Rendering her self: identity in the work of Lee Lozano

Abstract

Lee Lozano was a prominent conceptual artist in New York during the 1960s and early 1970s. After dropping out of the art world, she fell into obscurity. Since 1998, there has been renewed interest in her work.

Lozano struggled with her gender and artistic identity. Through her work, Lozano challenged traditional constructions of gender and created an androgynous persona for herself. She also used her art to challenge the limits of her body as an art-making machine. This thesis highlights three major parts of her oeuvre that demonstrate how her works defined her gender and artistic identity.

Early in her career, Lozano created many images of the phallus, as evidenced in her drawings of airplanes. She used machine aesthetics to undermine gender binaries and define androgyny. Her interest in machine aesthetics continued until the end of her career. She also made images that incorporated text, anticipating her later conceptual language pieces. The Wave Series from the late sixties and early seventies was a conceptual painting series based on the science of wavelengths. Lozano proscribed for herself a rigorous method of production that turned her body into an art-making machine and tested the limits of her endurance. Also during the late sixties and early seventies, Lozano created performance pieces. They were known as language pieces as well, since Lozano recorded the pieces in writing. For some of these pieces, Lozano enacted extreme behaviors; for others, she performed mundane tasks. In the end, her life fused with her art. This brought out latent mental instability that Lozano had struggled with much of her adult life. As a result of this instability and a growing disenchantment with the art world, Lozano dropped out of the art world