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REVIEWS LEE LOZANO
No Title, 1969, oil on canvas,
four parts, 602 x 602 cm.
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London
LEE LOZANO:
NO TITLE, 1969
HAUSER & WIRTH, LONDON
30 MARCH – 5 MAY
The fi rst thing that distinguishes Lee Lozano’s work is its
force, whether felt in the intense shading and chaotic lines
of her scatological and sexual drawings or in the elegant
precision of her abstract paintings. She burst onto the
New York art scene in 1960, showing with artists like Dan
Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Morris, only to burn
through her fuse (or smother its spark) ten years later in
Drop Out Piece (1969–70), in which she abandoned the
artworld, moved to Dallas and bizarrely stopped talking
to women. Critics have seen this critique of capitalism and patriarchy as both pathological and utopian, but it ef_f ectively made
Lozano vanish until a retrospective show in 1998, a year before her death.
Throughout her brief career the artist’s communication with men was problematised repeatedly in cartoonish cock drawings
– imagine an expressionist hybrid of Richard Prince and Sue Williams, drawings in which, for example, a man’s ear becomes a
penis, with the text ‘Man Cocking His Ear’ (Untitled, 1963), or in which a lipsticked mouth is stuf_f ed with an ass, a cock coming out
of the asshole, accompanied by the phrase ‘menage-a-trois’ (Untitled, 1963). They’re visceral, crude, disturbing narratives of the
phallus as the tool that drives men’s minds and bodies. At the same time Lozano was making large dark paintings of bore drills,
bolts, hammers and screws, as if visualising the steeliness needed to penetrate the male-dominated fi eld of minimalism.
While solo exhibitions in Basel and Eindhoven last year showed both strands of her work, Hauser & Wirth concentrates
on later paintings and small graphite studies for the work on canvas. It’s unfortunate, since it seems that Lozano could only talk in
minimalism because she screamed in fi guration. Nevertheless, her No Title (1969) set of four paintings is stunning. Four sections
of a circular band hang in a square, so that the spectator’s eye completes the absent sphere. The fury of her drawings reaches
what Adorno called the successful sublimation of rage – an eloquence of form that holds nothingness at its centre. The mild
hues of grey and cream capture temperatures of light, both day and night, and planetary eclipse. The three-inch housepainter’s
brushes she preferred leave smooth, wide strokes that accentuate the change in texture between the shaded band and the
ground. For Lozano the perfect body hung in space, free from human protrusions: ‘If we were more intelligent we would be
shaped like spheres,’ she wrote in her notebooks. ‘We could change from solid to liquid to gaseous states of matter or become
nothing but a charge or a force.’ The illusive density is pierced by a hole in the top canvas, like a spyhole to another universe.
Its circle of light and shadow both produces and playfully punctures the question of the w/hole Lozano was trying to ask. This
geometrical knowing seems like a beginning, or maybe for Lozano was a fi tting end. Cherry Smyth
ARTRTREVIVIEEW W one.linfive.lintwo.linone.linfour.lineight.lin
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 2 3/5/07 16:21:07
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