How long did that take?
It’s an obvious first question when looking at the work of artist Liza Lou. She has used the same material—glass beads—for more than three decades, painstakingly applying millions of tiny dazzlers one by one to create her painterly installations.
“I have a weird relationship to time,” Lou admits. “Everything that I make, you have to accept that it’s going to take a while. It’s part of the material. It’s baked into the practice.” It’s not so much that she is patient by nature, she tells me from her studio in Joshua Tree, but rather slow and methodical.
This month, New Yorkers have two new opportunities to marvel at the results of Lou’s careful toiling. On September 5, Lehmann Maupin gallery opens “Liza Lou: Painting,” an exhibition of new abstract works that crank up the bravado of Abstract Expressionism by using her signature beads as paint. These works are some of the most potent examples yet of Lou’s ongoing interest in the intersection of fine art and craft.
The next week, on September 13, the Brooklyn Museum unveils Lou’s installation Trailer (1998–2000), which will remain on long-term view in the museum’s lobby. Trailer is the masculine counterpoint to Lou’s best-known work, Kitchen (1991–96), her paean to the hidden labor of women in the Whitney’s collection. The inside of Trailer is similarly covered in tens of millions of glass beads, but where Kitchen is a colorful confection of domesticity, Trailer is a grayscale film noir. Hanging amid the rifle, whiskey bottle, and typewriter is an air of something gone horribly wrong.
In all her art, “the through lines have been playing with heroics,” Lou says. But these two September events—one a new body work, the other a resurrected old one that has not been on public view in over a decade—have a fundamental connection. Lou is peeling back the layers of a certain kind of maleness: the lone wolf, the madman, the genius left to his own devices.
The new painting works have been in her brain for a long time. Though she has applied her beads in a painterly way before—as in her clouds series from 2018—Lou says this is a breakthrough. “It’s the culmination of 35 years of working with this material.”
Earlier in her career, she’d tell people that she was treating her beads like paint and they didn’t really get it. “But to me, it was paint. It was a way to lay down color, and this was the most incredible color I’d ever seen, and it had more luminosity than anything you’re ever going to find in a can or a tube.”
For the new works in her “Painting” show, Lou applied a mix of her beads and oil paint onto canvas using a palette knife. The broad gestures are spare in some spaces, dense with heaps of beads and paint in others. In person (and these really are works to take in up close), the paintings achieve a remarkable optical feat, somehow both brushy and pointillistic. You could get lost for a long time in just one tiny square inch.
The first piece she made in this new series was Falling Action. With its streaks of crimson atop light pink oil stains, it burns like a sunset, and reminds me of Helen Frankenthaler. In the dizzying Septet, Lou leaves no blank space for the beads to breathe and instead piles them into mountains and canyons from corner to corner. It’s no surprise that the work is “very informed by nature,” referencing the blue skies and boulders of the Mojave Desert outside her studio.
Rising Action and Epitaph are two of the clearest nods to art history. Lou was thinking about the style of Pollock, that ur–Abstract Expressionist. “My material slows down a gesture. If you think about action painting, something happening very quickly. My work would be the very opposite of that: It’s this kind of crepuscular painting, a way to put down form.” It’s also very Liza Lou to take on one of the most “serious” and “male” art movements of the last century and imbue the style with her chosen material, often thought of as a frivolous, overtly feminine craft supply.
Lou made these paintings in happy solitude in her Joshua Tree studio, but she has often collaborated with others. After taking five years to finish Kitchen alone while in her early 20s, she worked with women, often from shelters, to construct the beaded blades of grass in Backyard (1996–99), the second of her Americana installation trilogy. She had a team helping with Trailer too. Then, in 2000, came her move to South Africa. For 15 years, Lou worked with local women in KwaZulu-Natal. “In terms of a benchmark for having a studio practice with a lot of people—I mean, it was the most beautiful experience of my life, hands-down,” Lou says. “The people, the experience, it was just so profound and so deep.”
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Trailer, which Lou began in her late 20s, started with a thought experiment in response to Kitchen. If, as with that piece, she were to tell a person’s story through their objects, what would replace the sink full of dishes, the pie in the oven, the broom propped against a wall? And what would happen if you drained all the color out of that work? She had spent a lot of time watching film noirs, and the idea of a crime scene out of a black-and-white film set started to take shape.
To view the piece, guests at the Brooklyn Museum will step up into the trailer—a 35-foot-long Spartan Royal Mansion from 1949—one at a time. “You as a viewer become a participant, because you’re in there breathing with it, living with it. And I find that to be really interesting. The viewer is implicated in some way,” Lou says.
“She sculpts a vision of this sinister side of the self-sufficiency of this manly man who was living in the trailer, who’s interested in guns, interested in porn, cooking his own food,” says Carmen Hermo, who organized Trailer as her final project at the Brooklyn Museum. (Her next curatorial post is at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, starting this fall.) There is evidence of violence. Twenty-some years after its creation, it remains a powerful commentary on masculinity.
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At the same time, there is an undeniable buoyancy given Lou’s material. There are kicked-off boots (even the laces are beaded), a crumpled pack of cigarettes, a sad half-eaten meal—but all glow in the light. Wood grains and carpet patterns, even in grayscale, take on whimsy.
In both Trailer and her new painting works, there is a nostalgia at play—or perhaps more accurately, a questioning of nostalgia. For decades Lou’s practice has explored themes of labor, justice, power, politics. She has made a wheat field (Gather (one million), 2008–10), a prison cell (Cell, 2004–06), and a Security Fence (2005)—all out of beads. What does it mean to spend years—years!—constructing such things one little glass orb at a time?
“I get all this credit for it being so labor-intensive, but I’m having more fun than anyone,” Lou, a 2002 MacArthur grant recipient, says. She grabs her phone and plays me a video of the sound of beads pouring into a bowl, delighted at the rapid-fire ping-ping-pings they make.
In all the years since she started using the material, she still isn’t sick of it. “It keeps opening outward and speaking to me in new ways,” she tells me. “I really mean that. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a mountain now.”