Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano

Abstract

This is a story about a woman who rejected two different communities. A successful New York-based artist in the 1960s, by the early 1970s Lee Lozano (1930–1999) was a woman who stopped speaking to women and an artist who had abandoned the New York art world. Largely forgotten by art history, Lozano is now experiencing something of a small renaissance.1 Yet the new art world attention shies from her rigorous abandonment of both it and the world of women, wanting instead to valorize her paintings, and to commend the prescient nature of her conceptual pieces. But I remain curious, fascinated even, by the extreme nature of her rejection, and before merely repatriating her want to think through why it is that the refusal of women feels consummately pathological and the rejection of the New York art world residually idealistic.