Helena Vilalta

Through a close study of works by Lee Lozano and Adrian Piper, my Ph.D. dissertation charts the emergence of what I call the “networked body” in conceptual art. I aim to demonstrate how these artists’ work elicited a new understanding of the body, which is distinct from the phenomenological body associated with Minimalism, or the physiological body staged in early performance art. In contrast, I suggest that Lozano and Piper were concerned with the interaction between embodied subjectivity and increasingly pervasive information patterns. Whereas most of their peers working in a conceptual idiom embraced logical and scientific formulations, these artists questioned the supposedly dematerialized nature of communication. Drawing on feminist media studies, I consider the strategies that they deploy to reflect on the gulf between information theory and their experience of the world as gendered and racialized bodies.

In the chapter on Lee Lozano, I analyze how she both drew upon and subverted the metaphor of the human as information system prevalent in Cold War America. While in her early drawings the body is, quite literally, plugged into the city’s physical infrastructures, I show how, in her conceptual work, the body is connected to informational currents. Focusing mainly on her Dialogue Piece (1969), I claim that in chronicling conversations with her network of friends, peers, and competitors, Lozano exposes the entanglement between the traffic in information and desire at the dawn of the knowledge economy.

During the fellowship at SAAM, I will complete a chapter on Adrian Piper. My research focuses on the relationship between embodiment and abstraction in Piper’s work of the 1970s, paying particular attention to the growing importance of music and dance in her practice. Though inspired, in part, by Lozano’s examination of intersubjective exchanges, for most of the 1970s Piper took her investigation beyond the narrow confines of the art world. Charting the evolution of her practice throughout the 1970s, I ask how her engagement with funk brings to the fore questions of class, gender, sexuality and race.