Hard Work: Lee Lozano's Dropouts

With her 1970 Dropout Piece, Lee Lozano marked the end of a ten-year career in New York as a painter and conceptual artist. Lozano's “dropout” had its roots in 1969's General Strike Piece, which recorded her withdrawal from the New York art world over the course of that summer. In August 1971, Lozano embarked on a further strike action to supplement Dropout Piece, a “boycott of women.” This article argues that, from the outset, Lozano was committed to an ongoing formal, psychological, and perversely political investigation into the changing conditions of work as a material and intellectual practice to be engaged, figured, and refused.