This radical artist ignored women for a project, but then kept up the boycott her whole life
Lee Lozano worked in the medium of removal
In 1971, conceptual artist Lee Lozano decided to stop talking to other women — to boycott them altogether, in fact. Born of a desire both to expose and to exempt herself from gendered power relations, the project was originally a short-term endeavor. In her notebook, Lozano wrote, “I am boycotting women as an experiment thru about September & after that ‘communication will be better than ever.’” But a life without women, it turned out, really suited Lozano. The boycott continued relatively uninterrupted until her death in 1999. Lozano’s friend Sol LeWitt would later say that, in particular, she was careful to ignore waitresses entirely.
The piece, originally titled Decide to Boycott Women, wasn’t the artist’s first attempt to remove herself from the circles she inhabited. Two years earlier, Lozano had produced General Strike Piece, in which she outlined directions for her own steady rejection of the art world: “GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY AVOID BEING PRESENT AT OFFICIAL OR ‘PUBLIC’ UPTOWN FUNCTIONS OR GATHERINGS RELATED TO THE ‘ART WORLD’ IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATION OF TOTAL PERSONAL & PUBLIC REVOLUTION.”
Lozano wasn’t alone in feeling compromised by the artifice of the art world, but she was among very few who were willing to sacrifice the notoriety they’d achieved in order to send a message about it. In 1972, proving her seriousness, Lozano moved from New York City to Dallas, where she spent the rest of her life in obscurity. “Lee was punk before punk,” said gallerist Dorothy Lichtenstein, wife of famed pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein.
Born Lenore Knaster in Newark, New Jersey in 1930, Lozano studied at the University of Chicago before settling in New York City, where she met her husband, Adrian Lozano, an architect. The two were married for just four years, but Lozano kept her married name. By the early 1960s, Lozano was a very visible fixture on the New York art scene, and was friends or acquaintances with the whole cast of Conceptual and Minimalist heavy hitters: Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra.
But Lozano wasn’t always working in the amorphous medium of concepts and gestures.
Up until General Strike Piece and even beyond it, through 1970, she was also making two-dimensional representational art. Throughout the 1960s, she exhibited her massive early canvases — distorted, saturated, super-sexual paintings that looked like a pervert’s colorful doodles come frightfully to life. She was best known for her Wave paintings, a series of which were shown in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in late 1970 and early 1971. She told Art in America the paintings were an effort to “combine science and art and existence….The pictures refer to energy and they were brought into being with a great amount of energy.” Just as interesting as the Wave canvases are Lozano’s notebooks, in which she fastidiously recorded quotidian details, including listing, according to art historian Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, “how many joints she smoked and when — in half-joint increments.” (She was often stoned, and even experimented in a deliberate manner with various substances while painting.)
The decision to boycott women came after a particularly dull art encounter. As Helen Molesworth writes in a 2002 Art Journal piece on the artist, Lozano’s notebooks describe “her boredom and dissatisfaction with a subcommittee of women involved with Art Workers Coalition at Lucy Lippard’s loft.” It must have been some meeting. Lippard, a well known feminist art critic and curator, was among the first mentioned at the very beginning of Lozano’s boycott actions: ‘THROW LUCY LIPPARD’S 2ND LETTER ON DEFUNCT PILE, UNANSWERED,” she wrote. “DO NOT GREET ROCHELLE BASS IN STORE,” read another line.
It is rumored that Lozano’s boycott did not extend to her own mother, but most other women were personae non gratae. Molesworth writes that even, “for instance, if greeted by a female clerk in a market, she would insist upon being served by a man.” Actions like these might be seen as frivolous, or overkill. But the grouping of conceptual works that defined the last decades of Lozano’s life — General Strike Piece, the boycott, and Dropout Piece, a further commitment to nonparticipation in the art world begun in 1970 — is groundbreaking. These both were and were not works of art, and they were different than anything else being done at the time. As Lauren O’Neill-Butler writes in Art Journal Open, “At a time when Conceptual artists were outdoing themselves in dematerializing their objects and their activities, competing as to who could do less and still call it art, Lee outdid them all by doing less with an unmatched intensity that made it more.” In her journals, she laid out her plans to extricate herself from the webs of power and sociality in which she was implicated — to stage a full withdrawal from intelligibility — and in this way she made the piece more than a series of ephemeral acts. She left behind a record of her own radical refusal.
But Lozano was also a loose cannon. Not all that much is known about the 30 years Lozano spent in Dallas, but as her work came to enjoy a renaissance in the early 21st century, many stories surfaced that suggest that her exit from the art scene was anything but quiet. She once embarked on a project that entailed doing 30 tabs of acid in 30 days, an adventure from which some friends said she never fully returned. She had once been seen by curator Alanna Heiss throwing paper scraps, stretcher bars, and a painting on a SoHo street. When asked by Heiss what she was doing, Lozano replied, “Get away from me! I wasn’t throwing anything at you. I wouldn’t take the time or trouble.” Artist John Torreano recalled Lozano smashing a plate at a holiday party one year, then threatening to cut herself with a piece of it. This was after she’d pierced the din by shouting “I’m so bored!” Heiss, who knew the artist, told The New York Times in 2011, “Lee wanted to be a bad boy very much. Then she got irritated because she was always a girl in the end.”
But in spite of the shock her work and some of her behaviors produce, Lozano’s evolution was hardly erratic. As Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer illustrates in her 2014 book Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece, the artist, practiced in feats of endurance in the name of art, carried out a “wrenching transformation from insider to outsider,” an unusual and extreme “declaration of willed marginality” that really worked.
Lozano died of cervical cancer in 1999, 30 years after Dropout Piece. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Dallas, in a move easy to read as that piece’s—indeed, her career’s—grand finale.
