Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lee Lozano (1930–99) was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life. In the decade before her infamous “dropout piece”—culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death—Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 1 is the first in the series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles.
In the 1960's, Lee Lozano was living and working in New York, painting her own kind of heavy, bodily, manic work – rather than conforming to the then-dominant modes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop – and garnering the recognition of the art world corpus of galleries, museums and magazines. Simultaneously, she initiated a body of aesthetically opposite conceptual artworks called Language Pieces--scribbled, mostly instructional or task-oriented notes generally written in ink on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Lozano considered these works "'drawings,' eliminating any distinction between them and her more traditional studio practice," according to Helen Molesworth's excellent text in Karma's illuminating new monograph, Lozano c. 1962. And yet, except for the fact that they were singled out as art objects, the Language Pieces are nearly identical to the journal pages that Lozano penned around the same time. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 3 x 5 in. / 136 pgs. LIST PRICE: U.S. $18.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $23.95 GBP £16.00 ISBN: 9781942607557 PUBLISHER: Karma, New York AVAILABLE: 1/24/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Before her self-imposed exile from the art world, Lee Lozano (1930–99) was a highly regarded painter who defined a generation of American artists infusing conceptualism with a new intensity. A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lozano kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.
Eleven of these private books survive, containing notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art’s role in society and humorous asides from daily life.
In the decade before her infamous “dropout piece”—culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death—Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 1 is the first in the series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles.
