"In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her 'General Strike Piece'..."

"... which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers.... In August 1971... she undertook another, even more audacious project, 'Decide to Boycott Women,' stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary.... But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction.... 'Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.'... A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex.... She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own...."

I'm reading "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her?/ When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go" (NYT).

Back in the 1970s, one would often read about things like this. I'd thought the culture had lost interest in this sort of thing. I wonder what prompted the revival of interest — wanting to forefront a woman artist? But this woman made a lifelong project out of boycotting women. Are we supposed to believe she sacrificed something she wanted to be able to do?

Here's the comment NYT readers rate highest: "Refusing to speak to other woman is sexist and borderline sociopathic. It is most definitely not art, it's merely an eccentric and fairly selfish personality trait...." That's consistent with my observation that the culture has moved away from seeing weird acting out as art. It's a mental disorder... unless it has the honor of counting as an expression of "identity."