These questions were running through our minds when, at the beginning of 2001, we were asked by BüroFriedrich in Berlin to prepare a presentation with text pieces by the conceptual artist Lee Lozano, who died in 1999.
The presentation became an 'exhibition as tool': an exhibition grasped as the starting point for research into the similarities and differences between the artistic practices of the 1960's and today. Within the framework of the presentation at BüroFriedrich, interviews with artists, critics and theorists took place. Some of them had been directly involved in the art scene Lee Lorenzo had been a part of.
Others related to the tradition of conceptual art and their practices address similar subjects. Yet another group uses concepts from artistic practice to bring about (political) change.
Many artists from the early days of conceptual art were acutely aware of the art system within
such as the Boycott Women Project and the Dialogue Pieces, which were both condemned as politically incorrect, reflect these other intentions. With her General Strike Piece and finally Drop-Out Piece, Lee Lozano definitively stepped outside the art world. The consequence of this artistic and radical act is that her work has as good as vanished from the annals of art history and her oeuvre has remained anonymous.
While researching this project for BüroFriedrich it became painfully apparent how little of Lozano' s life, work and thought has survived; a couple of lines in the catalogue Global Conceptualism, Lucy Lippard' s Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object, Dan Graham' s Rock My Religion, and a couple of articles in Art in America and Artforum were all we could find on her ten-year art career.