{"id":819,"date":"2011-02-02T11:45:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T11:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=819"},"modified":"2019-11-07T16:43:42","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T16:43:42","slug":"review-lee-lozano-lee-lozano-notebooks-1967-70","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=819","title":{"rendered":"Lee Lozano, Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967\u201370<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"Lee Lozano. <\/strong>Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967\u201370<\/em><\/strong>. <\/strong>New York: Primary Information, 2010. 224 pp., 108 b\/w ills. $24<\/p>\n

\u201cHISTORY DRAGS.\u201d Of the many shrewd observations and witticisms that Lee Lozano (1930\u20131999) recorded in her notebooks, this one strikes deepest when considering the revival of interest in her work. Of course, we\u2019ll never know her opinion on the widespread, international attention that has been lavished on her art and life over the last decade. Or whether she\u2019d care much about the recent, high-profile exhibitions of the works she made during her short career in New York, from the mid-1960s to 1972. But it\u2019s doubtful that she would. Indeed, it\u2019s hard to think of another artist who has been so fervently resuscitated and yet who so decisively rejected fame, a career, and the art world. Perhaps her phrase \u201cWin First Don\u2019t Last, Win Last Don\u2019t Care\u201d might seem a more appropriate starting point, but one wonders what Lozano would think of that one, too, since it was used for the title of one of her posthumous retrospectives.<\/p>\n

The story of Lozano\u2019s rejections and her art-historical status is not my interest here. Eight years ago in these pages, Helen Molesworth aptly charted those waters, noting how Lozano fell into \u201cart world obscurity\u201d when she abandoned the \u201cinstitutions of art buttressing her activities.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Lozano is known, if at all, for her mythic and extreme performances: She announced her staged withdrawal from the art world in her General Strike Piece, <\/em>1969, and dropped out completely around 1972 to move to Dallas. Molesworth argued, \u201cIt is only now, with the excavation and attention of curators, critics, and art historians, that her work can be recognized and legitimated.\u201d And this is what has happened.<\/p>\n

Over the last decade Lozano has been featured in several major museum surveys and their accompanying catalogues\u2014from WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution<\/em> to High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967\u20131975<\/em>. There have also been three large-scale solo exhibitions devoted to her work: at MoMA PS1 in 2004, at Kunsthalle Basel in 2006, and most recently at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2010. All this attention raises some questions: What lies behind the peculiar process of recovery and the pressure to amend the art-historical canon? And what are its costs? Has Lozano\u2019s \u201cenigma,\u201d which is so often evoked, been undermined through these exhibitions and publications? If so, how can we now address the demand for privacy that, I would argue, informs her best-known works? What might this dialectic between the individual\u2019s need for privacy and the art world\u2019s reliance upon publicity help us understand about Lozano\u2014and other artists like her\u2014who ultimately withdrew from art into life?<\/p>\n

These thoughts came to mind when the small nonprofit imprint Primary Information published a compilation of Lozano\u2019s \u201claboratory\u201d notebooks in March 2010 with the permission of her estate at Hauser & Wirth.2<\/a><\/sup> The simple, no-frills volume comprises only scanned selections from her notebooks, and therein a number of complicated, telling, and diaristic observations recorded by the artist between 1967 and 1970. It also includes studies for her abstract paintings, many of her decisive Language Pieces, and brief notes, such as this emblematic entry: \u201cFEB 3, 68: I HAVE STARTED TO DOCUMENT EVERYTHING BECAUSE I CANNOT GIVE UP MY LOVE OF IDEAS” (the book is not paginated).<\/p>\n

Of the three notebooks that Primary Information has reproduced, one is marked \u201cprivate.\u201d This might seem a minor point to dwell on, given that several of the works in this particular notebook have already been exhibited and reproduced in catalogues. But as it appears in the Primary Information reprint, a whole notebook rather than single works, it poses a significant problem for Lozano\u2019s revival: that of finding a balance between the artist\u2019s wishes\u2014or the tropes of privacy and the personal within the work\u2014and the demands of the historian, the art market, and the estate. What is one to make, for example, of the recent publication by A.R.T. Press of Felix Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s snapshots of his cats, apartment, toy collection, and trips to Florida?3<\/a><\/sup> On the surface, these are less confidential than Lozano\u2019s notebooks, yet the personal and brief observations that he wrote on the back of the photographs resonate deeply with her observations. Did Gonzalez-Torres want these to be published? And thus, are these \u201cworks\u201d? We\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n

Posthumously published writings\u2014from Van Gogh\u2019s letters to Steven Parrino\u2019s No Texts<\/em>\u2014are undoubtedly useful and insightful, as they offer a glimpse into the artist\u2019s internal monologue. Yet they also call into question the way personal writings and ephemera\u2014basically everything\u2014become public over time, or as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue, \u201cThere is nothing more public than privacy.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> Why do artists keep journals? On the one hand, the urge to record thoughts is a natural impulse, and on the other, it seems that some diaries are meant to be seen and are made, perhaps, in service to the archival impulse.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. In this particular notebook is Lozano\u2019s Dialogue Piece<\/em>, 1969, which is emblematic of her need both to record and to keep some aspects of her life private. For the work, the artist invited guests to her studio and then documented the meeting through cryptic notes, such as: \u201cMAY 30, 1969: DAN GRAHAM AND I HAVE AN IMPORTANT CONVERSATION IN THAT DEFINITE CHANGES WERE IMMEDIATELY EFFECTED BECAUSE OF IT.\u201d Clearly Lozano is withholding information about the conversation and its import, but from whom? Surely not all of the conversations were remarkable, but one senses a palpable desire to keep certain details at bay here\u2014to retain some boundary between art and daily life. Lucy R. Lippard picked up this deferral of information in her catalogue essay for the Moderna Museet\u2019s show, which was curated by Iris M\u00fcller-Westermann and featured several of Lozano\u2019s language pieces in a corridor between galleries of her paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lippard focuses on the \u201cincredibly personal\u201d aspects of Lozano\u2019s art. She writes:<\/p>\n

At a time when Conceptual artists were outdoing themselves in dematerializing their objects and their activities, competing as to who could do less and still call it art, Lee outdid them all by doing less<\/em> with an unmatched intensity that made it more<\/em>. . . . The contradiction at the heart of Lozano\u2019s text pieces is that we are told a great deal about her actions and very little about their ramifications. . . . Her conceptual works are incredibly personal and at the same time models of privacy. She treated herself and her life as an objective experiment. Expos\u00e9s on her activities and feelings were carefully selected.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The relationship between Lippard and Lozano was brief but significant: Lippard included Lozano\u2019s Piece<\/em>, her first exhibited conceptual work, in Art\/Peace<\/em>, an antiwar event at the New York Shakespeare Festival\/ Public Theater in 1969.6<\/a><\/sup> In 1971 the artist began to boycott the critic, as noted in this opaque entry:<\/p>\n

1ST WEEK AUGUST, 71: DECIDE TO BOYCOTT WOMEN. THROW LUCY LIPPARD\u2019S 2ND LETTER ON DEFUNCT PILE, UNANSWERED. DO NOT GREET ROCHELLE BASS IN STORE. 2ND WK AUGUST, 71: PAULA RAVINS CALLS AUG 11. TELL HER I AM BOYCOTTING WOMEN AS AN EXPERIMENT THRU ABT SEPT. & THAT AFTER THAT \u201cCOMMUNICATION WILL BE BETTER THAN EVER.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lozano\u2019s boycott echoes the rejections at play in her General Strike Piece<\/em> (against capitalism, the art world, and patriarchy, as Molesworth has written), but one might also consider her desire for privacy too. The artist\u2019s Wave<\/em> paintings were on view in her solo show Lee Lozano\u2013Painter<\/em> at the Whitney Museum (December 2, 1970\u2013January 3, 1971), which was installed just a month after a feminist offshoot of the Art Workers Coalition, the Ad Hoc Women Artists\u2019 Committee, of which Lippard was a key member, held a demonstration at the museum in protest of the Whitney Annual.7<\/a><\/sup> What would motivate Lozano to protest a museum that planned to feature her work so soon\u2014even if many of her (mostly male) friends were participating in such actions? I\u2019d like to suggest that her personal boycott was not fueled by an antipathy toward the committee or toward women in general, but instead that it was part of a larger need to keep certain ideas concealed until \u201cabt sept.\u201d and perhaps, until her peers could empathize with her position, which she had stated in 1969: I WILL NOT CALL MYSELF AN ART WORKER BUT RATHER AN ART DREAMER AND I WILL PARTICIPATE ONLY IN A TOTAL REVOLUTION SIMULTANEOUSLY PERSONAL AND PUBLIC.8<\/a><\/sup> That never happened, however: Lozano continued to boycott women until her departure from New York in 1972. Just when Lozano withdrew from the art world, Lippard registered some of Lozano\u2019s major contributions in the seminal book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972<\/em>.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Undeniably, Lozano\u2019s preference to withhold information as seen in her conceptual pieces also stresses her desire to use language as a screen and to highlight the impenetrability of private encounters. This is in contrast to the apparent linguistic transparency in some conceptual works of the era, such as those of Joseph Kosuth. But, as Lippard writes, Lozano ultimately used her life as an experiment. Herein resides one of the greatest contradictions of her art.<\/p>\n

Many of the original pages from Lozano\u2019s notebooks, including Dialogue Piece<\/em>, were on view in the Stockholm exhibition, yet several copies were also presented. A few recent group shows have likewise featured such reproductions; to cite but one example, an exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, concurrent with the Moderna Museet show, included two of Lozano\u2019s facsimiles in a gathering that paired her work with Stephen Kaltenbach\u2019s. The fact that Lozano produced several versions of the works she made in her notebooks, beginning with Piece<\/em>, and then distributed them to friends in \u201csmall but unknown quantities,\u201d according to the writer Todd Alden, makes matters very complicated.10<\/a><\/sup> (In addition, in July 1969 she submitted Dialogue Piece<\/em> and General Strike Piece<\/em> to the sixth issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer\u2019s publication 0 to 9<\/em>.) Lozano made photocopies, carbon copies, and \u201cwet\u201d copies of her language pieces using a technology that resulted in a hard-to-read print, which she then photocopied. One assumes that she considered these distributed copies finished works, yet they retain an unfinished, sketchlike quality\u2014clearly the idea was paramount. The \u201cfinal\u201d versions, according to the estate, are in the three notebooks reproduced by Primary Information as well as on loose sheets of paper.<\/p>\n

Seen together, Lozano\u2019s published notebooks do possess the sense of the privacy and intimacy of Gonzalez-Torres\u2019s snapshots, and the exhibited copied pages, on their own, are more analogous to a work like On Kawara\u2019s 1968\u201379 postcard series I GOT UP<\/em>, with its friction between the artist\u2019s reticent transmission of information and his desire for self-promotion through oblique methods. When we look at Kawara\u2019s works, however, what is most fascinating now are the recipients\u2014the constellation of artists, dealers, critics, and curators who comprise the network of the art world in that era. While reading Lozano\u2019s copied notebook pages, one notes the obverse. For instance\u00a0in Dialogue Piece<\/em>, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Larry Poons, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, John Giorno, Claes Oldenburg, and many more are mentioned as participants, yet there is little reference to anyone receiving copies of the work, which seems strange, since Lozano documented every visit so carefully. In the few instances when she does mention sending out a copy, it is as marginalia, as in one of the reproductions of Take Possession Piece #3<\/em>, 1969. At the very bottom of the page Lozano wrote: \u201cCC\u2014ABOUT HALF A DOZEN PEOPLE,\u201d and, to the right of that inscription, \u201cFOR DAN\u2014AN ORIGINAL\u2014WITH MUCH LOVE.\u201d<\/p>\n

This slippage between the public and private\u2014and to be sure Lozano\u2019s art seems to reframe the meaning of both\u2014reminds me of a passage in David Rieff\u2019s preface to Reborn<\/em>, a collection of journals and notebooks written by Susan Sontag, his mother, from 1947 to 1963. It is \u201cnot the book she would have produced,\u201d he notes, adding: \u201cthat assumes she would have decided to publish these diaries in the first place.\u201d Rieff then draws a parallel to Sontag\u2019s speeches and lectures, which appear in At the Same Time<\/em>, a volume published two years after her death. \u201cDespite the fact that my mother certainly would have substantially revised the essays for republication, they had already been either published during her lifetime or delivered as lectures. Her intentions were clear.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

For those who are working to revive Lozano\u2019s career\u2014historians, curators, and the keepers of her estate\u2014this is worth dwelling upon. Obviously, there\u2019s a parallel to be drawn between Lozano\u2019s artworks and her copies versus her \u201cprivate\u201d notebooks. But what do we do with an artist whose intentions were ambiguous and, in the end, ambivalent at best? The published notebooks and the retrospectives offer one response, which seems more and more particular to the art world.<\/p>\n

\n

Lauren O\u2019Neill-Butler is a New York\u2013based writer and the managing editor of artforum.com. A frequent contributor to Artforum<\/em> and to artforum.com, she has also written for Art Lies<\/em>, bookforum.com, Paper Monument<\/em>, and Time Out New York<\/em>, in addition to exhibition catalogue essays for Milton Keynes Gallery, among others. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts.<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. Helen Molesworth. \u201cTune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,\u201d Art Journal<\/em> 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 70. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. In addition to the laboratory notebooks, marked One through Three, Lozano made ten smaller notebooks, which were also numbered and labeled \u201cprivate.\u201d The artist occasionally revisited her notebooks and added new notes in the margins. In this review, all references to her own writings are derived from the laboratory notebooks. Lozano wrote only in capital letters in all of her notebooks, so quotations here are set in uppercase. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Alejandro Cesarco, ed., A Selection of Snapshots Taken by Felix Gonzalez-Torres<\/em> (New York: A.R.T. Press, 2010). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, \u201cSex in Public,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547\u201366. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Lippard quoted in Lee Lozano<\/em>, ed. Iris M\u00fcller-Westermann, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2010), 194. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. Piece<\/em> reads: \u201cwhen you\u2019re \u2018trying to make it\u2019 keep going for years a pile of show announcements, press release material, all printed matter relating to the art scene. everything that comes in the mail or is accumulated other ways is tossed on the pile. when you \u2018start to make it\u2019 throw your own printed matter on the pile. let it be covered up by time the way everybody else\u2019s is. companion piece: toss your own printed matter on top of the pile and keep it on top of the pile.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. Of this protest, Lippard has written, \u201cThe \u2018anonymous\u2019 core group faked a Whitney press release stating that there would be fifty percent women (and fifty percent of them \u2018non-white\u2019) in the show, then forged invitations to the opening and set up a generator and projector to show women\u2019s slides on the outside walls of the museum while a sit-in was staged inside. The FBI came in search of the culprits.\u201d Lippard, \u201cEscape Attempts,\u201d in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965\u20131975<\/em>, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 23. The critic Grace Glueck covered the protest for the New York Times<\/em>, writing, \u201cThe protesters-in-chief (artists Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold; the critic Lucy Lippard) charge in a letter to the museum that, though it was founded by a woman, its record has been \u2018lousy\u2019 with regard to the exhibition and encouragement of the work of women artists.\u201d Glueck, \u201cArt Notes: At the Whitney, It\u2019s Guerrilla Warfare,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, November 1, 1970, C20. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. Lozano offered the following statement to a publication commemorating the Art Workers Coalition meeting, held April 10, 1969, at the School of Visual Arts: \u201cfor me there can be no art revolution that is separate from a science revolution, a political revolution, an education revolution, a drug revolution, a sex revolution, or a personal revolution. i cannot consider a program of museum reforms without equal attention to gallery reforms and art magazine reforms which would aim to eliminate stables<\/span> of artists and writers. i will not call myself an art worker but rather an art dreamer and i will participate only in a total revolution simultaneously personal and public.\u201d Art Workers Coalition, An Open Hearing on the Subject: What Should Be the Program of the Art Workers regarding Museum Reform and to Establish the Program of an Open Art Workers Coalition<\/em> (New York: Art Workers Coalition, 1970), 38. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972<\/em> (New York: Praeger, 1973). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. Todd Alden, \u201cThe Cave Paintings Exist Because the Caves Were Toilets: Reactivating the Work of Lee Lozano,\u201d in Lee Lozano: Win First Don\u2019t Last\/Win Last Don\u2019t Care<\/em>, ed. Adam Szymczyk, exh. cat. (Basel: Schwabe, 2006), 16. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. David Rieff, preface to Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947\u20131963<\/em>, ed. Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), vii and viii. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Lauren O\u2019Neill-Butler<\/p>\n

    \u201cHISTORY DRAGS.\u201d Of the many shrewd observations and witticisms that Lee Lozano (1930\u20131999) recorded in her notebooks, this one strikes deepest when considering the revival of interest in her work. Of course, we\u2019ll never know her opinion on the widespread, international attention that has been lavished on her art and life over the last decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[74,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}