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

ArtForum, Oct, 2001 by David Reed

KS: Unlike a LeWitt series, which is finite. It seems to combine a rigorous scientific approach with some kind of personal statement.

DR: Her interest in science is a way of connecting art to larger issues and keeping it from becoming merely formal. I think the "Wave" paintings are one of the three great series of American painting, along with Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross," 1958-66, and Andy Warhol's "Shadow" paintings, 1978. I'd love to see the three of them together.

KS: Is there a connection between them?

DR: Newman's series is about transformation of the self. Warhol's is about the difficulties of that transformation and doubts of the self. And Lozano's "Wave" paintings seem to offer proof of the difficulties of that transformation of the self, and reasons for the doubts. The series is meant to be endless, but she can't make it endless. It ends physically, not conceptually. She desires more than she can achieve, not just physically, but in other ways as well. It's like Kafka saying, "Oh, there's infinite hope, just not for us."

KS: Even if their content is different, they all seem to share a certain attitude toward painting that is peculiarly matter-of-fact.

DR: Definitely. I love this category that the art historian Richard Shiff has of "declarative surface," which he takes from Newman, who wanted his surfaces to be workmanlike, there to provide information--painted about as nicely as you would paint a wall. You don't want to do a sloppy job, but you don't want to do an overrefined job. She has that attitude, and I think a lot of painters do. You want to show the process, but the surface certainly isn't expressionist.

KS: That sense of surface seems to carry over to her use of color; critics have complained about the drab colors she uses, the limited palette in the "Wave" paintings, for example.

DR: She was afraid of becoming decorative and was looking for a way to use color within the range that's available, that seems relevant to the moment. In her journals she uses the term "non-color." Looking at the "Wave" paintings, I thought of a postindustrial dystopia; the colors brought to mind Smithson's work, or Warhol's "Disaster" paintings. I wonder if she went with Dan Graham on some of Smithson's tours of New Jersey. I think that kind of late-'60s sensibility is very much in the paintings. There was a real hit of political reality. Bright-colored, optimistic painting, peace and love, was no longer relevant. It was very hard for some artists to deal with the change in climate, which happened suddenly in '68.

KS: Many painters left New York at that time. What made them so discouraged or embattled?

DR: I've been studying a group of abstract paintings made between 1964 and '69 in the Michener Collection at the University of Texas, Austin, bought on Richard Bellamy's advice. I didn't understand the sense of crisis in the works until I thought of what I was doing at the time--I had fled New York too and went to New Mexico. I thought it was the end of cities, no more civilization. Painters continued to make art in that context of radical change. Lozano found away to do it, and color is important to her thinking.