The Cost of Not Speaking to Women

The NYT has an article today about an artist I've never heard of before: "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her? When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go."

The article doesn't answer the question it asks; if it cost her anything at all, it's not evident in the text. In fact the matter is really only discussed in one paragraph of a longer piece.

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.”

Maybe it didn't cost her anything. Perhaps she enjoyed the relative quiet, given that she expanded the project voluntarily from "about a month" to 28 years.