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.
Lozano thought of herself as “Revolutionary”
ReplyDeleteHere are some information to help you understand her.
…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….
…EXHIBIT IN PUBLIC ONLY PIECES WHICH FURTHER SHARING OF IDEAS & INFORMATION RELATED TO TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION…..
1930 Lenore Knaster is born in Newark, New Jersey, the only child of Rosemond and Sidney Knaster, non-practicing Jews. Her father works as a furniture buyer.
1944 Growing up in a middle-class American home, at fourteen Lenore chooses to be referred to as Lee.
1948–51 Studies natural science and philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she receives a BA in 1951.
That still doesn't answer the question. It doesn't sound like she was much of an artist to start with, which likewise lowers my estimation of what it 'might have cost'; maybe it was comforting as a good excuse for the relative obscurity of her work.
ReplyDeleteI asked a classically trained artist I know about her; she'd never heard of her either.
Interesting, I too had never heard of her despite knowing of the majority of the other names mentioned as her group of artists. Her choice to avoid the "art world", while wise and principled, I suppose, certainly doomed her to obscurity. The only way to make it in the "art world" is to participate and be self-promoting. She strikes me as perhaps an obsessive compulsive type, who thought she could turn that into art. It's interesting on many levels (the least of which is the 'revolutionary' aspects), but art? Highly questionable. If what she did was art, was Diogenes an artist? I'd love to hear his answer to that.
ReplyDelete