TURIN, Italy — From time to time, I yearn to escape the art world, like Lee Lozano in the late 1960s and early 1970s through a series of concept pieces. Beginning with “General Strike Piece” (1969), in which she decides to “GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINATELY AVOID ATTENDING OFFICIAL OR PUBLIC MEETINGS OR GATHERINGS ‘IN THE WORLD’ RELATING TO THE “WORLD OF ART “IN ORDER TO CONTINUE INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE WHOLE PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION” (she writes in notebooks, in capital letters) and ending with her “Dropout Piece” in 1972, she gradually leaves the medium of art, withdrawing art.
These pieces and others, like “Boycott Women” (1970) – in which she stopped talking about her own genre – were analyzed and admired with Lozano’s posthumous rise, which accelerated in the 2010s. when new generations discovered his work. But there’s more to the artist’s oeuvre than the “Life-Art” pieces, some of which give a big middle finger to the New York art scene in which she worked feverishly for only a dozen years. years. To hita retrospective exhibition on display at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin from March 8 to July 23, describes the other chapters of her short-lived career, which included a fury of drawings and paintings that embody fierce feminism and capitalist criticism, and incorporate searing humor , brutal metaphor, and, later, esotericism, all produced before his farewell to the art world.
The seven-room exhibition opens with a tour of “General Strike” at the entrance before embarking on Lozano’s early self-portraits and a dense hanging of drawings made in the early 1960s. A row of self-portraits at the graphite on paper shows the artist’s cheeky defiance; elsewhere in the room are color drawings; many of them, depicting images of genitalia paired with naughty text, are as dark as they are provocative: a line of penis heads, drawn in colored pencil, are labeled with the line “finally cut them off”; “eating pussy for sanity” captioned a sketch of a tube of toothpaste with a mustachioed face. Here and in a room entirely dedicated to the artist’s puns, surrealistic phallic symbolism abounds – pencils are penises, businessmen’s heads are bums, a flat penis wraps around the cylindrical carriage of a typewriter, the keys of which display not letters but words one normally cannot print in American publications. But not everything is masculine: in “No Title” (1962), a hand holding an American quarter on which the word “freedom” is inscribed moves towards a reclining woman whose sex has been replaced by a coin slot (the composition is a nod to Gustave Courbet “The Origin of Life”, 1866).
The following spaces show Lozano’s departure from the literal: his Tools The series consists of large-scale paintings in which large fields of color frame renderings of oversized screws, hammers, and pliers, all of which can both destroy and build (these seem particularly appropriate in the Pinacoteca, which is located in the disused Fiat factory) . And the paintings of moving planes manifest the artist’s fascination with the intersections of art and science. Lozano seemed preoccupied with revolution, but it also set itself to fade into the ether: a group of Rothko-esque minimalist paintings, mathematically calculated in terms of scale and proportion, border on the esotericism – perhaps a foreshadowing of what was to come next.
Eventually, she disappeared. (She also faded in other ways – born Lenore Knaster in 1930, she asked to be called Lee at 14, but later reduced that further, to ‘E’; she also ate less and less as she grew older, wasting away.) Last space of the show, a small lined spiral notebook is open to a page dated April 5, 1970. Lozano writes, “DROPOUT PIECE IS THE HARDEST JOB I HAVE EVER HAD NEVER DONE.
To hit is surprisingly compact, but embodies both the emotional punch and the resignation of Lozano’s work and life (hence the title of the exhibition: a strike is both a violent blow and a refusal to work ). The artist’s shifts from the raw to the enlightened, from the chains of the body to an ethereal spirituality, from wicked humor to an increasingly serious mission of personal and public transformation provide curatorial clarity. After “Dropout Piece”, she moved to Texas and lived with her parents, dying of cervical cancer in 1999.
Lozano fascinates more than ever, but I wonder what she would think of the workings of the art world today; friends apparently came to save her plays when she was evicted from an apartment in New York; now Hauser & Wirth runs his estate and his works fetch up to a million dollars each. Mental health has become part of our daily vocabulary – in Turin someone whispered to me that Lozano might have schizophrenia. His politically incorrect puns wouldn’t fly in today’s culture, nor would an entire sex boycott. But her critique of power structures and feminism is still relevant – the exhibition opened on International Women’s Day, when protests for women’s rights and against femicide took place in most major Italian cities. And in this time of self-promotion and careerism, there is something amazing and inspiring about the integrity of someone who had the courage to leave.
Lee Lozano: Strike continues at the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Via Nizza, 230/103, Turin, Italy) until July 23. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.
