Making Waves - David Reed on legacy of artist Lee Lozano - Interview

ArtForum, Oct, 2001 by David Reed

KS: What do you think Is important about her painting now, and in what context do you see it?

DR: I'm very interested in what happened to painting in the late '60s and early '70s, when it was removed from the dialogue about what the most advanced art was. It seems to me that there was very advanced painting being done, and that it fits into a post-Minimal context. Lee Lozano, Jo Baer, Ralph Humphrey, Dorothea Rockburne, and Peter Young would be my favorite examples, and of course Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. But the others are less well known, and I would say less Minimal, more post-Minimal. They were reacting against Minimalism, and trying to develop something from it. To me, that painting is the equivalent of Robert Smithson or Barry Le Va, things that were happening in sculpture.

KS: What are some of the common issues between that kind of more familiar sculpture and the post-Minimal painting you're talking about?

DR: Time and the experience of time, both in the process of making and in the viewing. This generation of painters developed a kind of painting that was 3-D or wraparound, where the viewer moves around the work physically, having perceptions that change and accumulate.

KS: What were Lozano's particular contributions? Her career was so short--about ten years--but productive, with several different kinds of practices.

DR: She goes through a very unusual development, a kind of compact history of art. From surreal, almost Pop images through large-scale abstraction that uses tool imagery, to completely abstract paintings and, finally, conceptual art. I think that the late abstract paintings were the most advanced paintings being done at the time.

KS: How are they "post"-Minimalist?

DR: There has been a real emphasis on wholeness in postwar art, especially for Donald Judd and the Minimalists. Lozano turns that into a more general concept of having a whole life or experience. In the tool paintings, she makes them so that they seem to extend beyond the edges laterally, and back and forth spatially, so they don't seem to be contained by the frame. And then in the later abstract paintings, she turns this inside out: Sometimes there are two stretchers put together on a diagonal, or paintings where she cuts holes through the canvas, exposing the stretchers. I think of these as internally shaped canvases, where the outside edge isn't controlling things, and where the inside edge controls not just the painting but everything, extending out into the world.

KS: Similarly to Pollock, or allover painting's Implications of endlessness?

DR: Pollock implies that, but in a limited way; the space really doesn't extend much past the painting, in Lozano, it's really endless. For example, in the "Wave" paintings, which were realized between 1967 and 1970, there are ten completed paintings, each painted in one session. She started with two waves and added more waves again and again, moving up to a ninety-six-wave painting, which took three days working continuously to make. On an eleventh painting she then tried to paint double the ninety-six wave, but physically she couldn't do it in a single session; the painting remains just sketched out in pencil and not painted. So the series is infinite, it's just her physical limitations that stopped it.