Mattering Information: Lee Lozano and Cybernetics

Coming on the heels of Kynaston McShine’s seminal 1970 ‘Information’ show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoMA) in New York, Lee Lozano’s first exhibition of language pieces at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax the following year was audaciously titled ‘Infofiction’. This paper examines to what extent the artist’s notion of ‘infofiction’, and her conceptual work more generally, challenged the conflation of disembodiment and dematerialisation put forward in MoMA’s conceptual art blockbuster. Framing her practice within feminist analyses of embodied subjectivity, I argue that she challenged contemporaneous artistic and scientific accounts of information as dissociated from its material instantiation. Her prescient reflection on the intertwinement of body and mind, materiality and abstraction, has much to say about the challenges of subjectivity in the digital age.