The artist Liza Lou
Photo by Mick Haggerty
'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.
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