If she were alive today would Lee Lozano be a blogger?
I’d like to think so, as at the very least I think the medium would have been
deeply interesting to her, its occupation with the ‘global audience’, exposure
for the written word and debates on censorship and what constitutes public/private in an age when almost every aspect of people’s lives is documented
online.
But where are my manners?! Few people I know have ever
even heard of the artist, Lee Lozano and to some extent that is exactly what she wanted, self-creating her own infamy
with a body of work titled ‘Dropout piece’ whose primary aim was to reject and
create self-anonymity from the art world.
“She became competitively uncompetitive, ‘I
will not seek fame, publicity or suckcess.’ That single declaration remains the
cleanest summation of what Dropout Piece is actually amounted to: a total
disengagement from all professional art world ambition.”1
In succeeding to do so, but still continuing to work
privately and continue her practice (in the form of copious notebooks of
thoughts and experimental performance pieces) she
inadvertently created a legacy in the art of self-oblivion. Born 1930 in New
Jersey she graduated philosophy and natural sciences before marrying and in
four years divorcing, architect Adrian Lozano whilst studying towards her
Bachelors in Fine Art. In the 60s she moved to New York befriending artists
such as Stephen Kaltenbach and Carl Andre in which increasingly, due to the
likes of artists such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, the art was
beginning to emerge outside the institution of the gallery/exhibition space.
This was to be influential in the development of Lozano’s later performance and
conceptual pieces.
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IMAGE 1. Lee Lozano Installation view of the ‘Wave Series’ (1969)
oil on canvas.
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It is a compelling mystery that she is so unheard of
given the prolific nature of work she actually produced. Her decision to
disappear from the art world was not made out of apathy or an act of
attention-seeking but a rebellion, a protest piece against the disillusionment
and superficiality of the art world. Additionally it was met with shared
adversity amongst many of the artists Lozano associated herself with along with
the anti-war protest and feminist movements in America at the time. Prior to
‘Dropout Piece’ Lozano was gaining recognition for her series of large ‘Wave’
paintings that share a similar flat, minimalist sense of abstraction and use of
colour to Barnett Newman (IMAGE 1) but
becoming increasingly frustrated at the schmooze-filled pomposity of the art
scene and after undergoing an extensive period of psychoanalysis she revolted
against ‘expectation’ and resorted back to her earlier ‘word’ works; conceptual
pieces handwritten in copious notebooks. This almost cataclysmic shift to
something different in her practice, I feel has so much in common (but so
little written about it) in relation to Philip Guston’s own choosing to retract
from his success in the art world as a abstract expressionist painter to pursue
his own path, his own re-invention as an artist. A bold thing to do and one that is not without risk nor always successful. Lozano herself very aware of
the pressures and expectations put upon artists by both themselves and, more
significantly for the motivation for ‘Dropout piece’; the expectation that the
art world places upon the artists it is so reliant on. Lozano expresses this
quite honestly and refreshingly defiantly at a lecture she gave on creative
production,
“For example, what is expected of any artist
or any creative person, as opposed to what really happens? Everyone knows that
an artist’s best work often covers a very short period of time, yet the artist
is expected to function on a high, high level of performance at all times. And,
if an artist does very good work at one period in life, he or she is always,
actually competing with their own great period of work. It’s almost very rare
that an artist does high quality work and maintains this great period
throughout their career. Yet it’s expected of him.”2
Prior to any of this however she had been making
drawings, gestural paintings and caricatures of tools, screws, nails,
flexi-pipes, sharpeners and mechanical objects which she collected off the
streets and her ‘former’ studio floor (IMAGE
2). And for me, personally, it is her tool work made between 1964-67 that
is particularly interesting...
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IMAGE 2. Lee Lozano ‘Untitled’ (1964) Graphite and crayon on
paper. 23 x 16”
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IMAGE 5. Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1963-64) graphite and crayon on
paper. Dimensions unknown.
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In her series of tool drawings and large paintings tools
are depicted with great intensity, often in extreme close-up with a very
physical use of mark-making.
“In Lozano’s hands, screws are
no longer a neutral means to hang a painting or set a bookshelf but rather
explicit euphemisms of sexist logic: anthropomorphized machines aggressively
screwing in and out of each other in acts of overdetermined functionality,
regardless of pain or pleasure.”3
The concept of anthropomorphising tools being one reason
I am interested in Lozano’s work,
"Given life they automatically become frenzied beings –
clamps, pliers, screwdrivers and hammers fondling and struggling with each
other in a kind of dangerous courtship."4 (IMAGE 3)
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| IMAGE 3. Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1963-64) graphite and crayon on
paper. Dimensions unknown.
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In my own work (IMAGE
4) the tools I depicted were nearly always unconsciously in groups or sets.
I like to think this was a compositional decision; that the positive and
negative shapes created by layering/overlapping the tools more interesting
visually than drawing them statically or in rows. However, the large scale and
intensity with which I drew them dictated otherwise, making them often more
intimidating or, similarly to Lozano personified in some way. Tools are objects
of character, their patina giving them unique surfaces and whilst I did not
directly respond to imbuing them with the courtship and coupling in Lozano’s
drawings I accept that other people could read into them in this
way. If anything it makes me want to make new work that specifically explores these ideas. 'Tools and their relationships'! Ha!
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IMAGE 4. Natalie Parsley. Tools 2. 2008. Oil and gloss mono
print on paper. 250 x 220cm.
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Lozano’s tool works aren’t exactly comfortable viewing aside from the fact they aren’t always particularly accurately drawn, their composition of
being squashed and almost perverse intimate close-ups of these familiar objects
that creates feeling of claustrophobia or threat; met with the large scale of
some of the paintings,
“The huge formats of many of
the Tool Paintings give these dynamic images an overpowering forcefulness.”5
These are paintings that intend to intimidate and are as
aggressive as they are sexually direct and full of double entendre and
masculinity (IMAGE 5). In their
exaggerated extremity they also have many parallels with comic books that both
influenced Lozano and whose word-play inspired her written pieces. But the fact
Lozano is a woman depicting these heavily masculinised objects with equally
masculine connotations gives them a sort of anarchic sense of taking claim or ownership
of them.
"Lozano’s early work was
irreverent and unabashed, propelled by an overt and oversexed drive to
misbehave as much as possible for a woman in the early 60s."6
As a woman myself, conveniently, who has depicted tools
in her art for many years now it is incredibly liberating to discover Lozano’s
tool work as it openly challenges stereotypes and throws an interesting perspective
on my own relationship with tools that had previously, relatively gone
unconsidered. Perhaps being in a more
liberal age of equality than America in the 60s I don’t see gender-equality as much
of an issue regarding my own work in the sense it isn’t driven out of a desire
to protest or misbehave but none-the-less after spending the majority of my
tool-based art career looking at the prints of Jim Dine it is refreshing to
counterbalance this perspective with a female artist. Dine and Lozano’s drawings have a similarity in their
intensity of looking and use of drawing as a means of expression and almost
cathartic ‘drawing-out’ which I too have frequently referred to in my own
practice. This and the fact that each of them underwent bouts of psychoanalysis
is evidence that there is more that unites the likes of Lozano and Dine other
than just in their representation of tools.
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Lee Lozano ‘No Title’ (1964) oil on canvas (two parts)
275.2 x 168.5 x 5.2cm.
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Where Lozano differs, is that Dine’s tools are relatively
more static but ‘sexually’ charged by the mark-making that surround them (IMAGE 6); Lozano’s tools are cropped so
that the moving-parts of the tool, the parts with teeth, which cut, which
flatten and squeeze are amplified so have this feeling of being more menacing, at times perverse and
certainly more physical. In a precursor to Sol Lewitt, Lozano wrote her own
list of verbs and used these ‘doing’ words as titles for her tool paintings,
further underpinning associations with action/use.
In my own practice an ongoing thread has been the idea
that the function of objects is to be ‘put to use or be possessed’ and my MA
explored someway into unravelling what it means to ‘use’ a tool and/or
‘possess’ one. Specifically I was interested if drawing could be a form of use
and possession largely fuelled by a quote by Jim Dine who of his tool prints
stated, "I wanted to possess them and what better way to possess them than to
draw them"7. Whether Lozano was trying to
possess them or not she was encapsulated in a form of ’Tool Mania’ and
possessive lifestyle mixed with periods of casual and heavy drug-taking. It was
as though she was seeking of ways in which to escape reality and thinking
through frantically making work,
"...concerns shaping her
practice, involving intimacy and exposure, the incommunicatability of living in
your head and the psychological state of possession, whether taking possession
or being possessed."8
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IMAGE 6. Jim Dine ‘Untitled (C Clamp)’ from Untitled Tool Series (1973).
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The idea of ‘incommunicatability of living in your head’ struck
me as yet another example of the similarities that Lozano’s tool drawings have
to Guston’s later works (IMAGE 7).
They share the similarity of being inwardly bodily; ‘living in your head’ which
Lozano conveyed with her treatment to thickly apply paint like a skin and make
marks with a frenzied intensity, expression and physicality that are comparable
to Guston’s fleshy, skin-crawlingly pink, eyeball filled figures. A depiction
of what it feels like on a very sensorial level, to be inside a head. As cartoonist,
Chris Ware writes of Guston’s work so succinctly,
"...these paintings are not what it looks like to see a
human being, but what it feels like to inhabit one. Philip Guston is the first
painter, ever, to truly paint a portrait from the inside out."9
There is, I feel without doubt a rawness of emotion in both Lozano's and Guston's drawings aside from their subject matter that warrants further research than I have gone into here. I see this post as the beginning of an on-going enquiry into Lozano's work.
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IMAGE 7. Philip Guston ‘Rug’ (1980) Lithograph on paper, 495 x 736
mm.
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Lee Lozano ‘Untitled (Be this occasionally)’ (1964)
Graphite and crayon on paper. 13 x 18.5”
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Lozano’s tool drawings and paintings only made for a
short span of her artistic career which evolved from the early tool works to
minimalist paintings and later written conceptual pieces performed often in
private. Despite the diversity and shifts within her practice her reasoning and
resistance to any sense of categorisation within the art system and nonconformity
prevailed seeking recognition and appraisal amongst her peers rather than
public.
Her work highlighted the dangers of expectation and
assumption and demonstrated that artists are able to reinvent themselves and
take on many evolutions within their practice, but most of all being admirable
for not being afraid to stick two fingers up at the symbiotic, superficial relationship
between artist and the art world, in fact making it into the catalyst for creating work. This path consequently led her down an incredibly self-destructive path and at times reliant on the support of
friends and family which she continued to rely on up until her being diagnosed
for cervical cancer which she died from in 1999 (she was 69). Yet despite her elusiveness and relatively premature death her work went on to influence a generation of conceptual and performance artists working in America and thanks to the preservation of many of her works, countless since. I have known of her work since 2011, first
discovering her in a book on drawing –since then I have felt obliged to unveil some of the mystery and have continued to seek her
work out in exhibitions and in books. I still want to find out more, captivated by both the shifts within her practice, her mystery and determination met with anarchy against the establishment.
That and the tools, of course!
1 LEHRER-GRAIWER, S (2014) Lee Lozano ‘Dropout Piece’ Afterall Books: London p57
2 IBID p59/60
3 FOLIE, S (2011) ‘Lozano
Tools’, An Art Service Publications; Minneapolis
4 IBID
5 IBID
6 LEHRER-GRAIWER, S (2014) Lee Lozano ‘Dropout Piece’
Afterall Books: London p28
7 DINE, J (2005) Jim
Dine: Tools and Plants Alan Cristea Gallery: London p5.
8 OpCit p18
