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Buro
Friedrich
2001
Is the fusion of art and life a radical concept? What are the consequences of living out (artistic) concepts when this might imply complete invisibility or even erasure? Or, at the total other end of the line, unerasable visibility? Are concepts and ideas more radical when they remain unexecuted: after all, doesn't the imagination far exceed reality? How does one carry out or present or represent concepts and ideas that can only be experienced when 'lived' through'? How conceptual is experience? How can public engage itself with radicality?
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 the text pieces by the conceptual artist Lee Lozano who died in 1999.
We conceived the presentation as '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 BüroFriedrich, we interviewed artists, critics and theorists, and organised public discussions around our questions.
Some of the participants and contributors 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 which they wanted to operate. Lee Lozano was no exception. However, she adopted a far more personal approach than many others and allowed herself to be led by her own, personal circumstances.
Her experiments with drugs (Grass Piece and No-Grass Piece) or actions like the Boycott Women Project and the Dialogue Pieces (which were condemned as politically incorrect) reflect these other intentions. With her General Strike Piece and finally Drop-Out Piece, Lee Lozano definitively stepped out of the art world.
The consequence of this artistic and radical attitude and final act is that her work as good as vanished from the annals of art history and her oeuvre has remained anonymous.
During our research 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.
However, more recently the Dallas Observer (9 December 1999) published an article in response to her death. And, more recently, a true revival of her work unfolded: Artforum ran a long article which included interviews with a number of her colleagues and critics from the 1960s (October 2001).
See this article in Artforum for a full report. And, in 2005, Hauser and Wirth took her work to the Armory show in New York (and sold it all), after they took over her work from the Lozano Estate (that showed her work at PS1 in 2004).
Conceptual art has recently begun to attract attention once again through such exhibitions as Global Conceptualism, which have been influenced by the conceptual approaches of contemporary artists.
Consequentially, canonizing (which implies 'looking at' something with many eyes) work generates its institutionalization - which is exactly what the conceptual artists of the sixties rebelled against, both in their work and attitude.
It is important that this renewed attention for conceptual art is deployed to create an opening beyond what has been, preserving and building on and atop, toward a critical approach to these practices as well as celebrating new fields of research developing from this acquired knowledge.
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