Turning a Beady Eye on the Work of Liza Lou

The artist Liza Lou 

Photo by Mick Haggerty 

ropac.net

 

'Somehow, I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, 

the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

If asked, I could probably name at least three culturally significant events that happened in NYC in 1969: Woodstock; the Stonewall Riots; and the birth of American visual artist Liza Lou. I believe there was also a huge ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts, but, like Picasso, I'm indifferent (if not hostile) to moon landings [2]. 

 

Best known for the use of glass beads in her sculptures and paintings, Liza Lou has a new solo show opening next month at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London [3] and I'm very much looking forward to going along and learning more about her work. 

 

For anyone who can transform a domestic setting such as a kitchen or backyard into a magical space [4] deserves respect and I'm interested in how her practice is grounded in labour and community, emphasising the material many-handed process of production rather than simply the conceptual genius of the artist.

 

But I'm also interested in how her more recent work - born of the solitude of the Mojave desert in southern California, rather than a studio in South Africa employing a large highly-skilled team of Zulu bead workers - is rather more personal in its expression. 

 

Or, as it says in the press release for the forthcoming exhibition, how Lou has "rediscovered her own individual mark, along with a focus upon colour as both subject and object" [5]. 

 

But while the material focus of her practice "has expanded to incorporate drawing and painting", she has, I'm pleased to see, remained "committed to the bead as the generative cell of her art" [6]. Because just as you take away his soul when you remove the hunchback's hump [7], Lou would strip her own art of its essential element were she to abandon the beads; "her signature unit of art making for more than three decades" [8].

 

 

II.

 

Etymologically, the modern word bead derives from an Old English term (of Germanic origin) for prayer: gebed (meaning to ask or entreat) - and one wonders what it is Lou is asking of herself and of us as viewers [9] of her new works combining (presumably mass-produced) glass beads and oil paint on canvas.

 

I don't have an answer to this question, but I like to think that we are being invited as viewers not simply to take something away, but give something back; to enter into an exchange with the artist of some kind (beads are thought to be one of the earliest forms of trade between peoples and bead trading may even have helped shape the development of human language [10]). 

 

I also like to think that this exchange is symbolic in nature rather than commercial; i.e. a non-productive and reversible form of exchange based on gift-giving, ambivalence, and reciprocity rather than economic value; a ritualised interaction that strengthens social bonds and directly challenges the capitalist system of consumption and commodification.  

 

Art should never be a one-way thing or a finalised transaction; as much as a work should challenge us, we should challenge and interrogate it. Great art criticism is not a form of appreciation, but of defiance and of daring the artist to go further in a game not so much of truth and beauty, but of life and death.  

 

Perhaps that's why Lou says that every brushstroke requires full fetishistic seriousness and every mark made upon a canvas becomes a holy shit experience. I don't know if this requires one to be heroic, or just a little bit reckless and foolish. Maybe a combination of all these things - not that there's anything careless or crazy in the pictures: 

 

"Lou uses her chosen material to denaturalise the spontaneity of the brushstroke, juxtaposing each painted drip and spatter with a process that demands painstaking care and precision. By translating fluid pigment into cell-like particles of colour, she forges a new experience of painting grounded in what she describes as the push and pull between 'absolute control and total abandon'." [11] 

 

 

III. 

 

Unfortunately, we now come to the problematic aspect of Lou's FAQ exhibition: 

 

"'These works are about amplification, about making things more ideal [...] in this body of work I'm using my material as a way to make paint more paint than paint.'" [12]

 

What Lou describes as ideal amplification is exactly the process Baudrillard discusses in his concept of hyperreality; a process wherein something is engineered to be more X than X, so that the real object or event can eventually be replaced by its ideal. 

 

What on earth does Lou hope to achieve by making paint more paint than paint - unless it is to make it more colourful, more vibrant, more perfect than the messy, unpredictable, slow-drying original paint which is just particles of pigment suspended in linseed oil. Such hyperreal paint would be a kind of lifeless version of real paint; cleaner, safer, even if more saturated with colour and productive of hi-res images perfectly suited to their digital reproduction and transmission on screens.  

 

Surely that's not what Lou wants; to turn glass beads into pixels (or hyperreal Ben Day dots)? I'm going to be disappointed if it is, but I suppose I'll find out next month ...

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, writing in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 10 August 1903, in Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (Northpoint Press, 2002); lines that Liza Lou likes to quote. 

  

[2] I'm quoting Picasso who, when asked by The New York Times to comment on the moon landing replied: "It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care." His remark was published on 21 July, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong simultaneously took his one small step and one giant leap.

      Some readers might be shocked by his lack of interest in technological achievement - and some interpret it as a sign of weariness and old age (Picasso was 87 at the time) - but I think it's more an affirmation of his privileging art over and above science; his way of staying true to the earth and the body, rather than thrilling to the thought of outer space and rocket ships.    

 

[3] Liza Lou, FAQ (10 April - 23 May 2026), at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, Mayfair, London, W1. Click here for details. This exhibition marks the artist's sixth solo show with the gallery.  

 

[4] Lou first came to the attention of the art world with the 168-square-foot installation entitled Kitchen (1991-1996); a to-scale and fully equipped replica of a kitchen covered in millions of beads. 

      Rightly or wrongly, it has been given a fixed feminist interpretation; Kitchen is a powerful statement on the often neglected value of women's labour ... etc. It is also said to challenge boundaries (and hierarchies) of what does and does not constitute serious art. The work now belongs in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC). 

      Kitchen was followed by Backyard (1996-1999), a 528-square-foot installation of a garden featuring 250,000 blades of grass, which, upon closer inspection, are revealed to be tiny wires strung with beads.  As the threading process would have taken Lou 40 years to complete singlehandedly, she chose to invite public volunteers to assist her. Backyard is in the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (Paris). 

 

[5] Press release by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press at Thaddaeus Ropac, London), p. 4. The press release can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking here.  

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] See Nietzsche, 'On Redemption', Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[8] Nina Sandhaus, press release, as linked to above.  

 

[9] Nina Sandhaus addresses this question, telling us that FAQ proposes "a series of fundamental questions about the nature of art that Lou has returned to across decades: When is a painting not a painting? What constitutes a paint body? Can a brushstroke be more than a brushstroke - and colour more colour than colour?" Again, see her press release linked to above. 

[10] Interestingly, with reference to this last point, the works in FAQ are titled after figures of speech, thus highlighting, as Sandhaus says, "the analogy Lou draws between visual art and language". 

 

[11] Nina Sandhaus, press release. 

[12] Liza Lou, quoted in the press release for FAQ. 

Dark Spring: In Memory of Unica Zürn and a Brief Note on a New Exhibition Reimagining Her Legacy

Photo of Unica Zürn by Man Ray (1956) and a flyer for the 

Dark Spring - syzygy exhibition ft. Vicky Wright's V-Effekt (2024) 

 

"There can never have been a spring more beautifully dark than this ..."

 

 

I. 

 

Unica Zürn, for those who might not recognise the name, was a German author and artist, probably most famous for her anagrammatic poetry, automatic drawings, and the notorious nude photos produced in collaboration with her Surrealist lover, Hans Bellmer, in 1958, in which she was bound so tightly with string that it cut into her flesh.

 

Born in the summer of 1916, in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Zürn adored her (mostly absent) father; had a stormy relationship with her (uncaring) mother; and was sexually abused by her older brother. 

 

After leaving school, she began working at the film agency which produced propaganda material for the Nazi Party, although Zürn herself was not a party member (and, besides, a girl has to make a living somehow).

 

She married a much older - and also much wealthier - man during the War and bore him two children. Unfortunately, following a divorce in 1949, Zürn lost custody of both bairns, lacking as she did the means to support them (or indeed herself).    

 

Deciding that she was more suited to a bohemian life rather than one of domestic drudgery and child-rearing, Zürn began to hang around the caberet circuit and frequent the bars and clubs popular with artists, whilst earning what she could by writing short stories for newspapers and dramas for the radio.

 

Zürn also became romantically involved with the painter and dancer Alexander Camaro, although it was her meeting with Hans Bellmer in 1953 that was to prove pivotal; the two of them fleeing Germany and relocating to Paris, where she became his mistress, model, and muse. 

 

Whilst in Paris, Zürn also began experimenting with her own artwork; if Bellmer secretly wished to slice up bodies, she was more interested in how to fragment language and produce a style of writing she termed Hexentexte (1954). 

 

Before long, she and Hans were very much part of the Surrealist in-crowd, mixing with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray ... and all the other usual suspects. But the good times were not to last and in 1960 Zürn experienced a psychotic episode - which may or may not have been triggered by her experiments with mescaline. 

 

Following this, dissociative states, severe depression, and suicidal thoughts became the norm and she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic (and not in the positive sense that Deleuze and Guatarri would later thrill to). If, on the one hand, she continued to produce new work, on the other, she destroyed many of her earlier drawings and writings.  

 

Long story short: in October 1970, 54-year-old Zürn committed suicide by leaping from the window of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer, while on a five-day leave from a psychiatric hospital. She was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and, at his request, Bellmer was buried next to her upon his death in 1975.

 

One of Zürn's final written works was the semi-autobiographical Dunkler Frühling (1967) [1], which tells the story of an obsessive young woman as she has her first sexual encounters and experiences the onset of mental illness. 

 

Somewhat disconcertingly, Zürn's death seems to be foreshadowed in the text as the protagonist of Dark Spring also tops herself by jumping out of a window, although, as it rather poignantly says in the book: She was dead even before her feet left the windowsill.

 

This book has since acquired cult status, particularly amongst feminists, female artists, and those who find her life (and death) fascinating (even romantic). Thus it is, for example, one can wander around Hoxton on a sunny afternoon and come across a contemporary gallery space on Vestry Street running an exhibition entitled Dark Spring - syzygy [2] ...    

II.

There were only eleven paintings on show - two from each of the five artists featured in the exhibition, with an extra one for luck by Sadie Murdoch thrown into the mix - but I struggled to see how some of the pictures repurposed and re-routed the principles of Zürn's work, as promised in the exhibition press release (though I'm perfectly willing to concede this might be a failure on my part). 

 

I liked Murdoch's Pass-Way Into Where To (2022) - an ink-jet printed digital montage, operating, it is claimed, in "the field of power and absence, via the partial, the incomplete, the crop and the edit" (see Figure 1 below).

 

And I also really liked a canvas by Petra Williams entitled Floating Man (2024); not so much for the questions it posed re identity, isolation, relationship to others, the need to create one's own space, etc., but because the colours were so lovely (see Figure 2 below).

 

But perhaps my favorite work was a pair of pictures by Vicky Wright in her V-Effekt series (2024). For these at least gave us amorphous figures with distorted bodies and a layering of faces that one might expect and hope for in an exhibition inspired by Unica Zürn.

 

The writer of the exhibition press release describes them as anti-portraits and speaks of how their woozy painterliness troubles subjectivity, thereby obliging the viewer to reconsider the idea of the human self in relation to non-human elements, both demonic and animal (see Figure 3 below).        

 

Fig. 1 Sadie Murdoch: Pass-Way Into Where To (2022)

Fig. 2 Petra Williams: Floating Man (2024)

Fig. 3 Vicky Wright: V-Effekt II (2024)

Notes

 

[1] This short novel by Unica Zürn has been translated into English by Caroline Rupprecht and was published by Exact Change in 2000. 

 

[2] The exhibition at Cross Lane Projects (1st floor, 6-8 Vestry Street, London N1), runs until 19 April, 2025, and features work by Vicky Wright, Josephine Wood, Petra K. Williams, Sadie Murdoch, and Tracey Owusu. For full details and to download the press release from which I quote in this post, please click here.   

Why I Love Aleksandra Waliszewska

Aleksandra Waliszewska

waliszewska.blogspot.com
@aleksandrawaliszewska

 

 

I would like to express my affection and admiration for Polish artist Aleksandra Waliszewska ... 

 

I like the fact that she's a bit Old School in her influences and points of reference: early Renaissance painters and Slavic folklore. And I love the fact that her queer gothic vision is often more amusing than terrifying. 

 

For the fact is, whilst the nightmarish symbolism and perverse sexual violence of her work might be dark and often gruesome, the mood seems strangely lighthearted; even the monsters, devils, and demons who populate her pictorial universe alongside fabulous beasts, creepy children, and often mad-looking women make smile.

 

I don't quite know why that is, but suspect it has something to do with her technique, which is detailed and precise, but retains a certain childlike innocence and nonchalance: I think she cares a great deal about her work, but not about what people might think of it (or her); she paints what makes her happy, even if what makes her happy happens to be what others describe as macabre or obscene (or even evil).

 

Below is a (typically) untitled work from 2018, but I like to think it's a self-portrait with her green-eyed cat, Mitusia (who so often acted as her feline muse).  

 

 

 

Notes

 

(i) Readers who are lucky enough may still be able to find a limited edition two volumed collection of work by Aleksandra Waliszewska entitled PROBLEM / SOLUTION (Timeless, 2019), with a foreword by David Tibet and an afterword by Nick Cave. 

      A short promotional video (of sorts) with the same title was made by the artist in collaboration with Jacek Lagowski, featuring Kaja Werbanowska: click here.

 

(ii) Alternatively, those interested in knowing more about Waliszewska and her work might like to purchase a new book published by the University of Chicago Press (2023); The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism, ed. Alison M. Gingeras and Natalia Sielewicz.

 

(iii) Waliszewska's imagery has inspired many other artists working in many different fields, including musicians. Here are two short pieces readers may enjoy: the first by Andrea González (2019): click here and the second by Jeff Pagano and Ben Zervigon (animation by Wiktor Striborg): click here.