Isabelle Graw, ‘High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture’

I remember standing before a Lee Lozano work, Whom Graw includes amongst her examples of the ‘artist’s artist’.  It was 2007, I was at Documenta 12, and I had just graduated.  While discovering the painting called Clash, at this time I was ignorant of whom its painter was, or that she had a very conceptual practice quite apart from the paintings on display then in Kassel.  I mention this experience, because it goes some way toward marking out the terrain of my own position with regard to art and its marketable value. 

When I encountered this painting I was immediately captivated.  It seemed to require my movement about it, in, around and outward.  My first thought to its context was post-Minimal, if a label was wanted.  While orienting to this work, I was not certain of the artist’s gender, since her name is sufficiently androgynous, and the work likewise sat at some threshold between robust and tender, lyrical and matter-of-fact: not that this necessarily pertains to actual gender, but I was curious.   The surface was sensitive and knowing.  Todd Alden, in the catalogue for this painting said, ‘Lozano’s textures here represent a rare commitment to sensuality, distinguishing Lozano from virtually all Minimalists’ (66).  The brush had been dragged across the surface in even, steady directions, with shifts in direction marking the boundaries of form.  The monochrome paint was thick enough, and of a metallic sheen, so as to gather light along its directional strokes.  There was also some content being alluded to here, as the work of tint and shade created the illusory sense of volume amongst all its flatness.  This seemed almost a baroque thing of chiaroscuro affects.  It was satisfying to learn later of the content that, ‘While they appear to be abstract, each work evolved or transformed out of earlier representational depictions of tools – screws, cones, and hammers’ (Alden, 66).

The surface was divided at an angle, into two distinct parts, which seemed to do more than mark a change in direction of brush-stroke.  It was so precise and incisive that it ‘called’ me in, and yes I discovered that the painting was made of two panels abutted.  They fight and grind at each other as the title of the work suggests, and the actual boundary here seemed to make this a very physical act.

I was seduced.  This is at the heart of my point.  In order for a painting to lay claim to the projections and introjections that make up the ground of its knowledge production, it needs to invite pause and attendance.  And so there is a flirtation with the contested borders of bourgeois taste, bound up, as it is, with its history as a commodity.  Painting more than most art, can scarcely be a painting at all without looking like a commodity.  It has to work in spite of this.  More than this, it is living proof for all art, ‘… against the idealistic belief in art as the market’s Other’ (Graw, 81); it just has to work twice as hard to not be conceived as commercial for commercial sake.  Graw implies that Lozano’s, ‘(more marketable) paintings’ largely get their important art-world status from the radical (more avant-garde, less commercial, and therefore-must be-a-real-artist) conceptual works (85).  She goes further, pointing out that the status these works have are possibly assumed to, ‘automatically rub off on Lozano’s tool paintings and tool drawings, [as] the latter were shown – with no reference to the conceptual pieces made at the same time – at Documenta 12’ (86).  But the paintings, for me at least, held their own.

Citations

Alden, Todd. “1965 Lee Lozano”. Documenta Kassel 16/06-23/09 2007 #12. Catalogue. Taschen, 2007: 66

Graw, Isabelle. High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009.