TURIN, Italy — Every so often I yearn to flee the art world, as did Lee Lozano in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of a series of conceptual pieces. Beginning with “General Strike Piece” (1969), in which she decided to “GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY AVOID BEING PRESENT AT OFFICIAL OR PUBLIC ‘UPTOWN’ FUNCTIONS OR GATHERINGS RELATED TO THE ‘ART WORLD’ IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATIONS OF TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION” (she wrote in notebooks, in all capital letters) and ending with her “Dropout Piece” in 1972, she incrementally exited the art milieu, making withdrawal the art.
These and other pieces, such as “Boycott Women” (1970) — in which she stopped speaking to her own gender — have been analyzed and admired with Lozano’s posthumous rise, which accelerated in the 2010s as new generations discovered her work. But there’s more to the artist’s oeuvre than the “Life-Art” pieces, some of which flip a fat middle finger to the New York art scene she feverishly worked within for only a dozen years. Strike, a retrospective exhibition running at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin from March 8 to July 23, outlines the other chapters of her short-lived career, which included a fury of drawings and paintings that embody fierce feminism and capitalist critique, and incorporate raunchy humor, blunt metaphor, and, later, esoterism, all produced before her farewell from the art world.
The seven-room show opens with a visit to “General Strike” at the entrance before launching into Lozano’s early self-portraiture and a dense hang of drawings produced in the early ’60s. A row of graphite self-portraits on paper show the artist’s cheeky defiance; elsewhere in the room are color drawings; many of them, depicting images of genitals paired with naughty text, are as darkly humorous as they are provocative: A line of penis heads, drawn in colored pencil, is labeled with the line “finally cut them off”; “eat cunt for mental health” captions a rough sketch of a tube of toothpaste and a mustachioed face. Here and in a room entirely dedicated to the artist’s puns, phallic symbolism with a Surrealist bent abounds — crayons are penises, businessmen’s heads are bums, a flat penis wraps around the cylindrical carriage of a typewriter, whose keys display not letters but words one normally can’t print in American publications. But not everything is male: in “No Title” (1962), a hand holding an American quarter that displays the word “liberty” moves toward a reclining woman whose genitals have been replaced with a coin slot (the composition is a nod to Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of Life,” 1866).
The following spaces show Lozano’s move away from the literal: her Tools series consists of large-scale paintings in which broad fields of color frame renderings of outsize screws, hammers, and clamps, all of which can both destroy and build (these seem especially apt in the Pinacoteca, which is situated in the decommissioned Fiat factory). And paintings of aircraft in motion manifest the artist’s fascination with the intersections of art and science. Lozano seemed preoccupied with revolution, but she also set herself up to fade into the ether: a group of minimalist Rothko-esque color-field paintings, mathematically calculated in terms of scale and proportion, borders on the esoteric — maybe a foreshadowing of what was to come next.
Ultimately, she did disappear. (She faded in other ways, too — born Lenore Knaster in 1930, she asked to be called Lee at age 14, but later reduced this further, to “E”; she also ate increasingly less as she aged, wasting away.) In the show’s last space, a tiny lined spiral notebook is opened to a page dated April 5, 1970. Lozano writes: “DROPOUT PIECE IS THE HARDEST WORK I’VE EVER DONE.”
Strike is surprisingly compact, but embodies both the emotional punch and resignation of Lozano’s work and life (hence the exhibition’s title: a strike is both a violent hit and a refusal to work). The artist’s shifts from the crude to the enlightened, from the shackles of the body to an ethereal spirituality, from the wickedly humorous to an increasingly serious mission of personal and public transformation provide a curatorial clarity. After “Dropout Piece,” she moved to Texas and lived with her parents, dying of cervical cancer in 1999.
Lozano fascinates now more than ever, but I wonder what she would think of how today’s art world functions; friends apparently came to save her pieces when she was evicted from a New York apartment; now Hauser & Wirth manages her estate and her works fetch up to a million dollars each. Mental health has become part of our everyday vocabulary — in Turin, someone whispered to me that Lozano may have suffered from schizophrenia. Her politically incorrect puns wouldn’t fly in today’s culture, nor would boycotting an entire gender. But her critique of power structures and feminism are still spot on — the exhibition opened on International Women’s Day, when demonstrations for women’s rights and against femicide took place in most major Italian cities. And in this age of self-promotion and careerism, there’s something stunning, and inspiring, about the integrity of someone who had the courage just to leave.
Lee Lozano: Strike continues at the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Via Nizza, 230/103, Turin, Italy) through July 23. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.
