Most Fascinating Person Of The Week: Lee Lozano–who didn’t speak for women for 28 years:
LEE LOZANO CRASHED through New York’s art world between 1960 and 1972, a restless decade during which she went about disrupting all of its conventions. A compatriot and challenger to a cadre of mostly male artists who would become leading figures in post-minimalism and conceptual art (Robert Morris, Dan Graham, Carl Andre and Robert Smithson, among others), she went further than any of them, becoming one of the first artists to commit herself to what the critic Lucy Lippard called “life as art.” In Lozano’s case, it became impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Lozano wasn’t the first artist to create art beyond salable objects, or to make her life her material. But for her the practice became all-consuming. In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her “General Strike Piece,” which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers. Lozano wrote that she wanted to create a “total revolution simultaneously personal and public,” her own take on the collective protest movements of the age. Other artists were marching against the Vietnam War and demonstrating against patriarchy, but Lozano disdained such public actions, choosing instead a private, idiosyncratic rebellion. After this, her writing — lists of thoughts, questions, proposals, interactions, offers and invitations she’d turned down — became her work, though it largely went unseen outside of a handful of exhibitions and a small circle of friends with whom she corresponded.
She once declared that the subject of her work was “mystery,” and it is her unknowability, coupled with her humor and outrageousness, that has stoked a growing interest in Lozano.
Her notions — brilliant and ridiculous — became official pieces only when she rewrote them on paper headlined with a date and an address and mailed them to friends or gallerists, or occasionally showed them.
You can divine in these notebooks the ticking of a mind whirring through its eclectic interests. Lozano was well read in physics, mathematics, astrology, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching. She used drugs devotedly, systematically: For “Grass Piece” (1969), one of her early conceptual projects, she was almost continuously stoned for 33 days. (This was immediately followed by “No-Grass Piece,” in which she tried and failed to stay sober for the same amount of time.) She conceived of her work as an attempt to fuse art and science. Sometimes she asked others to participate, as in her “Dialogue Piece” (1969), for which she invited friends and acquaintances — and at one point a cat and a baby — into her studio to talk with her. This represented the “ideal I have of a kind of art,” she wrote, that is “not for sale, which is democratic, which is not difficult to make, which is inexpensive to make, which can never be completely understood, parts of which will always remain mysterious and unknown.” She mused that she wanted to just continue “Dialogue Piece” as the work of her life. But over the next two years, Lozano moved in the opposite direction, finding even more extreme ways to divest and turn inward.
In August 1971, eight months after the opening of her Whitney show, she undertook another, even more audacious project, “Decide to Boycott Women,” stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary — an experiment that would go on for about a month and “after that ‘communication will be better than ever.’” But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction. The curator Helen Molesworth called it “consummately pathological.” Lozano’s friend the artist David Reed said it was “masochistic.”
CERTAINLY THERE MUST have been an amount of self-loathing and misery involved. But there was a logic and clarity too. As Visconti writes, at the advent of the feminist movement, Lozano faced a dilemma: “She was not one of the guys, and she certainly did not want to be one of the girls — yet she had already been assigned a category.” And so the only control she could have was “not over which subject she could claim to be, but rather over the choice of being a subject at all.” There’s something prescient in her refusal to identify with women — her refusal, really, to identify with any category of human at all. She saw the ways in which an affiliation based on gender could produce its own rules and norms that would eventually be enforced, and she rejected any norms that originated outside her own mind, any identity imposed from without.
I’ve only scratched the surface. Read the whole thing. I find the subject fascinating.
It’s Not Easy Being A Reenactor:
Benedict Arnold had been growing hunkier all afternoon.
Incarnated, at the moment, by Cameron Green, the director of interpretation at historic Fort Ticonderoga, Arnold had spent much of this May Friday on horseback. Sixty rain-numbed Revolutionary War reenactors had sloshed in his wake, marching up forest trails and past a Texaco station, in period-correct leather buckle shoes (not engineered to withstand repeated impact with modern Vermont’s asphalt highways) and period-correct wool coats (now ponderously wet, stinking of sheep). “Give ’em hell, boys!” a local resident had hollered from his farmhouse.
Saturday morning would mark the 250th anniversary of the fort’s seizure in 1775 by the Green Mountain Boys—a rumbustious militia of proto-Vermonters who spent years violently defending their bite-size territory—but so far the rain was at best blighting and at worst obliterating every enriching activity the Fort Ticonderoga staff had dreamed up. A plan for the reenactors to sleep under starlight when we’d arrived on Thursday had been downgraded to a plan to shiver in a barn all night. A plan to shoot muskets had been canceled. A plan to teach elementary-age children how to cook a meal over an open fire in a town green had devolved into a horde of famished, filthy adults flooding into a schoolroom; propping their dripping muskets against shelves of picture books; and scavenging pencil-shaped cookies leftover from Teacher Appreciation Week. Everything was going less smoothly than it had in 1775. If the partially defrosted reenactors under Cam Green’s supervision—individuals who had come from as far away as North Carolina; who had had to submit color photos of themselves in 1770s-era clothing and proof of insurance to be granted the privilege of portraying 18th-century guerrillas—camped out again tonight, there was likely to be a mass hypothermia event.
Crossing ‘Be a Reenactor’ off my bucket list.
Geothermal–The Future Of Heating And Cooling? At this corporate HQ, it’s the present:
VERONA, Wis.—You only need a glance at the “Intergalactic Headquarters” of Epic Systems to realize the corporate campus of this medical records software company is not a typical office park.
Buildings resemble Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, the Emerald City of Oz and Hogwarts Castle. There’s a treehouse conference room, a “Deep Space” auditorium and a stairway in “Heaven.”
However, what’s buried beneath the fantasy-themed campus of one of the nation’s largest privately held tech companies is arguably more unusual and, from a climate perspective, potentially far more significant.
Roughly 6,100 boreholes, each drilled hundreds of feet into the earth, comprise one of the largest geothermal heating and cooling networks in the world. Electricity from a nearby wind farm and a field of solar panels pumps approximately 6 million gallons of water through a closed network of pipes that distribute hot and cold water across the sprawling 410-acre campus.
Epic’s buildings use approximately one-quarter the amount of energy as typical office buildings, according to Derek Schnabel, the director of facilities and a senior mechanical engineer at Epic. Some of those savings come from high-efficiency lighting, additional insulation and weatherization, but more than half the energy reduction comes from the geothermal system, Schnabel said.
Color me impressed:
