Liza Lou

Liza Lou, in my opinion is half crazy! She is headstrong and belligerent, yet she is brilliant and I'm a fan!  Bear with me on this blog... because of the magnitude of her work, one picture is just not enough...There is a lot to say about Liza Lou, $500,000 MacAurthur Foundation "genius" grant winner of 2002.

Lou was born in New York City 1969 but spent most of her early life in South California.  She attended the San Fransico Art Institute.  But she eventually dropped out of college due to chastisement from a professor she had nicknamed "Frogman."  

Lou works mainly with glass beads.  I find it interesting that she chose such a tedious medium, especially because she works with large, life-sized spaces.  Her style is unique and her works are, at first, whimsical and glistening with a sort of fairytale flare.  Her first major work was Kitchen, which took five years in the making before being finished in 1995.  She was 26 years old.  

Kitchen is 168 sq ft and is ornamented with an estimated 30 million glass beads; Every tile, dish, muffin, and bit of cereal, just glitters.  She applied each bead individually, by hand, using tweezers!  Real tiles and appliances were used as a foundation for her beads. Personally, my favorite portion of Kitchen is the sink.  I love how the water is portrayed.  I look at that facet spewing blue beads and can practically hear the water rushing out and the dishes sinking and clanking together as the sink fills. 

 The beads seem to immortalize or rather, memorialize this suburban kitchen.  Kitchen tells a story of a woman's toil.  Kitchen glorifies the perfect suburban woman, yet also shows how inhuman the perfect suburban woman really is.  In Lou's words, "I'm referencing women's experience in the piece. The requirement is to have a really fastidious clean house. And, in today's culture, to be a babe at the end of the day. You have to be cute … The task never ends."

During the five years of construction, Lou supported herself with a waitress job, selling prom dresses, and any odd jobs she could find.  As stricken as I am by this piece, I can't help but chuckle to myself that, for five years, she was a woman who toiled in the kitchen.  The message of Kitchen is clear, but ironic.

Liza Lou's next major work was Backyard, roughly 600 sq ft finished in 1996.  Lou's explanation was simple and logical, "standing in front of the sink, what do you see? The backyard.  I've always been inspired by the suburbs.  This is really my landscape." Which is logical, due to her also living in Southern California.

 The most amazing thing about Backyard is the lawn.  Each blade of grass is actually a strand of wire that has been hand-beaded and inserted into a paper mache surface (which actually gave the piece better mobility as it was lighter and easier to install and de-install.) In fact, the commitment the lawn demanded was so massive that Lou had to humble herself and recruit volunteers to help her bead all the individual blades.  She would have beading parties!  So I think the lawn, itself tells a story of many different american's lives interacting with each blade that was beaded.  I really liked Liza Lou's perspective, "With 50,000 square miles of lawn in this country, the lawn truly is a symbol of America."

 Backyard also has fewer actual objects as foundations for the beads.  I figure Lou regretted the real objects because of their impracticality when it came to moving the display.  Personally, I enjoyed the foundation of real objects and found myself looking for specific items, like a game of "ISpy."



Despite the glamour, Lou's works can also often be dark and even devious.  There are social, emotional, and political messages lying beneath her glistening intricacies.  Below is an example of her dark story-telling; Trailer, a Spartan Mobile Mansion (1949) whose interior was completely refurbished in Lou's glass beads (1999-2000).  

Trailer looks like it's strait from an episode of CSI.  The mobile mansion is filled with magazines, cigarette implications, guns, distasteful magazines, a typewriter and beside it, what appears to be a suicide note.  But most shocking is the man's leg lying in view of the doorway of the small bedroom, completing the eerie and forlorn feeling.  Lou explained, "I realized there had to be that leg at the very end... something has gone wrong.  It's a crime scene.  It's ver opposite visually of the kitchen, because it's absence of color.  And the trailer piece is that dead place."

Trailer was an interesting turn in her works story telling.  It is a bit more narrative than Kitchen (mostly due to the leg.) As Lou put it,

"I really was taking objects and using them in order to describe a feeling of despair, loneliness, and isolation...

It's just that I go interested in the darker side and making it visually seductive.  That's always my aim, to bring you in and tell a story."

To me, it's amazing how glass beads could paint such an extraordinary picture for the viewer.  That's my favorite aspect of Liza Lou's works: they tell a story."