Lee Lozano: Kunsthalle Basel

Lee Lozano

KUNSTHALLE BASEL

THOSE WHO KNOW of Lee Lozano know she ditched the art world and stopped talking to women. But the fact is most people don't know of her, because she ditched the art world and stopped talking to women. Feminism taught us long ago that history is written as much through its exclusions as through its master narratives. This has certainly been the case for art history, whose neglect of, and outright hostility to, women artists is amply documented. It is doubly odd, then, to come across the problem of Lozano, for the version of '60s and '70s art that most of us carry in our mind is marked by the total absence of her short but major career. "Lee Lozano: Win First Don't Last Win Last Don't Care," a traveling retrospective curated by Adam Szymczyk, aims to change all that. In this exhibition Lozano's oeuvre lands upon us so fully and with such finitude--its beginning, middle, and end splayed out for all to see, all at once--that it's hard to process.

Lozano, born in 1930, was active as an artist for only ten years. She graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960, settled in New York the same year, and, from 1961 to 1971, moved in rapid succession through gestural figuration, hard-edge figuration, hard-edge abstraction, task-based painting, and word-based conceptual pieces. These "styles" were enacted in oil paintings and through a seemingly rapacious drawing habit. In 1969 she began a conceptual piece called Untitled (General Strike Piece, Feb. 8, 1969), which was predicated on her systematic severing of all connections to the commercial art world. It's a hilarious drawing in which she documents exhibitions not participated in, parties not attended (we should all be so lucky). Around this time she also decided to BOYCOTT WOMEN, as she succinctly put it in another untitled work. By late 1972 she had packed her bags and moved to Dallas, where she remained until her death in 1999. Her exclusion, unlike so many others, was willed, conscious, and an ongoing work of art.

But I've gotten ahead of myself, which is easy to do with Lozano. It's difficult to pace yourself through her decade when you know how her story ends. Indeed, the two major exhibitions of her work to date (the other, at New York's P.S. I, in 2004, "Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961-1971," was curated by Bob Nickas and Alanna Heiss) have both suffered a similar fate, a difficulty finding the narrative line through the work. Like the P.S. I show, which included about 150 works, Szymczyk's exhibition, weighing in with 212, evinces an aversion to editing--as if the curator is trying to compensate for Lozano's long absence through sheer bulk. This is understandable but also problematic, because it disallows ways of thinking about the work's potential to trouble and rearticulate the legacy of '60s and '70s art.

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Consider, for instance, a group of paintings and drawings Lozano made between about 1961 and 1964, that show us the human form morphing with and becoming a variety of mechanical and inanimate objects. Deleuze and Guattari's theories of the hookups between machines and bodies seem mild-mannered compared with Lozano's whacked-out erotic porosity. Penises sprout from ears and are propelled out of revolvers. Toasters get plugged into cunts. Assholes spit Swingline staples. Tits harden in excitation to cocklike turgidness. In which permanent-collection galleries of a museum shall we hang these pictures? Maybe they should be installed in a room with an abstract painting by Philip Guston and a Willem de Kooning "Woman" picture? In a series of drawings of her studio, also made in the early '60s, electric sockets, water spigots, and radiators are conduits not only of energy and heat but of a sexual life force that appears ready to vaporize the architecture. Next came the tool pictures--hammers, wrenches, vice grips, all lushly painted and lustily suggesting the violent, combinative nature of sexual desire. It's around this point, as you moved through the Kunsthalle Basel galleries, that you began to realize that the inanimate is not a working concept for Lozano--everything possesses some kind of energy, life, or drive. This is true not only of content but also of form. In her graphite-and-crayon drawings, Lozano's line conjures the great Bob Dylan lyric from "Visions of Johanna": "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face."

But the expressionist paint handling of the first tool paintings gave way to increasingly hard-edge cold ones. The warm browns and creamy passages of white, the wet-on-wet paint application, fade out as Lozano's palette turns to a chilly, mean, gunmetal gray while the tools are magnified to fill canvases as large as six by thirteen feet. Ambitious to the core, Lozano was friends with the likes of Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, and it's hard to avoid seeing these works as her attempt to broker a deal between the intensely erotic passion of her art and what suddenly seems like the puritanical sublimated industriousness of much Minimalist sculpture. I write "suddenly seems" because I think one effect of encountering Lozano's entire oeuvre at this moment is a kind of infinitely interesting recalibration of all that we thought we knew. Figures like Robert Morris and Donald Judd start to look nothing short of prudish.