Vilalta Conesa, Helena; (2023) Embodying Information: Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that the friction between conceptual art and feminism was a generative site of artistic intervention in American art of the 1970s. I do this by examining the work of three New York-based artists who had a conflicted relation to both movements: Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell. I situate these artists’ practices at a historical turning point, when the anti-war and liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s rendered conceptual art’s fascination with abstract structures of communication increasingly suspect. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, I show how these artists pushed against the ideology of dematerialisation that underpinned the information paradigm, and explored the sexual and racial politics that the erasure of the body disavowed. I contend that their attempts to embody information led them to develop socially situated practices, which often addressed their own positionality in the art world of the time. Rather than simply affirming the particularity of their own gendered and/or racialised bodies, however, I suggest that they explored the interplay between the schematic and the particular, abstraction and materiality, to challenge the conditions of legibility of their work. In so doing, they developed critical approaches to the institution of art that bound the interrogation of art’s conditions of production to an examination of the social structures of identity that curtailed their agency as artists. Looking at their practices through the lens of contemporary theories of feminist refusal, I consider the different strategies that they deployed to defy institutional structures, as well as to create new contexts for their work.

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