I love Lee Lozano

Grass Piece

Biography l

Throwing Up Piece





Real Money Piece

Clarification Piece, July 28, 1969


Frontispiece l. 3

http://leelozano.net/
Arts Journal Review

I was going to write about Lee Lozano last week, but I had some difficulty finding the works that I wanted to talk about. I discovered her work when I ventured up the New York for the first time EVER, this January. We took the metro to Queens to check out PS.1. Her work was part of the 1969 collective up, and I fell in love with it immediately.

Ms. Lozano was born Lee Knastner in Newark in 1930. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. A brief marriage in the late 1950's to an architect, Adrian Lozano, ended in divorce. Her history is interesting, while her time and notoriety she received in the art world was brief, the prices of her works skyrocketed after her death on October 2, 1999 from cervical cancer. Murmurs of exploitation and scandal are associated with her posthumous recognition. Lee also decided to drop out of the art world, and I find this conscious decision of hers admirable in some way.

"Ms. Lozano was a quixotic, confounding rebel whose decadelong New York career seemed always to involve pushing one limit or another." Evidently Lee was also known for her drug taking behavior and some had said she began losing her mind. She was known for a piece where she decided to boycott women for a month or two as a means of improving communication with them. And for some reason Lee continued this piece up until her death. Also, when I saw her work at PS.1, I was completely unaware that she was female. Well, it turns out that her frequent name changes, were, in fact, another project of hers, with the intention to obscure her gender and live in a male only society.

It sounds like Ms. Lozano and I would have much to talk about.

Lee was known as a painter and a conceptual artist. Her first paintings were done in an expressionistic style and were often sexual. Her style shifted and then became more minimalist and she produced monochromatic 'wave' paintings that pushed the limits of visual perception. Then in the 1960's she began to "execute a series of life-related actions (she didn't like the word performance) that tested, among other things, her stamina, her friends' patience and the conduct of everyday life. These works reflected her friendship with Conceptually inclined artists like Sol LeWitt, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Carl Andre. They also reflected an increasing disenchantment with the art world that bordered on hostility." I feel like I am similarly dealing with disenchantment and hostility directed at the art world. She was attracted to these works because they were unsaleable and democratic. I find this element of her work very attractive.

But what I saw at PS.1 was not her paintings, nor her performances. It was her proposals or recordings of the piece, that was written by her hand, which she considered drawings. These are known as her notebooks. I love the ideas that Lee articulates through language, and I have realized that a huge aspect of my work is conceptual, and is driven and rooted in ideas that are articulated and known through language. I have realized nothing turns me on more than ideas, than breaking down and stretching the barriers of the mind (which explains my interest in mind altering substances/drugs) and I love Lee for her ideas, much more than her paintings.

'Clarification Piece' is definitely my favorite work. However, these are just transcribed copies, a majority of the original ones I saw at PS.1 are hand written, and this makes a lot of difference to me. But, I only managed to find these after downloading some obscure PDF and taking screenshots of it for this blog.

"All of the works transcribe below first appeared in Lozano’s set of small private notebooks which she latter organized and transcribed into a quarto sized set of lab books. For exhibitions, such as the Virginia Dwan Language III show, 1969, she would then re-transcribe the particular work to be shown and exhibit it framed and hanging from the wall. In addition, she also distributed the pieces freely through the mail to her friends in the form of carbon and Xerox copies. My transcriptions below come from her lab books and span an eleven month period in 1969, with the Dialogue Piece spanning almost the entire time. A careful reading will reveal the intertwining of the works as various participants found themselves in one project, and then in another. I have tried to maintain all idiosyncrasies in her spelling and punctuation; when clarification was needed, I added my notes in square brackets. Beyond those people mentioned above, special thanks is due to Mr. Brad Campbell who actually transcribed most of the works below and continues to assist me in all of the Antinomian Press publications. However, all errors in the final draft are mine as I was responsible for the proof reading and final format.
Ben Kinmont
NYC, February 1998"

Antinomian Press
14 February 1998
New York City
150 Copies
Downloaded from
antinomianpress.org