ART-TRIBUTE:Weaving and other Practices… Liza Lou
We continue our tribute with Liza Lou (1969- ). Over 30 years of working primarily with glass beads, Lou has pushed the boundaries of her chosen medium, exposing its potential as not only a material, but as a conceptual object. Over the past several years, while living and working in South Africa, Liza Lou has developed a body of work based upon further ideas of confinement and protection.
By Efi Michalarou
Liza Lou was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles. Lou attended San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, but dropped out when it became evident her professors did not take her work with beads seriously. She first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture “Kitchen” was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of labor, this groundbreaking work subverted prevalent standards of art by utilizing glass beads as a fine art material. As a monumental work of 20th Century feminist art, the work’s slow, hand-made process is a tribute to women whose work has historically gone unrecognized. The project blurs the boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou’s long-standing exploration of materiality, beauty, and the valorization of labor. Centering her practice on a craft métier has led Lou to work in collaboration with artisans in a variety of socially engaged settings, including recent projects in Brazil and India, as well as Durban, South Africa, where she founded a collective in 2005 that she continues to work with today. Other works continue to explore psychological spaces and structures of confinement. “Trailer” (1999-2001) is a twelve-metre-long mobile home (caravan) whose contents have been transformed into a film-noir tableau. Every inch of the interior is layered with black, white and silver beads. Next to a beaded sofa, on a coffee table strewn with men’s magazines, lies a bottle of Jack Daniels. In a beaded typewriter there is what might be a beaded suicide note, and, visible in the glow of the TV, a shape that could be the body of a man. These elements combine to generate an unsettling atmosphere of male violence and menace. Since 2007, Lou has been creating a series called “Reliefs”. Each one of these unique panels, created with glass beads standing on their tips, bring to mind patterned prayer rugs from the Caucasus region, while at the same time they are reminiscent of topographical maps, organisms or crumbling cities. “Find, Fix, Finish” (2007-08) is a large-scale panel covered in 200 kg of soot-black beads of various sizes, each one meticulously balancing on its tip to create ridges and valleys arranged in a precise geometric pattern. Over the past several years, while living and working in South Africa, Liza Lou has developed a body of work based upon further ideas of confinement and protection. “Security Fence” (2005) is a full-scale, silver beaded enclosure of chain-link and razor wire that can neither be entered nor exited. “Barricade” (2007-08) is a gate-like structure that Lou has encased in 24-karat-gold beads, but provides neither protection nor safety. “Continuous Mile” is a coiled and stacked rope measuring a mile in length, woven entirely out of glossy black, or bone-white beads, made with a team of Zulu bead workers in the townships of KwaZulu Natal. Working with this team, Lou constructed the monumental piece “The Waves” (2016), comprised of 1,000 white, clothlike beaded sheets, a work of art inseparable from its process and its makers. This work lead to years of investigating the potential of a minimalist approach, and ultimately a return to basic visual elements: color, light, line, volume, and texture recasting beads as paint, mixed and bound to a canvas. Most recently, Lou has further pushed her process and medium.
