Lee Lozano, Drawn from
Life: 1961 - 1971
PS1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave at 46th Ave in
Long Island City, New York
January 22 – May 1, 2004
By JOE
FYFE
Lee Lozano Hammer
Diptych 1963
oil on canvas, 94 x 100 inches
Lee Lozano: A Personal Note
I went to see the Lee Lozano
show at P.S. 1 with a friend of mine who used to be her pot dealer and
(briefly) her lover. In the reception area there is a painting done
in Lozano's expressionist style that depicts a hammer with three heads.
Broad, straw-like brushstrokes and a deceptively understated palette
infuse the hammer image with an organic vitality. It fills the rectangle
like a restless, mythical beast. In the exhibition rooms where the majority
of Lozano's works are displayed there are more paintings of tools: hammers,
wrenches and clamps.
The objects are pictured much larger than life size. Standing in front
of one of these images allows one to feel like they are climbable, like
the limbs of trees. The tools coil in on themselves, tucked under in
a cramped, interior space. The paintings seem to be about imagining
what it must feel like to be alongside a growing penis stuck inside
trousers. They have a murmuring, heroic air about them, like awakening
animals. Lozano's tools are more personal then those in Claes Oldenburg's
repertoire of "object pornography" and infinitely more bracing
than Jim Dine's coy little tool drawings. Lozano makes the reference
specific in a drawing of a man's lower torso with a wrench handle bulge
in his pants and the adjustable wrench head sticking out of the pants
fly. Lozano was fascinated by sex and would discuss her sexual experiences
and those of her friends with great specificity.
The rooms also exhibit her slightly better known drawing and painting
style, an obsessive bundling of subtly toned curves and directed force
lines. In a number of works on paper Lozano makes various conceptual
proposals concerning society and observes the behavior that surrounds
her drug-taking. Here is evidence of the drug influence on the post-minimalist
generation of artists. The lettered grid paper evokes the lofts and
bleak streets of lower Manhattan in the late sixties and early seventies:
(I'm quoting from memory):"Well, you can't go over to La Monte
and Marians without smoking a lot of hash" she writes. Or, "Alan
Saret just got a pound". The public and private, the visionary
and the anecdotal converge in these candid, irascible graph paper notes.
In the further rooms on the first floor there are the more freehand
drawings. I first saw many of these at the Philadelphia house of art
collectors Helen and Milton Brutten in 1976. These works, on sheets
about 16 x 20in., feel executed on the run. They are also are filled
with penis and tool imagery but continue into depictions of crayons,
flashlights and many other disparate objects amid pronounced textual
rantings. Lozano conflated advertising catch phrases with street talk.
One page combines a crayoned mouth with heavy graphite letters that
scream "I got my Blow Job through the NY Times!"
By the early seventies, Lozano had stopped making art except (perhaps)
for some of these drawings. "This is now the age of information"
she told my friend, "the most important work that will happen in
the future will be the exchange of information between people; I see
no real future for studio art". She got money by selling work from
her collection of drawings by Judd and Andre. Lozano was taking a lot
of LSD. When she was seen around SoHo she had the faraway look. When
I met the Bruttens a few years after that time, they were selling her
drawings for her and would send her the money. They told me that she
was mostly living on the street.
I remember I wanted to buy a Lozano drawing with some boiler and pipe
imagery and the phrase 'I got fucked in the G^ass by Con Ed!" at
the time for $250 and had to pass on it because I needed the money to
move to New York City. Lozano's drawings moved me and inspired me like
nothing else at that moment. I had just finished art school and the
only thing that interested me was the nascent punk movement. Lunatic
rage seemed the only appropriate expression and I was looking for the
visual equivalent to what I had been listening to. When I moved to New
York, I would be asked what artists interested me and I said "Lee
Lozano." Either she hadn't been heard of or there were vague rumors
that she was a "shopping bag lady".
Within a few years many younger artists had found the visual equivalent
to punk music in neo-expressionism. It wasn't until seeing this work
of Lee Lozano's again that I understood why I found neo-expressionism
so contrived. Amid the expressionist assault, there's a depth and complexity--something
wavy in the lines, soft in the edges--it's neither piercing nor brittle
beneath the first look. A good artist's attention during execution has
the ability to twist and counterpoint one's impressions of a work.
Like punk music, her drawings have a way of conflating aggressiveness,
ridiculousness and vulnerability. Years after their brief recording
life, the Sex Pistols album reveals a musicality and spaciousness that
was not apparent at the time they were performing. All the other bands
of that era have fallen away. In the same way, I'm a little amazed at
the resonance of Lozano's work. The full-throated sexuality and profound
irritation of the work is tempered with an unusual tenderness and clarity.
How rare to see work so unguarded, so strange and refreshing.
