Kunst-Forschung-Geschlecht: Helena Vilalta Event

Erotics of Information - Lee Lozano and the Networked Body.

In the spring of 1969, Lee Lozano read out an explosive statement at the Art Workers Coalition Open Hearing in New York, announcing her decision to withdraw from the art world. For the remainder of the year, she became engaged in an investigation of her own subjectivity, structured around a series of self-directed instructions, which dictated the way she was to lead and document her life. Yet Lozano?s retreat is less an affirmation of the liberal subject?s autonomy as a chronicle of its untenability. Time and again, the artist?s impulse to sever all ties with her environment, either via sheer isolation or consumption of psychoactive drugs, is met by the opposite urge to build another, more equitable system of exchange with her peers, best registered in her Dialogue Piece (1969). In this lecture, I analyse the work?s conflation of cybernetic communication models and an erotically charged language of insubordination to suggest that we read it as a symptomatic representation of the anxieties surrounding the dissolution of the body?s boundaries at a time when it was becoming increasingly integrated in circuits of information.

Helena Vilalta is a PhD candidate at the Department of the History of Art at University College London and an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She is a former senior editor of Afterall journal and has published widely on contemporary art.