Keywords:
Sexual materiality
Playful language
Visual association
Mouths, ears, and sexual orifices; and fingers, aeroplanes, noses and phalluses jostle one another for space and dominance as Lozano creates a world of ambiguously sexual materiality, a vaguely nightmarish dreamscape in which everything is always potentially something else.
The kind of visual rhyming that Lozano is doing in this work destabilises reality, ripping the fabric of the real so that the unconscious (consciously courted) pokes through. She exchanging the body parts to reconfiguration the human body just as Bataille said. I can see how Lazano's erotics both mobilise and refashion Bataille's permutational eroticism.
'For me, there can be no art revolution that is separate from a scientific revolution, a political revolution, an education revolution, a drug revolution, a sex revolution or a personal revolution. I cannot consider a program of museum reforms without equal attention to gallery reforms and art magazine reforms which would aim to eliminate the stables of artists and writers. I will not call myself an art worker but rather an art dreamer
and I will participate only in a total revolution simultaneously personal and public.'(Lee Lozano, p24)
If Bataille's penchant for abjection was an attempt to posit a matter that cannot be reduced to systems of scientific or political mastery, in Lozano's work such as irreducibility of libidinal urges is shown to be a little more than a chimaera; rather, time and again her early drawings and paintings reveal a continuity between sexuality and social structures. (Stoekl. p.XV.)
I like the series painting called 'I Sing The Body Electric—the drawing also conveys how the body, for Lozano, is joined to the circuitry. These sketches rely on a combination of metaphoric transpositions and metonymic slippages. Plugging the toaster directly into the woman, rather than the electrical outlet behind her, is just one step away from the company's own metonymic slippage in rating the efficiency of its customers rather than its appliances.
Her notebook, which shocked me, systematically records the problems in creation, sketches, whether a plan was passed or denied, and the reasons, as well as steps diagram and even comments on the art markets.
'A painting is a snapshot of an idea'(Notebook, 9 March 1969)
'Painting is just one more information system: painting gives comparatively less information than other information systems.' (Notebook, 14 May)
Lee combines body parts with tools.'Clearly these are paintings about the laboring body, but there are about other kinds of work too, an unproductive and non-generative work---- a kind of work that doesn't really work.'(Jo Applin, Hard work Lee Lozano's Dropouts) She foundd the connection between tools and human bodies in modern cities. She deflates tools, at times by lampooning their industrial, hard edges, at other times by softening, torquing, and dismantling them.
Books and other resources
The Fruitmarket Gallery. Lee lozano. Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, 2014. Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece. London: Afterall Books: One Work.
Fiona Bradely & Barry Rosen, 2018. Lee Lozano: Slip Slide Splice. Edinburgh: The Fritmarket Gallery.
Lee Lozano, 2009. Lee Lozano: Note Books 1967-1970. New York: An Art Service.
