Author Description

Lozano went to New York as a painter in the early 1960s. Her first major body of paintings was a rough-and-tumble mixture of ge nitals that morph together, mix ineluctably with, and transform into a variety of tools?screwdrivers, bolts, and hammers. The paint is thick, creamy, and se xy, and the overall images are arresting, as if the cartoon style of Philip Guston had somehow encountered contemporary cyborg fantasies of a complete merger of body and machine. The se xuality imaged in these paintings and drawings, all done in the early 1960s, is hardly the soft-core liberation offered by the then recently founded Playboy. It lends itself more to accounts of se xuality that stem from Freud?s theory of the polymorphous se xuality of children or Bataille?s 'Story of the Eye', which evokes a body that experiences a kind of perpetual slippage of meaning and signification?br easts become balls, and balls become eyes, and eyes are like vul vas, and so on. A polymorphously perverse account of se xuality lends itself to a feminist analysis, as it refuses to render the body and its se xuality hierarchical and implies instead a decentered experience of the body less dependent upon vision, voyeurism, spectacle, and objectification. Lozano?s evocation of this body is raucous, muscular, and simultaneously disturbing and deeply er otic (not that those two attributes are always different). 00Exhibition: KARMA, New York, United States (17.11.-17.12.2016).