LEE LOZANO CRASHED through New York’s art world between 1960 and 1972, a restless decade during which she went about disrupting all of its conventions. A compatriot and challenger to a cadre of mostly male artists who would become leading figures in post-minimalism and conceptual art (Robert Morris, Dan Graham, Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, among others), she went further than any of them, becoming one of the first artists to commit herself to what the critic Lucy Lippard called “life as art.” In Lozano’s case, it became impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Lozano wasn’t the first artist to create art beyond salable objects, or to make her life her material. But for her the practice became all-consuming. In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her “General Strike Piece,” which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers. Lozano wrote that she wanted to create a “total revolution simultaneously personal and public,” her own take on the collective protest movements of the age. Other artists were marching against the Vietnam War and demonstrating against patriarchy, but Lozano disdained such public actions, choosing instead a private, idiosyncratic rebellion. After this, her writing — lists of thoughts, questions, proposals, interactions, offers and invitations she’d turned down — became her work, though it largely went unseen outside of a handful of exhibitions and a small circle of friends with whom she corresponded.
Lozano identified and anticipated so much that still troubles us: the commodification of the art market, the way social movements can curdle when they become too rigid, the self and self-fascination as the ultimate traps. Other artists — David Hammons, Cady Noland — are reclusive and ambivalent about subsuming their identities in the art market, but Lozano’s refusals were orchestrated with such commitment that they became works of art in themselves.
She once declared that the subject of her work was “mystery,” and it is her unknowability, coupled with her humor and outrageousness, that has stoked a growing interest in Lozano. This fall, there will be a survey of more than 100 of her drawings at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, as well as an insightful book on the artist, “In the Studio: Lee Lozano,” by the curator Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. If in her lifetime perceptions of Lozano’s brilliance were mingled with a suspicion that her mind was addled by drugs and possible mental illness, her conceptual work now appears coherent, willful and rigorous. (It’s worth noting that Lozano was never diagnosed with anything; a psychiatrist once told her she was simply “eccentric.”) Seen from a future in which confession and shareability are calling cards, especially among women artists, Lozano is a kind of existential hero, a person who made her identity nearly impossible to grasp.
LOZANO, WHO WAS born Lenore Knaster in Newark, N.J., to middle-class Jewish parents, changed her name as a teenager to Lee, skeptical, as she put it later, of the “traditional American middleclass female trip.” The name change was the first of many: Throughout her life she went by Leefer, Lee Free, Eefer and finally just E., for “energy.” She studied philosophy and natural sciences at the University of Chicago and then worked at the Container Corporation of America, a mecca of graphic design, where she met the Mexican American architect Adrian Lozano, whom she married in 1956. She studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, and when she decided to pursue her life as an artist in New York, she and her husband parted ways. The marriage lasted only four years and they had no children, but she kept his name.
Not long after she arrived in Manhattan in 1960, she became enamored of what Visconti describes as the “cheap, chaotic and notoriously sordid neighborhood” of SoHo. Even there, Lozano stood out. She was seductive, defiant and unconventional, sometimes to the point of hostility. Jaap van Liere, who was her art dealer in the ’80s and ’90s, along with Barry Rosen (the two later became co-executors of her estate), told me that she would do things like take a bite of the food on a tray waiting to be served to customers at a bar as she walked out the door. She was sexually experimental, having many affairs with men and documenting details like sex during menstruation in her notebooks.
Her work evolved quickly, as she sloughed off one style for another. Her early drawings are surrealistic, antic and raunchy (penises worming out of machinelike contraptions; a huge, gaptoothed red rictus chomping on a cigar-turd). She soon started making paintings derived from tools and ephemera that she’d collect on the blocks near her SoHo studio: giant, metallic, phallic forms that sometimes overwhelm the canvas with their twisting force. These evolved into more severe, geometric abstractions with titles like “Cram,” “Split,” “Butt” and “Hack,” culminating in her “Wave Series,” which consists of 11 paintings (the last piece was unfinished) made between 1967 and 1970 of electromagnetic waveforms, executed according to strict constraints. Each painting was made in one sitting, with few breaks, and took between eight hours and three days to complete.
Although those works were the subject of a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, Lozano was becoming less and less interested in art as something to exhibit, disdainful of what she saw as the snobby patronage system of the art world, its competitiveness, self-referentiality and narrowness. Her personal notebooks from that time (which she later revised) bristle with ideas written in her neat, insistent all-caps handwriting:
“I could start writing down all my fantasies.”
“I could record number of incoming calls rec’d each day, from whom, content of each, also calls outgoing.”
“Collectors chosen by artist as ‘allowed to buy’ strictly on basis of how interesting they are when they visit artist. Collectors as entertainment for artists. Price of art fixed.”
Her notions — brilliant and ridiculous — became official pieces only when she rewrote them on paper headlined with a date and an address and mailed them to friends or gallerists, or occasionally showed them.
You can divine in these notebooks the ticking of a mind whirring through its eclectic interests. Lozano was well read in physics, mathematics, astrology, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching. She used drugs devotedly, systematically: For “Grass Piece” (1969), one of her early conceptual projects, she was almost continuously stoned for 33 days. (This was immediately followed by “No-Grass Piece,” in which she tried and failed to stay sober for the same amount of time.) She conceived of her work as an attempt to fuse art and science. Sometimes she asked others to participate, as in her “Dialogue Piece” (1969), for which she invited friends and acquaintances — and at one point a cat and a baby — into her studio to talk with her. This represented the “ideal I have of a kind of art,” she wrote, that is “not for sale, which is democratic, which is not difficult to make, which is inexpensive to make, which can never be completely understood, parts of which will always remain mysterious and unknown.” She mused that she wanted to just continue “Dialogue Piece” as the work of her life. But over the next two years, Lozano moved in the opposite direction, finding even more extreme ways to divest and turn inward.
In 1970, she wrote in her notebook about an idea she referred to as “Dropout Piece,” an evolution, perhaps, of “General Strike” in which she would demand even more of herself. She described it as the “destruction of (or at least complete understanding of) powerful emotional habits. … I want to get over my habit of emotional dependence on love.” Six weeks earlier, she’d declared that she would sleep irregularly, eat irregularly and try to cultivate new ways of being to “make living more interesting & flexible.” Over the next few years, she devoted herself exclusively to her “Life-Art” pieces.
In August 1971, eight months after the opening of her Whitney show, she undertook another, even more audacious project, “Decide to Boycott Women,” stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary — an experiment that would go on for about a month and “after that ‘communication will be better than ever.’” But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction. The curator Helen Molesworth called it “consummately pathological.” Lozano’s friend the artist David Reed said it was “masochistic.”
CERTAINLY THERE MUST have been an amount of self-loathing and misery involved. But there was a logic and clarity too. As Visconti writes, at the advent of the feminist movement, Lozano faced a dilemma: “She was not one of the guys, and she certainly did not want to be one of the girls — yet she had already been assigned a category.” And so the only control she could have was “not over which subject she could claim to be, but rather over the choice of being a subject at all.” There’s something prescient in her refusal to identify with women — her refusal, really, to identify with any category of human at all. She saw the ways in which an affiliation based on gender could produce its own rules and norms that would eventually be enforced, and she rejected any norms that originated outside her own mind, any identity imposed from without.
“I will give up my search for identity as a deadend investigation,” Lozano writes in an untitled 1971 piece. “I will make myself empty to receive cosmic info.” She was a fantasist or a futurist, wanting to get beyond the conventions of art as they’d been devised, beyond the social contract (which could never outlaw the competition and brutality among people), beyond even the body and its design. “I will be human first, artist second. I will not seek fame, publicity or suckcess.” You can sense desperation in the tone of these pieces — perhaps the desperation of someone trying to outrun her own flaws and vulnerability — but also the boldness of a born explorer. And yet, there’s always the punning, the self-parody that introduces a note of doubt about her seriousness. In one of her notebooks, she bolded the word “pout” in “Dropout.”
There is still a question of whether “Dropout” and “Boycott Women” are really pieces, van Liere told me, since Lozano never formally wrote them up in the manner of her official works. But her acts of refusal and rejection of the art world continued. She closed her Grand Street studio in 1972, in part because she was short on cash (she made many pieces about money — having it, not having it, trying to give it away), and bounced around New York for another decade. Reed wrote in Artforum about encountering her at that time: “Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.” In the early 1980s, she moved to Dallas, where she would remain for the rest of her life. A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex. But soon, she was evicted and became homeless for a time, until van Liere and Barry Rosen helped arrange a more stable housing situation.
Van Liere told me that he kept in touch with Lozano by phone for over 15 years, meeting her only once, in a bookstore in Dallas. In their conversations, she was sharp and fun, and kept close tabs on the New York art world by voraciously reading newspapers and magazines. She occasionally talked on the phone with Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, and was sometimes seen at art openings in Dallas. Many days, she walked (“She walked everywhere,” van Liere told me) to the Southern Methodist University library, where she read about wave and string theories. She cared very much about the fate of her work. When she closed her studio, she’d entrusted much of it to a collector — Milton Brutten, a psychologist in the Philadelphia area, and his wife, Helen Herrick — for safekeeping. In the late ’90s, there was a resurgence of interest in Lozano, thanks in part to the intervention of LeWitt, who encouraged the curator James Rondeau to show her work, which he did at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. A series of smaller shows were simultaneously staged at galleries in New York and, since then, there has been a steady stream of shows.
Paradoxical as it may seem, Lozano was pleased by this. Van Liere told me that he doesn’t believe she ever “walked away from her achievements as an artist. That was not her intent. Her intent was to think more clearly, to not be affected, to not participate in the jibber-jabber.” He insists that her art practice continued — it just became a practice of reading and information gathering and thinking. She died in 1999 at age 68 of cervical cancer, about a year after making one last piece: a detailed list of questions about the collectors who owned her work.
It’s touching to think of Lozano, sitting in the S.M.U. library, practicing an art so intensely private and rigorous that it needed no form, no audience. Had she reached some other plane? Or was she a prisoner of her own neuroses, having violently disdained social convention only to devise a new set of constraints that made living nearly impossible? To speculate and psychologize, in Lozano’s case, feels especially fruitless. Her whole mode of expression repels, by a diabolically clever design, this kind of analysis. As Lippard wrote of Lozano’s text pieces, “We are told a great deal about her actions and very little about their ramifications; we have no access to her emotions, only to her ‘brain-pain.’ Her conceptual works are incredibly personal and at the same time models of privacy.” They remain models for us now in an era in which selfhood is for sale. She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own. Her work has that same underlying pathos — the feeling that her spirit has been around for a lot longer than any of ours, and that it may linger for many years to come, never belonging, never agreeing, always trying to get free.
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