Lot 21: LIZA LOU (B. 1969) Comet, 1992

LIZA LOU (B. 1969)
Comet, 1992

signed 'LIZA LOU' (on the reverse)
polyester, resin and glass beads

7 3/8 x 3 3/8 x 3 3/8in.
18.8 x 8.6 x 8.6cm

This work is unique.
FOOTNOTES
Provenance
Outside-In Gallery, Los Angeles.
Private Collection, California (acquired from the above in 1993).
By descent from the above to the present owner.


"I bring this tendency [to work in a methodical and slow way] to my work no matter what the métier...Scale is very important to me. The macrocosm and the microcosm."1

Liza Lou is perhaps best known for her breakthrough installation, Kitchen, 1991-1996, where she reimagined the American suburban kitchen as a glittering utopia of domesticity, replete with bright, shiny, new consumer products, appliances, and all the hopes and anxieties that come along with seeking perfection (or fighting entropy). Using colored bugle and seed beads as her medium, Lou painstakingly glued 30 million beads (vetted for uniform size and colors) to all surfaces of her 168-square foot tableau by hand with toothpicks and tweezers over a span of five years.

If Kitchen, 1991-1996 can be seen as a macrocosm, Comet, 1992, is a microcosm but of the same magnitude. The element of time is critical in Lou's work, as it is represented variously through narrative and the duration of production. In Kitchen, the narrative of domestic perfection presents itself through the rigidly ordered and 'crystalized' space; in the present work, the same narrative exists through the promise of cleanliness, or 'turning back the clock' on age and wear. In Kitchen, the artist's slow and singular process is belied by the gestalt of the tableau, whereas in Comet, the artist's handiwork can be traced clearly—bead by bead—in the single object.

Prior to 1996, Lou worked on her own without the assistance of studio help. Of her process, Lou explained, "It is agonizingly slow work. I became interested in finding the perfect circle, the perfect bead. Each tip needs to be perfectly smooth, no jagged edges."2 She rejects a characterization of her process as 'obsessive' which she sees as "clichéd, insensate, shallow, folksy, dumb psychobabble."3 "My work is not the result of a mental disorder," she adds, "It is serious, determined work. The closest thing I can relate it to in terms of process is sitting Zazen."4 In this way, Lou's early work evokes the earnest heroics of endurance artists such as Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, and Chris Burden whose durational works "test the limits of physical and psychic pain, personal isolation, and self-inflicted monotony."5

Comet draws upon a history of Pop art for its transformation of a commonplace object to subject as in Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (Soap Pads), 1964, as well as Feminist art for the subversion of a medium normally reserved for 'women's work' (i.e. decorative embellishment in the domestic sphere). Through Lou's careful craft and critique, the result is a "slowing down" of Pop art through the re-introduction of the hand to create "idealized visions of the ordinary world.'6


1. M. Reilly (ed), "Existence and Beading: The work of Liza Lou," in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, Thames & Hudson, 2015, p. 371.
2. Ibid., p. 368.
3. Ibid., p. 369.
4. Ibid.
5. E. Heartney, "Liza Lou: Transfigurations of the Commonplace," Liza Lou, Skira Rizzoli, 2011, p. 31.
6. Ibid., p. 28.