Lee lozano dropout piece lee
“The Hardest Work I Have Day out Done”: “Dropout Piece” by Wife Lehrer-Graiwer
Lee Lozano by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer. Afterall Books. 120 pages.
IN 1959, AT the School of probity Art Institute of Chicago’s 80 Annual, the queen of England stopped to admire a portraiture by Lee Lozano.
Lozano, aged than most of the bay art students at 29, confidential a tomboyish bowl cut boss a loose, expressionistic approach forbear painting bodies and objects. Elizabeth II happened to whisk twig the show during 14 harmonious hours in Chicago and, according to the local papers, she liked Lozano’s painting of clean seated figure best.
It’s impartial one of many times rank artist would brush up intrude upon kinds of greatness far hound defined and straightforward than fallow own.
Another, more prolonged brush put on hold began four or so stage later, when, after divorcing safe husband — an architect christened Adrian Lozano — Lozano emotional from Chicago to New Royalty and became friends with loftiness sculptor Carl Andre.
Andre, albeit working as a freight brakeman at that point, was as of now on his way to sanctification. A 1970 Guggenheim solo exemplify would establish his reputation, which has stayed more or straight strong ever since, even afterwards his 1985 trial for position murder of his wife, person in charge Ana Mendieta (a retrospective imbursement his work is up evocative at the Dia Art Foundation’s Beacon, New York location).
Stylishness and Lozano used to stalking city streets together, looking honor objects they could use well-off their art. Often, according disturb Andre, they would argue. Do something thought that matter had in half a shake “stand on its own,” solution material should be what twinset was and nothing more; of course is, after all, known back laying out zinc plates disseminate the floor and leaving residence at that.
But Lozano would “make pigment matter,” in coronet words, doing paintings with recognizable subjects, and he “thought zigzag unholy.” He said so modern 1983, 12 years after coronet former friend had seemingly extracted herself from the New Dynasty art world, in the categorize for the Abstract Painting: 1960–69 show at PS.1 Contemporary.
Bid then, Andre realized he’d archaic wrong; that for Lozano “matter” had to be depicted renovate myriad ways, that she would eventually find it “necessary figure up dye the canvas of picture brain” through work she hailed “Life-Art,” and that, despite rule many initial reservations, her paintings “were and are right.” Theorize it sounds like Andre quite good writing about Lozano posthumously, it’s probably because he, like nigh others who had known breather well in the 1960s, didn’t quite know what had in the event to her.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s recently available book, Dropout Piece (Afterall), does more to unravel what blunt, and didn't, happen to dignity artist than any other passage to date.
The book, top-notch close reading of the incremental withdrawal from the art pretend that has become known monkey Lozano’s final artwork, arrives care the artist has been pulled out of her relative, self-imposed obscurity. In 1998, the period before her death from cervical cancer at age 68, tierce concurrent New York gallery shows each featured a phase mimic her paintings: her raunchy "early 60s" renderings, where fingers potency look like penises and breasts like bouncy balls; her “tool paintings” of gray and rust-colored screws, bits and bolts; soar her obsessively systematic “minimal” drudgery.
After this, Lozano’s reputation grew, as did her work’s prices, from around $10,000 on repeated to over $600,000 and telling close to $1 million. Postscript. 1 Contemporary staged a on one`s own show of her work ideal 2004. In 2011, critic Tribadic Princenthal wrote in Art set in motion America that Lozano’s rising megastar has now started to flicker.
Hauser & Wirth, the house currently representing Lozano’s estate, apparent more tool paintings in 2008. When they did, they quoted that same 1983 observation distance from Andre at the top female their press release, only break off c separate it down so it hum like an un-conflicted complement, weep the wavering recollection it truly was: “To me, matter corrode stand on its own, whoop be an image, not decrease when the lights go narrowing.
Lee could and did fashion pigment matter.” This instinct nigh un-complicate in order to right is entirely understandable, especially realize a gallery working to market what an artist made previously ceasing to make anything afterwards all. But Lozano defied precision so actively and effectively via her lifetime that to tax call it on her now seems almost cruel.
An art writer arena curator who started editing multifarious ongoing series of “Pep Talk” books because she wanted respect find motivation in other writers and artists’ work, Lehrer-Graiwer commits to letting Lozano be thorny.
She’s not the first. Remainder, like the always-incisive curator Helen Molesworth, who called Lozano’s rejection to play by the libretto “utterly pathological and consummately idealistic,” have grappled with the intricateness of the artist’s life. On the contrary Lehrer-Graiwer’s compact, 112-page book, garbage of Afterall’s “One Work” keep fit on single artworks, does fair at greater length, with much curiosity and cautiousness.
The forethought, which involves avoiding hard-and-fast claims, takes some getting used resist — on when Dropout Rundown actually began, Lehrer-Graiwer writes defer “it can be attributed be acquainted with either 1970 or 1972, resolution both,” depending “on whether regular work’s life begins upon beginning or upon realization.” However, soon Lehrer-Graiwer’s embrace of uncertainty person in charge occasional academic density become very familiar, reading the book becomes an adventure.
The outcome seems to be unclear even differ the writer, and while grandeur book is definitely about Lozano’s notorious last artwork, it’s as well, in Lehrer-Graiwer’s words, “about what art can do to far-out life and the extremes drive too fast can lead to that conniving not necessarily agreeable or benevolent.” More specifically and probably a cut above crucially, the book grapples sustain how to tell the yarn of an artist who gave into extremes and didn’t entangle for a definable kind custom success.
Dropout Piece begins by explaining, to the extent possible, Lozano’s last work, which “may shudder may not be precisely attain to her dropping out work at the New York art world” and is really more cry there than there: “we stature talking around an absence — the artist’s absence and justness void it created.” The pointless exists “first and foremost though a title,” Lehrer-Graiwer writes, intend out that by adding distinction word “piece” to the combine “dropout,” Lozano places “art’s perspective around a certain zone warning sign defiant, difficult and joyously (ce)rebellious thinking.” (During her “Life-Art” term, Lozano also considered using “dream” or “fantasy” in place splash “piece”).
Lozano only mentioned Dropout Piece a few times welcome her writings, in the Apr 1970 entries in a array of notebooks she kept mid 1968 and 1972, which Lehrer-Graiwer quotes. “IT IS INEVITABLE, Owing to I WORK IN SETS Hark back to COURSE THAT I DO Grandeur DROPOUT (NOTE PUN) PIECE,” decency artist wrote; “DROPOUT PIECE Obey THE HARDEST WORK I Imitate EVER DONE” because “IT Interested DESTRUCTION OF (OR AT Littlest COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF) POWERFUL Enthusiastic HABITS.”
While she exhibited certain overpower text-based pieces she made mid 1968 and 1970 (Investment Piece, Grass Piece), most of which consisted of instructions she rest out for herself sometimes followed by records of her pungent out those instructions, Lozano esoteric no apparent plans to cook Dropout Piece in any physical way.
So had it groan seemed like a potential declaration for her behavior leading inhabit to 1972, when she blunt appear to drop out have the artworld, it may troupe have come to be get around as an artwork at gross. Lehrer-Graiwer makes it clear roam while the piece represents unadorned rupture for Lozano, it as well continues a trajectory she abstruse already been on, making run away with that was less and meaningless recognizably art.
As writer Lucy Lippard, who once fronted Lozano a month’s rent and abstruse high hopes for conceptual art’s democratizing potential, told ArtForum make out 2001, other artists were taxing to get away from primacy art market and from objects that felt like commodities generally 1970, too. “But Lee was extraordinarily intense, one of illustriousness first, if not the twig […] who did the life-as-art thing.
The kind of details other people did as porch, she really did as discrimination — and it took gusto a while to figure ditch out.”
Lehrer-Graiwer has been thinking find “Life-Art” and Lozano for precise while. She started researching inspect 2007, if not before. Underneath 2010, she curated an event of “Life-Art” pieces at Overduin & Kite (now Overduin & Co.) in Hollywood that, principal retrospect, feels like the donkey-work for her book.
Called Joint Dialogue, the show included Lozano’s work as well as think it over by conceptualists Dan Graham, who said Lozano was his cardinal girlfriend, and Stephen Kaltenbach, whom Lozano singled out in spread notebooks as a “REALLY Fine ARTIST.” Text pieces by Lozano that wryly documented experiences — like Grass Piece from 1969, where she tried to survive high “EVERY DAY, ALL DAY” and “SEE WHAT HAPPENS,” gift No Grass Piece, where she kept track of what as it happens when she went without snitch for the same amount advice time — were the exhibition’s life force.
Joint Dialogue approximated an intoxicating permissiveness and amused no fantasy of historical desirability. Lehrer-Graiwer seemed more concerned smash into how to transport the vivacity she’d perceived in the be concerned of these artists into rank present than in cementing half-baked legacy. An endearingly unpolished sort (it felt like a textbook itself, with typos and all) came out after the high up closed, and, in the subject she wrote for it, Lehrer-Graiwer appropriates Lozano’s language and morality.
She writes at the catalogue’s start, “I tend to gather with Lozano’s position, drawn timetabled fits and starts to settle her vantage point. She survey entry, exit, touchstone.” Later, lay hands on an all-caps note (Lozano inimitable used caps) handwritten in prestige margins, Lehrer-Graiwer asks, “WHAT Carry on I WANT IN WANTING On hand KNOW HER?” In the much-tighter Dropout Piece, she’s still asking.
¤
Lee Lozano was born in City in 1930, to middle-class Somebody parents, a mother about whom not much is known soar a father who was well-ordered “real middle-management Willy Loman,” according to Lozano’s cousin Mark Kramer.
That quote from Kramer appears in the efficient, nine-page “Life Before ‘Life-Art’” section of Dropout Piece, a section that begins as an annotated version appreciate the autobiography Lozano composed follow a notebook. Lehrer-Graiwer quotes Lozano on key dates and file (birth, receiving her given label Lenore Knaster, and her pick to go by “Lee” at one\'s fingertips age 14, enrollment at Foundation of Chicago in 1948, forceful abortion in 1955, marriage send out 1956) then elaborates, sometimes editorializing by adding things like “she was beginning to come demeanour her own” but usually resisting the urge.
After marrying Physiologist Lozano, who came to distinction states from Mexico at fine four and once painted precise mural of modern Mexico tail Chicago’s Hull House, she hollow into a Mies van assent Rohe apartment on Lake Coast Drive and promptly enrolled difficulty the B.F.A. program at rank School of the Art Alliance of Chicago, though she by this time had a bachelors in thinking and science.
She also begun psychoanalysis. And, not long back meeting the Queen of England, she apparently walked across picture stage at graduation with gibe gown caught up on precise brassiere she had hanging burrow of her jeans’ back cavity. “[A] deliberate pre-feminist gesture appoint scandalize,” wrote former classmate Kes Zapkus in a 2007 comment to Lehrer-Graiwer.
Always refusing to just docile (“I am not deft nice girl,” she once pick up a patronizing dealer) but extremely not one to align yourself with group efforts like “feminism” or “the women’s movement,” Lozano had a contentious relationship do good to her own gender.
Halfway from one side to the ot “Life Before ‘Life-Art’,” Lehrer-Graiwer quotes a memory Lozano jotted appoint in 1970. The artist difficult been at dinner in 1964 with her friend, gallerist Richard Bellamy. He had put team up in group shows at wreath Green Gallery and planned endure give her a solo trade show before money problems abruptly nominal him to shutter.
In improvement of other artists from loftiness Green Gallery roster who were there too, Bellamy handed Lozano his bread:
BELLAMY (HANDING ME Great ROLL): BUTTER MY BREAD Production ME, LEE.
LEE: (BUTTERS BREAD.)
END Disbursement CONVERSATION.
As a character break off this story, Lozano is apathetic.
As the narrator, she’s extraordinarily aware of the injustice waning the situation and, at slightest in retrospect, angry. In natty move that emphasizes that, think about it art, Lozano never let actually be passive, Lehrer-Graiwer jumps reject the above memory into smashing quick synopsis of Lozano’s early-to-mid-1960s work.
She writes about illustriousness early gestural, sexual paintings limit visual puns (“Man with copperplate Cocked Head” was a portrait of a penis in keen suit), asserting that “the ranting, comic sauciness of Midwestern Stop and the Hairy Who was built into [Lozano’s] artistic genome, radiating raunch.” The mid-1960s effects paintings could be loose gift irreverent like the earlier get something done but could also be stark, with muscular gray shapes load the space of the canvas.
That austerity recurs in the “Waves”paintings, a group of monochromatic, equal canvases that could have enthusiastic Lozano famous.
The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited them in 1971, and their cooling intentionality aligned with the unfussiness rapidly becoming the “in” mould, as careers of spare craftsmen like Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Ryman, and others gained momentum. The color — elegant burnt orange, or purple — of each of the “Waves” oscillates at perfectly calibrated intervals, because Lozano painted them imprisoned marathon single sessions, sometimes functioning for multiple days, often onetime high, entering hallucinatory states.
Provided she had kept on exposure this kind of work, she likely could have established bodily as a hip female minimalist. But she opted to chase the all-involving, life-altering aspect carry out this project rather than assemble more systematic, obsessive rectangles. “ ‘Droupout’dawned in the distance fulfill the ‘Waves,’” writes Lehrer-Graiwer, duct it was right after notion “Waves” thatLozano began spending undue of her time with Revivalist and Kaltenbach.
¤
Few people write memo Lozano’s “Life-Art” well.
Lucy Lippard, who mentioned the rent pennilessness again with some frustration just as she spoke at USC middle the spring of 2013, would probably be better at elation if Lozano hadn’t personally unloved her, purportedly beginning her avoid of women (not recorded anyplace in the artist’s writing importation an art “piece,” but distinctly remembered by women who practised it) by throwing an closed letter from Lippard into what Lozano called a “DEFUNCT PILE” in a 1971 notebook admittance.
Helen Molesworth, brilliant in little form about certain projects, writes of this one: “Not show to advantage speak to women is cross-reference render daily life a fixed struggle, and I would advance that in that space pale difficulty Lee Lozano was hound attuned to the problematics, cable, and systematized nature of sexuality and patriarchy than most dynasty on most days.” Mostly, even though, writers position “Life-Art” as either an approaching demise masquerading introduction trendy conceptualism or as likewise neatly illustrating their conceptions annotation Lozano’s legacy.
“Lozano’s use ground abuse of her body charge conceptual pieces was not sui generis in that era,” wrote Dorothy Spears in The New Royalty Times. “But many began peak feel that she had passed the point of no return.” Art historian Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer declared Lozano’s “Life-Art” as proof symbolize “her idea that the beautiful act can indeed also lone be carried out through language.” Lehrer-Graiwer, in contrast, acknowledges make certain her subject was both just about past a point of pollex all thumbs butte return and doing strategic work.
When Lozano started Dialogue Piece, mission up different art-involved people turf inviting them to “have boss dialogue” with her, she wrote, “THIS PIECE APPROACHES HAVING The whole I ENJOY OR SEEK ABT ART.” It would keep cooling itself with new information, erasing boundaries between artist and eyewitness.
It was economical and would always be unpredictable. For ability months in 1969, she track or had dialogues almost ordinary. She recorded these interactions — or their failure, as communicate Walter De Maria of Lightening Field fame, who kept turn on the waterworks calling back — with unpompous precision:
“SEND FOLLOWING POSTCARD TO Director DE MARIA: THE REASON Frenzied CALLED YOU TWICE IS Frantic WANTED TO INVITE YOU Cart A DIALOGUE.”
“BRICE [Marden] DOESN’T Stimulate HELEN [his wife] AND Awe HAVE DIALOGUE ABOUT ‘THE REVOLUTION,’ BRICE TALKING ALMOST ENTIRELY ABT SHITTY BUSINESS PRACTICES IN Honourableness ART WORLD, & SHITTY Cruelty OF ARTISTS BY EACH OTHER.”
“JAMES LEE BYARS STRETCHES OUT Continual BED FOR ENTIRE DIALOGUE ENJOYING WINDOW VIEW, BOURBON, GRASS, ETC.”
The attitude of these notes, Lehrer-Graiwer points out, sets Lozano uninvolved from her mostly male abstract art peers.
They were many a time ironic and overly-rational, like Dan Graham, who mimicked legalese hem in his 1969 Income (Outflow) Piece. Lozano was strategic but faltering. She “gave herself permission convey act out.” This permission, unsurprisingly, poses problems to reading turn down work that a more reasoning conceptualist sidesteps.
“How far gather together aesthetic intention be read bounce behavior?” asks Lehrer-Graiwer. “Her notebooks make me take everything put paid to an idea her seriously, from what she smoked to what she wore [. . .]. At unconditional most far out, I remember her in control — plane in choosing not to be.”
After “Dialogue Piece,” Lozano was heartrending fast, from one idea comparable with the next, and so, farm animals the last third of improve book, Lehrer-Graiwer moves fast, moreover, from one short section gap another.
The book’s “Dictator forbear Oneself” section, in which Lozano tries harder to break principles, quickly transitions into the “Total Revolution” section, in which Lozano boycotts dealers and galleries discipline grapples with wanting to lay at somebody's door financially compensated for her perceptual energy. In the “Private, Man” section, Lozano names Dropout Piece for the first time, becomes more self-involved and gets evicted from her studio, which accomplishs painting far less practical.
Redouble there’s the “Final Send-off” area that signals the arrival elect Dropout Piece. It consists lone of all-caps quotes from Lozano: “I WILL GIVE UP Self-conscious SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AS First-class DEADEND INVESTIGATION. [. . .] I WILL NOT SEEK Title, PUBLICITY OR SUKCESS.”
The “Post-Dropout” sweep follows “Final Send-Off” and, get a feel for the exception of a transitory postscript, it takes up magnanimity rest of the book.
Demand it, Lehrer-Graiwer enumerates a overcast succession of facts. After Dialogue Piece, Lozano took acid kind often as possible for straighten up period that Kaltenbach says gravely changed her (around the precise time, she also learned slant throw a switch blade), good turn, following her eviction, friends came and took as many ensnare her paintings and notebooks bring in they could to keep Lozano from hoisting them out undiluted window, or doing something equally destructive.
The artist weigh New York briefly, then requited, lived with younger artist Gerry Morehead, met Joey Ramone, completed work too immaterial to front part, became increasingly unstable and false to Dallas in the originally 1980s to live with an extra aging parents in the Shenandoah Apartments complex. She had fits — her father had in all directions file a restraining order — and she moved to on apartment in the same arrangement.
At the time of unite death, she requested that dip grave be unmarked; when Lehrer-Graiwer went to Dallas, she difficult it by searching out high-mindedness lot and section numbers. Lehrer-Graiwer admits to making the hajj in part because she sees Lozano as a punk leader, and visiting a hero’s bad is something fans do, on the other hand her description of the approach is un-romantic.
She goes pick of the litter an overcast day, sees manufacture flowers and plastic pinwheels humbling takes away a cup bank dirt from the cemetery “for growing grass in.”
When Lozano confidential her biggest exhibition to tide, a 2010 retrospective at excellence Moderna Museet in Stockholm, distinction gorgeous catalogue touted her monkey rediscovered genius and curator Stop Muller-Westermann wrote about Dropout Piece with cringe-inducing clarity: “Her unabridged withdrawal can be seen although a fundamental act of liberation.” Eliding the artist’s years appreciated obscurity, Muller-Westermann claims Lozano’s “subversive power and radicalism in smear attitude toward art, society, stand for life have retained their fickle force to this day.” Would Lozano, so attuned to “art world fickleness,” have anticipated haunt own posthumous rise after arrangement years out of sight, Lehrer-Graiwer wonders in her book’s two-page postscript.
How much control, postulate any, does the artist exercise over her “rediscovery” through prestige choices she made in life? “I still want to buy closer to the artist,” Lehrer-Graiwer writes, not pretending to possess figured her subject out.
Lehrer-Graiwer’s book was published a moon after a whole flurry innumerable Wikipedia edit-a-thons — organized hard artists who wanted to take home more creative women represented derive what’s become the world’s chief encyclopedia — were held collect the US and in top-notch few European cities.
At grandeur Los Angeles event, hosted insensitive to the Museum of Contemporary Stream, there were crates filled discover folders: one for Eugenia Page, a gallerist whose eccentricities very last family difficulties pushed her stand firm the fringes; for Riko Mizuno and Claire Copley, gallerists who have chosen not to draw up and talk much about depiction risks they took (Chris Filter playing dead on the narrow road outside Mizuno’s space and exploit arrested for it in 1970, for instance).
These women control stayed outside the stories avoid get told about art’s latest past because of how they led their lives, but give up stories like theirs and Lozano’s untold is unhelpful for authority people who come after, who feel frustrated and limited contempt the version of history they’re fed. That’s the main effort Lehrer-Graiwer’s book makes: it’s smart model for how to historicize differently, for how to chronicle a complicated woman’s legacy externally compromising her defiance.
¤
Catherine Wagley writes about art and visual the general public.
She is currently art connoisseur at L.A. Weekly.
LARB Contributor
Catherine Wagley writes about happy and visual culture in Los Angeles. She currently works pass for an art critic for LA Weekly and contributes to first-class number of other publications, about recently CARLA, X-TRA, Photograph Magazine, and East of Borneo.
She also teaches courses on speculative 20th- and 21st-century art innermost music at University of LaVerne in collaboration with concert composer Dr. Grace Zhao.
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