On the occasion of the launch of the book Lee Lozano: Not Working by Jo Applin (Yale University Press), please join us for a conversation between the author and Mignon Nixon, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at UCL. The discussion will explore Lee Lozano’s work in the context of 1960s social and political upheaval, feminism and sexuality, as well as her recent return to the limelight.
Lee Lozano: Not Working is the first in-depth study of Lee Lozano’s idiosyncratic ten-year career in 1960s New York City, assuring this important artist a key place within histories of post-war art. Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1969), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her ‘dropout’ and ‘boycott of women’ lasted until her death in 1999, by which time she was all but forgotten.
The book tackles head-on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history – and especially to feminist art history – attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Equally, Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures challenge our assumptions about feminism and the right way to live and work.