsessive tendency to self-observation. The »Dialoguepiece (April 21 – December 18, 1969« is her most important word-based work. It shows with whom the artist was in friendly and close contact, which today sounds like a »Who’s Who« of the New York artistic elite of the time. Lozano’s art becomes an instrument that attaches value to the less tangible qualities of interpersonal relationships as well. In the »General Strike Piece«, Lozano records various actions that she used to create distance from the art industry as part of the artistic project.
Lee Lozano’s gradual departure from the world of art was not only conceptually prepared, but very concretely implemented. The artist did not want to make any concessions - »I see myself not as an art worker, but as an art dreamer, and I will only take part in a total revolution that is at the same time private and public.« The »Dropout Piece«5 was for Lozano the hardest work she had ever completed, and contained the decision never to talk again with women; she maintained this boycott until the end of her life (1999). In view of the radical nature of this »opting out«, Helen Molesworth has asked why, these days, Lozano’s rejection of women seems almost pathological and her repudiation of the New York art scene so idealistic. Lee Lozano had recognised that »the patriarchal system and capitalism exist as two connected and mutually determinant systems, and inequality can only be eliminated if both systems are abolished.« The logic behind late capitalism, which produces almost solely affirmative effects, is far removed from this, so Lee Lozano will be given an important place in the system of art history. However, the power of her view of the ambivalences that she saw is not neutralised by this, but only strengthened.

The exhibition »Win First Don’t Last, Win Last Don’t Care« was on display from 15 June to 27 August 2006 in the Kunsthalle Basel; »Seek the Extremes … – Dorothy Iannone / Lee Lozano« ran from 7 July to 15 October 2006 in the Kunsthalle Wien.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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