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

ArtForum, Oct, 2001 by David Reed

California-born artist DAVID REED has been showing his paintings and installations internationally for the past three decades. His current retrospective at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, brings together twenty-five years of his output; the exhibition will travel to the Kunstverein Hannover in January. For this issue's special feature devoted to the multifaceted art of painter and Conceptualist Lee Lozano (1930-99), Reed talks with New York-based critic KATY SIEGEL about the artist he first met in the '60s and the work he has long championed. Siegel is assistant professor of contemporary art history and criticism at Hunter College, City University of New York, and a frequent contributor to Artforum. The author of numerous essays and magazine articles, Siegel recently wrote on the art of the '90s for the catalogues accompanying "Public Offerings," at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and "The Americans: New Art" at the Barbican Gallery, London (through December). PHOTO: ROGER LEMOINE (SIEGEL ).

SOL LEWITT

BACK IN THE '60S, I used to visit Lee Lozano's studio pretty regularly. On some of these visits, she would present you with three objects--abstract objects, like small cubes--and tell you to arrange them on a tabletop. I remember her doing the "Wave" paintings, which I was very impressed with--and their premise. When they were first shown, everyone agreed it was a major statement. Lee's relative disappearance from the historical records is sort of mysterious; the work was hardly negligible, so it's hard to say why she didn't have more of a career. It was definitely hard to make it as a woman artist, and she herself really withdrew from the world. The thing about not speaking with women went way beyond an art project. I remember sitting in a restaurant with her once and a waitress came to the table; not only would Lee not talk to her, she would hide her eyes. She had an extreme dislike for the company of women, thought they were evil. When she came to my studio, if my girlfriend opened the door, Lee would turn on her heels, run down the stairs, and be gone. Her wounds were self-inflicted; the withdrawal from the art world and the anti-feminism. Eventually she stopped making artworks altogether. She became a spirit who would appear and then vanish, but her work was saved by friends and those who had faith in her vision.

LUCY LIPPARD

I KNEW LEE LOZANO from around the art world. She showed at the Green Gallery, the best place for young artists in New York, and was a friend of Dick's [Richard Bellamy]. The conceptual work was much more my thing, so I got to know her better around '66 or '67; she was up the street from me when I lived on Grand Street. It must have been around 1971 that I lent her a copy of my essay collection Changing, and when she returned it, the book was full of little marks. One read, "a footnote is a legend"-you had to pause a second a figure out she meant "leg end." Lee had a nice sense of language. She wasn't precisely an intellectual, but she was very thoughtful, and her work was more personal than that of the guys, who were still mostly Minimal. Her paintings had all the things Donald Judd didn't want: color and shape and brushstrokes. They were marvelous, but they didn't fit in any movement, and people like me were not very interested in painting. Lee was always a figure who slipped between stools. But I don't know if she would have ever fit into anything anyway--even her conceptual work looked extreme compared with other art at the time. A tremendous number of people were thinking about how to get art out of the commodity market, and General Strike belonged to that milieu. But Lee was extraordinarily intense, one of the first, if not the first person (along with Ian Wilson) who did the life-as-art thing. The kind of things other people did as art, she really did as life--and it took us a while to figure that out.