Private Book 1

In the 1960's, Lee Lozano was living and working in New York, painting her own kind of heavy, bodily, manic work – rather than conforming to the then-dominant modes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop – and garnering the recognition of the art world corpus of galleries, museums and magazines. Simultaneously, she initiated a body of aesthetically opposite conceptual artworks called Language Pieces--scribbled, mostly instructional or task-oriented notes generally written in ink on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Lozano considered these works "'drawings,' eliminating any distinction between them and her more traditional studio practice," according to Helen Molesworth's excellent text in Karma's illuminating new monograph, Lozano c. 1962. And yet, except for the fact that they were singled out as art objects, the Language Pieces are nearly identical to the journal pages that Lozano penned around the same time.