In Conversation: Jo Applin and Courtney J. Martin on ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’

‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ is the first in-depth study of the idiosyncratic ten-year career of Lee Lozano (1930 – 1999) and asserts her importance in the history of post-war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano’s production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts, to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract Wave Paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Lozano is now perhaps best known for ‘Dropout Piece’ (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture where 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, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles the challenges that Lozano poses to art history – 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. ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the ‘right way’ to live and work. Jo Applin is Reader and Head of the History of Art Department at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is the author of the books ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ (Yale University Press, 2018); ‘Alison Wilding’ (with Briony Fer; Lund Humphries, 2018); ‘Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America’ (Yale University Press, 2012); and ‘Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field’ (Afterall and MIT Press, 2012); and co-editor, with Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin, of ‘London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960-1980’ (Penn State University Press, 2018). In 2012 Dr. Applin was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and she has recently been Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and Senior Scholar at the Terra Summer Residency in Giverny, France. Her most recent book, ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working,’ was awarded the Suzanne and James Mellor Book Prize from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Courtney J. Martin is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation. Prior to Dia, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2012, she curated a focus display at Tate Britain, ‘Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip…Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973-1978.’ In 2014, she co-curated the group show, Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art, at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008-2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and is co-editor of ‘Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator’ (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award). In 2015, she curated an exhibition of the American painter, Robert Ryman at the Dia Art Foundation, entitled ‘Robert Ryman.’ She is the editor of Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016). In 2018, she will oversee exhibitions of works by Mary Corse, Nancy Holt, Dorothea Rockburne, Blinky Palermo, Keith Sonnier and Andy Warhol at Dia. She received a doctorate from Yale University for her research on twentieth century British art and is the author of essays on Rasheed Araeen, Kader Attia, Rina Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Lara Favaretto, Leslie Hewitt, Asger Jorn, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha and Yinka Shonibare.