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

ArtForum, Oct, 2001 by David Reed

KS: Still, even though she kept making art, In her notebook entries and drawings of the late '60s you begin to sense a real frustration with the abstract paintings, what to do with them, an almost cruel self-criticality. Was there a break then from the paintings to the conceptual work?

DR: There is no real break; she's making the two kinds of work at the same time. And if she hadn't lost her studio, she might have continued to make paintings--there was no conceptual reason not to. They were connected in many ways. In Dialogue Piece, 1969, she invited different people to come to her studio and talk to her. In the paintings, those same impulses of how to have an honest interaction with another person went into the relationship between the work and the viewer.

KS: Instead of relating to a painting as if it were a person, she's relating directly to a person, and that's the artwork. She also made work about larger social relations, like General Strike.

DR: She announced General Strike on February 8, 1969, and two months later made a related statement at the Art Workers' Coalition. She said from that point forward she would only do things that involved "total personal and public revolution," and that didn't mean stopping painting, but she withdrew from commercial shows, like one organized by Richard Bellamy at Goldowsky Gallery. And, of course, Bellamy was one of the most adventurous, least commercial gallerists, making Lozano's decision all the more extreme.

KS: That's interesting now, because people are always talking about rampant careerism and the dominance of the market today compared to the '70s. She seems to have been unusually sensitive to these problems.

DR: Yes, in strikingly radical ways. She stopped going to meetings of the Art Workers' Coalition after this statement. She said she wasn't an art worker, but an art dreamer. They weren't radical enough for her, in that they weren't artistic enough. She wanted the two things to come together-a very difficult position to sustain.

KS: Some people have said that these later conceptual works are an excuse for her to have psychological problems and call it art. How much do you think her personal psychology enters into this work?

DR: It's hard for me to talk about her psychological situation because I didn't know her very well. I know she was very intense and troubled. I find it doesn't interfere with the art, but enhances it--she can thematize and integrate into her art what she's trying to deal with in her life.

KS: I think a lot of people know her by that last piece (which began in August 1971) where she stopped speaking to women. It started out as a month-long project, and then continued to the end of her life, twenty-some years later. That's the work that all the obituaries spoke about, and it's so puzzling.

DR: I view it as a self-destructive way of dealing with a very real situation: Women didn't have any power in the art world then, so she decided to just deal with the men, who did have the power. It points up that issue. But it's masochistic also, because she couldn't form dialogues with other women and missed out on the feminist movement of the '7Os, when women in the art world did gain power by engaging and supporting each other.