[letter dated 7 April 1998]

[to:]

Barry Rosen & Jaap van Liere
362 West Broadway
New York , NY 10013

Dear Barry and Jaap–

I hardly know where to begin in applauding the depth and breadth of your achievement in resurrecting my cousin’s life and work from historical footnotedom and recontextualizing her as a dynamic living presence.  The Wadsworth Atheneum’s exhibit—and the live Alvin Lucier/Joan La Barbara sonic tribute–offered a kind of experiential vantage from which to reflect upon the power and fullnesss of Lee’s vision.  In such intimate spatial and visual proximity to the Wave paintings and through the synesthesic prism of Lucier’s composition, it was possible to witness first-hand the passions Lee inspires in her audiences—and by inference, the heroic dimension of Lee’s long, lonely and not always lovely quest.  

The March 29 event also heightened my recognition of how the current context—that also includes the Mitchell Algus and Margerete Roeder exhibits and the critical reaffirmation of Lee’s work in the press–is inseparable from  your unyielding belief in Lee throughout the years and your crisis management on her behalf in weird and difficult times.

Thus my thanks—and those of [redacted], who has also discovered Lee’s work through your curatorial efforts—for bringing such clarity and humanity to one of post-modernism’s more enigmatic outposts.  

Sincerely….

 

 

If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.  
William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Exactly a year to the day preceding her death, the artist articulates her legacy in no uncertain terms:

Pen on Paper

11 x 8 1/2

[graph paper]

E.

QUESTIONAIRE, WITH JOKES CONCERNING PURCHASES & PURCHASERS OF MY ART

NUMBER OF PURCHASES

INFO ABOUT PURCHASERS INDICATE AGE GROUPS, PURCHASERS WHO WERE INDIVIDUALS, NUMBER OF:

HETERO COUPLES

GROUPS

U.S.

EUROPEAN

ASIANS, OR OTHER

COLLEGE-EDUCATED, PERCENTAGE oF

CLASS OF PURCHASERS: BETTER

MIDDLE

WORKING

RELIGIONS OF PURCHASERS, IN PERCENTAGES

OCCUPATIONS OF PURCHASERS, NUMBER OF

BUSINESS MEN
PROFESSIONAL MEN

ACADEMIC MEN

POLITICIANS

MEN WHO WERE ARTISTS, OR IN THE ARTS

SCIENTISTS
PUBLISHERS

RICH

GENDER OF PURCHASERS, PERCENTAGE OF MALE HOMOSEXUALS

PURPOSE OF PURCHASES, NUMBER OF, FOR

HOME
MUSEUM
OFFICE
SCHOOL
SPECULATION
RESALE,

GALLERY COLLECTIONS

OTHER RELEVANT INFO

FOR BARRY AND YAPP [sic], NY

INVENTED IN AUG., SEPT., OCT

WRITTEN AND SENT NOV. 2, 1998

The rest is history.   Case history.

December 1992

from letter to:

James Hartnett, Jr., Esq.
Dallas, Texas

“….TO CURE RESULTING ‘CYST’ FROM THE VICIOUS TWEAK HE GAVE MY LEFT BREAST INVOLVED MEDICAL TREATMENT THAT WILL BE LENGTHY, COSTLY AND UN-FUN. THAT IS, IT WILL FORCE ME INTO A SOCIOLOGY THAT ENDANGERS MY MENTAL STABILITY.”… [signed] E….”

12 October 1999

For: Robert Wilonsky
The Dallas Observer

Re;  Lee Lozano
Born: Newark, NJ 1930
Died:  Dallas, TX  1999

Robert–
Here’s my original 1996 overture to The Observer plus update…..

[Airborne Express waybill 'Sender's Copy']

10 May 1996

From:  Mark Kramer  448 West 37th Street  NYC 10018

To: Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer 2130 Commerce St. Dallas TX 75201

Descripton: Framed Print [Lozano/Bianchini Gallery poster] + text

Airbill Number 476915187
Airborne Customer [Dallas Observer] account number:  7655433

Shipment Valuation:  $1000

[fax transmission]

20 April 1996

Features Editor
The Dallas Observer
2130 Commerce Street
Dallas, TX 75201

Dear Editor:

“….occasional Observer contributor [redacted]…is familiar with my writings down through the years.  Please consider for publication an exclusive epic tale of New York/Texas cultural dislocation, as embodied by one of Dallas’ most mysterious residents: once-famed painter and conceptualist Lee Lozano, who is currently the subject of critical and historical reappraisal.

….now 65 and known locally only as ‘e’…[she] has resided enigmatically and sometimes dramatically in Dallas since 1982, when she arrived as the end product of a process succinctly described by critic Robert Hughes in the attached page from his book The Shock of The New.

Lozano…has spent much of the past 14 years wandering Dallas’ darker byways and skidzones, and is not an unfamiliar figure along the lower extremities of Greenville Avenue.  She is a walking secret history of the sometimes tragic late American avant-garde.  Recently, in the catalog to a major retrospective entitled “Reconsidering The Object: 1965-1975″ at The Los Angeles Temporary/Contemporary Museum of Art, critic Lucy Lippard proclaimed Lozano the most important female conceptualist of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, back in Dallas—despite equally uplifting mentions in Artforum and Art in America…’e’ is broke, alone, facing eviction from her apartment and quite possibly doomed to a squalid death in the streets.  The fact that she is also quite mad prevents her from seeking help through any existing social-service resources.

In exploring the chronicle of her madness,–which goes right to the origins of New York’s modern-art scene–I have spoken at length with art-world figures including critic Lippard, artist/writer/filmmaker Dan Graham (a former Lozano associate [sic]] who includes her in his book Rock My Religion) and Lozano’s gallerist Barry Rosen.  More locally, longtime Dallas art dealer [redacted] has been in contact with both Lozano and her New York rep.

…I happened to be living in Dallas in the winter of 1982 when she arrived materialized here.  Until that moment, I had never met nor spoken to my semi-legendary bohemian relation Lee–so deeply had she been buried in New York City’s roiling art, sex and drug subcultures.   Clearly, by 1982, the roil was subsiding.  For one thing, Lozano’s benefactor—and Max’s Kansas City founder—Mickey Ruskin had just died…. bringing to an end one of the longest-running free lunches in the history of urban artistic excess.   And if this—along with AIDS, the commercialization of SoHo and police padlocking of Manhattan’s once-abundant retail-marijuana shoppes [sic] —wasn’t enough to drive her into the cold, objectifying Texas daylight…there was one other thing:  Lee Lozano had completely spurned all contact with the female gender.  This has proven a harder road each day to travel through an increasingly feminized civilization, not to mention art scene.

In the ten years since I returned to New York, I have been gathering textual, visual and anecdotal artifacts in the hope of decoding the mystery of Lee Lozano. And the more that I learn, the more it appears that she is the missing link…to the wider societal mysteries and maladies that beguile most of us every day:  madness, homelessness, what America does to its artists and what America’s artists do to themselves.

I hope you find this story as compelling as I do.

“I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas”-

Lee Lozano

3 February 1968

19 October 1998

For: PATRICIA SHARPE
TEXAS MONTHLY

Dear Ms. Sharpe:
….for your consideration the following tale of latter-day Texas:

In a Grand Prairie pauper’s grave reposes one of post-modern painting’s most enigmatic practitioners, Lee Lozano—who died October 2, 1999 of stage-three cervical cancer in an Oak Cliff charity hospice.

Also nearly buried at Dallas County expense on October 5 was a tale that has haunted art historians since Lozano—born Lenora [sic] Knaster, in Newark, New Jersey, 1939—last put brush to canvas three [sic] decades ago.

“Perhaps the most touching radical gesture of the time was made by a New York artist named Lee Lozano,” recalled Robert Hughes in The Shock of The New [1980], “who announced the enaction of a ‘piece’ in which she would avoid being present at official or public ‘uptown’ functions or gatherings related to the ‘art world’ in order to pursue investigation of total personal and public revolution [Hughes’ italics]. Whatever became of this Timon, the record does not show.”

By 1982, having exhausted every particle of largesse that New York’s art world and downtown subculture could offer an artist who had produced exactly nothing in more than 12 years [sic], Lozano—“homeless” before the word had yet achieved wide currency—tapped an uptown [Manhattan] cousin [Jeremy Knaster] for one last “loan”, and embarked upon the journey she swore she’d never make: to visit her aged parents in Dallas.

In January, 1982, the wizened, pot-smoking, bespectacled Joey Ramone lookalike materialized on the doorstep of Sidney and Rosemond “Rookie” Knaster. The septuagenarians [sic] had moved to Dallas in 1960 near Mockingbird Lane—and it was in this one-bedroom domicile, tranquil for so many years, that they would be consumed by the raging Oedipal drama of their 52-year-old offspring’s return.

Lozano, who came to be locally known as “e”—as in “e=mc2”—would spend much of 1982 through 1998 meandering the streets of Dallas day and night. She was a familiar, if phantom-like, figure along the lower extremities of Greenville Avenue and Fair Park. She was a frequent and unwelcome apparition at East Dallas art gatherings where free alcoholic beverages were consumed. She had skid-row-level sexual liaisons involving marijuana and screwtop wine, and at least once had been violently assaulted in the street-person equivalent of a mugging.

In 1987, the poltergeistly Lozano was handcuffed [by the Dallas PD] at the Shenandoah apartments and briefly hospitalized after a violent episode of what is now known as “elder abuse”. The prodigal daughter would continue to occupy the premises long after Sid and Rookie Knaster had been wheeled out a final time.

Nearby her parental pied-a-terre, there was an apartment-complex stoner salon [percussionist David Hughlett's] where “e” could mooch joints and—by selling off the Knasters’ disintegrating household item-by-item—occasionally scrape together enough for a nickel or dime bag.

For five years, the aggravated intergenerational nightmare raged between Lee Lozano and her parents.

Her father and mother died, having neglected to leave a will, in 1987 and 1990 respectively, and another six years passed before their estate was exhausted—whereupon the aging orphan faced certain eviction and possible full-time life on the streets.

According to a Dallas civil-court judgement—filed 5-10-96 against one “E. Knaster”—Lozano was evicted from the Shenandoah Apartments.

Interviewed before her death, Lozano described how her possessions—including grad-student paintings [the Tool oils and pastels, among others] she’d given her parents in the Fifties [sic], and which by the Nineties had literally soared in art-market value—were removed to the street by Dallas city officials. And [Lozano described] how, had a big-hearted clergyman not at that moment been driving by in his pick-up truck, much of the [remaining] Knaster estate might have ended up in a dumpster, instead of finding safe storage in a church basement.

Soon thereafter, Lozano—rescued from the cusp of oblivion by Dallas social-service providers, and a trickle of dollars from a New York art collector [Barry Rosen] —relocated to apartment #999 at 6019 [redacted], her penultimate address en route, as “E. Knaster”, to hospice care and then Southland Memorial Cemetery in Grand Prairie.

In 1998, the prestigious Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford mounted perhaps the most ambitious Lozano retrospective ever…

…According to The Hartford Courant, dated 1-25-98, “Lozano, now 67, hasn’t painted since 1970, lives in her apartment in Dallas and for many years has avoided all social contact with women. Her shunning of women originated as the kernel idea for a conceptual art project, but grew into a permanent part of her unorthodox lifestyle….”

She had eschewed members of the female gender with an aversive intensity so unforgettable that grocery and convenience store personnel up and down Dallas’ Greenville Avenue corridor knew to have a male working the register when the notorious “e” checked out.

Perhaps this innate gynophobia was why Lee Lozano had never once in her life, according to one prominent collector of her work [Jaap van Liere] undergone a Pap-smear exam.

And thus Lee Lozano was immolated on the altar of the very femaleness she shunned with such a mad passion….”

As the late George Carpozi, Jr. advises,
“When the facts are few and far between—use them sparingly”.

13 October 1998

Att: HELEN @ Dallas County Clerk’s Department

Re: E. KNASTER Estate

Helen:

As I mentioned, I am interested in locating any and all records relating to the estate and will of my first cousin, E. Knaster.

There is a possibility the estate may have been handled under the deceased’s professional name, Lee Lozano.

Could you kindly run both the names E. KNASTER and LEE or E. LOZANO through your database?

According to the Dallas Medical Examiner’s Office, the available facts relating to Ms. Knaster’s death are as follows: She died 10-2-99 at Dallas Health and Rehabilitation Center in Oak Cliff; she was buried by Dallas County on 10-5-99 at Southland Memorial cemetery in Grand Prairie.

E. Knaster (born Lenore Knaster in Newark, NJ 1930) is the daugher of the late Sidney and Rosemond Knaster (both died 1987 [sic]), whose last address was the Shenandoah Apartments on Glencoe in Dallas. E. Knaster is named as a debtor in a civil judgment filed by Shenandoah Apartments on 5-50-96 [sic ], at approximately which time she was evicted from the residence formerly occupied by her parents. E. Knaster’s last address, prior to hospice care at Dallas Health and Rehabilitation Center, was 6019 [redacted] #999 Dallas 75206.

(Another cousin of the deceased, Jeremy Knaster of New York City, would be happy [sic] to corroborate the above claims I have made. His phone number is…[redacted]. My claim can also be verified by Art Institute of Chicago curator James Rondeau, who in a specialist in the work of the late Ms. Knaster/Lozano, and can be reached at 312-443-3476.)

I am especially interested in obtaining any affadivits [sic] or filings of heirage [sic] or other publicly available papers pertaining to my cousin’s estate

Would you and your associates kindly let me know what steps I need to take in order to access these records, as well as the specific forms I will need to file an objection to the will as it is currently being handled?

Many thanks, Helen, for your informative and friendly phone assistance,

Sincerely,

[redacted]

[from undated "APPLICATION FOR TEMPORARY ADMINISTRATION AND FOR ADMINISTRATION WITH WILL ANNEXED" c. winter, 1989]

“…..Decedent [Sidney Knaster, d. 10-27-88] is survived by a daughter, Lenore {Lee} Knaster, age 57 years, and who has been before the Mental Illness [sic] system and has recently been a patient in the 8 North Unit of Parkland Hospital,…”

All evidence is circumstantial. All circumstance is evidential.

Michel de Montaigne: “He who would take up the trade of lying should have a long memory.”

—-Original Message—–
From: Mark Kramer [mailto:krash@inx.net]
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 11:14 AM
To: editors@artforum.com; rwilonsky@dallasoberver.com;knaster@att.net;leni@lightprojectsltd.com; mguinzburg@aol.com; recoil44@earthlink.net; kingoutlaw@noos.fr; nickzedd2000@aol.com; iain@penpusher.com; stan1nyc@aol.com; henican@newsday.com; barbara_london@yahoo.com; lisakat@rcn.com; ccotts@villagevoice.com

Subject: Re: artforum.com - registration

My objective in registering [for Artforum.com site] had been to access last month’s Lee Lozano feature which is apparently not yet available online. As it happens, Lee was my first cousin and close friend as well as my all-too-frequent houseguest in Dallas in the years 1982-1986 [when I moved to NYC but remained in touch with her nearly to the time of her death from cervical cancer in 1999]. Had your correspondents done their homework–which is to say, read Robert Wilonsky’s exhaustive, not to say exhausting, posthumous 1999 Dallas Observer report, “The Dropout Piece”–they would know, at the very least, that Lee never dated Joey Ramone, but rather, in her last decade, she resembled Joey Ramone in a her attire, hairstyle,choice of eyewear, and lanky, sinuous bearing. In point of fact–and which was curiously omitted from Wilonsky’s article [which in turn evolved from a pre-mortem Lee Lozano feature I had pitched as a freelancer to the Observer in 1996--when she was not yet the subject of art-critical revival and was in imminent danger of being turned out onto the street by her landlord ]….was that the Downtown figure with whom Lee was most intimately identified throughout the late Seventies and earliest Eighties was filmmaker Scott B. Thus Artforum’s Joey Ramone factoid was pure urban myth arising from writerly imprecision or worse. More significantly, one of the Lee Lozano paintings reproduced in Artforum’s report was among those plundered from the estate of Lee’s parents by New York City collectors Jaap van Lier and Barry Rosen. Van Lier and Rosen, who had been storing Lee’s work–most of which she herself had [un]ceremoniously discarded onto a Grand Street curb in the early Seventies, when her as-yet-diagnosed madness had clearly begun to take hold–were again brought into the picture in 1996 when I called Jaap, on Lee’s behalf, because her Dallas landlord was suing to evict her. This was an eventuality I had hoped to somehow forestall by attempting to get her story into the Dallas Observer . The piece was actually assigned to me by a soon-to-be-fired editor-in-chief, and the assignment was bounced to in-house writer Robert Wilonsky–who shortly thereafter was transferred to the Observer’s New Times affiliate in L.A., leaving the Lee Lozano piece to wither on the vine. It was then that I called van Lier and Rosen for their help in preventing Lee’s eviction. Although the duo sent Lee, who was living on SSI, enough cash to delay the eviction for approximately 18 months–at which time deputies removed Lee and her possessions onto the street–these acts of collectorly largesse were done in apparent exchange for a number of paintings which belonged to her deceased parents’ estate, to which Lee was emphatically not heiress. On the occasions of both her parents’ deaths–each without having written a will–Lee had been resident in a Dallas psychiatric institution and effectively a ward of the state. Moreover, before the parents had died, as Robert Wilonsky’s article notes, Lee’s father had filed for a protection order against Lee because she had given him cause to fear for his and her mother’s lives. It was upon Lee’s conversion to out-patient status that van Lier and Rosen contrived to “purchase” from Lee, for what amounted to chump change–and without consulting the custodian of her parents’ estate–the six or seven paintings that had hung in the dead octogenarians’ apartment. These paintings, a series of heavily impastoed oils from Lee’s pre-conceptual period, were spirited back East and into the van Lier/Rosen collection. Soon thereafter, Jaap van Lier notified me by phone that Lee had died in a charity hospice and been buried by Dallas county in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Once again I called Robert Wilonsky–who might otherwise never have known of her death since Lee was hospitalized and buried under the name Knaster–and in the necromorphic heat of the moment, offered up to Wilonsky all the reportorial, anecdotal, and other resources I had collected regarding my cousin over a period of 17 years, including sources such as Lee’s husband from the Fifties and the curator of her 1998 retrospective at the Wadsworth Atheneum as well as the critical bibliography that would give Wilonsky’s article its scholarly dimension. Not surprisingly, in addition to not reimbursing me the $100 he assured me I would receive for my long-distance and database expenses, Wilonsky, in a flurry of misquotes, disquotes and mischaracterizations, would greatly obfuscate my role in his published narrative–but his most egregious lapse, much like Artforum, would be to further promulgate the myth of Lee’s “lost decade” in the Seventies. Numerous individuals to whom I had spoken and tried to refer Wilonsky –and who for his own mysterious reasons he never called–knew full well of Lee’s whereabouts throughout that era. These included: Dan Graham; the widow of Max Kansas City owner Mickey Ruskin; and Lee’s other first cousin, Jeremy Knaster,a motion picture electrician and actor who was perhaps Lee’s closest confidante in the Sixties and Seventies.

In sum, the record–including this missive, every word of which is fact-checkable– continues to show that Lee Lozano is as elliptical in death as she was in life, and that her conceptual masterwork “The Dropout Piece” continues to puzzle not only those of us who knew her, but those, including some Artforum readers, now discovering her for the first time.
Mark Kramer
Hell’s Kitchen

editors@artforum.com wrote:
Welcome to http://www.artforum.com
A lightly edited version of this letter that appeared in the Jan. 2002 issue of Artforum.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-82469486.html

To borrow James Ellroy’s phrase: “If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’.”