In her 1967 essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Susan Sontag writes that art, in the ‘modern era’, has become ‘something to be overthrown’. In this context, ‘a new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition – and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself’. A recent exhibition at London’s Raven Row offers a striking display of work animated by this impulse. Conceptual Art and Christine Kozlov presents a near-complete display of the oeuvre of the pioneering American conceptualist, set alongside a range of work by her peers – Joseph Kosuth, stanley brouwn, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, The Red Krayola, Adrian Piper, and Lawrence Weiner. The effect is multiform: to situate this often-neglected artist at the centre of conceptualism, to illustrate the movement’s collective and dialogic character, as well as to ask questions about its parameters and history.
Though often marginalized in the history of conceptual art, Kozlov was an early practitioner, and was present throughout the mid-1960s and 1970s when the movement was at its most vigorous. Born in 1945, she attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she became close friends with Kosuth. The pair set up the Museum of Normal Art at Lannis Gallery in 1967, which became one of the foremost exhibition spaces for the nascent conceptual art movement. Kozlov went on to participate in various seminal group exhibitions – a key format for the conceptual art of the time – throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the age of twenty-two, a series of ‘Sound Structures’ she had produced while at SVA were shown in the exhibition Non-Anthropomorphic Art by Four Young Artists (1967) at Lannis Gallery, and she was the only woman amongst thirty male artists to be featured in Seth Siegelaub’s One Month in 1969; she also took part in MoMA’s landmark exhibition, Information (1970). In the 1970s, Kozlov turned increasingly to group work, becoming a member of (Provisional) Art & Language, and in 1974, she began working as an assistant for Robert Rauschenberg. But in 1977, she left New York for the UK, where she largely withdrew from public exhibition. At Raven Row, fragments of a final, incomplete piece on the Gulf War from 1991 were displayed on the second floor. She died in London in 2005 at the age of 59.
Among conceptualism’s targets was the reigning doctrine of Greenbergian formalism. If abstract painting had reduced art to its material components, conceptual artists sought to go a step further, reducing it to pure concept, in a revival of Duchamp’s interest in ideas over ‘visual products’. As such, the materials and resultant forms of conceptual art were often unassuming; as the curator Rhea Anastas explains in a booklet that accompanies Raven Row’s exhibition, many conceptual artworks were ‘made using readily available materials such as office supplies and photocopies, and devices to hand such as typewriters and sound recorders’. Execution of artworks was a secondary concern – ‘a perfunctory affair’, as Sol Le Witt wrote in Artforum in 1967. In a 1969 essay, ‘Art after Philosophy’, Kosuth argued that ‘being an artist now’ meant ‘questioning the very nature of art’, which entailed a challenge to its materiality – and therefore also its commodification.
Kosuth and Kozlov spent their time at SVA investigating art not as material object but as idea. The results of these early years are displayed in the first room at Raven Row, where one finds Kozlov’s ‘Sound Structures’ (1965-67) – an idiosyncratic system of musical notation in the form of a series of schematic diagrams representing the overlapping duration of sounds – alongside a likely prototype for Kosuth’s famous ‘Art as Idea as Idea’ series, which featured photographic reproductions of dictionary definitions of words, and another diagram, made by Lawrence Weiner, of his seminal 1968 sculptural project for Windham College.
Documentation was a central part of the repertoire of conceptual art, used to render an object in conceptual terms, or to give a concept objective from by the process of recording. Kawara’s ‘Today’ series (1966–2013), a collection of daily paintings the artist that record the date, is an example of this latter impulse – his NOV. 18 1967, featuring white letters on a black background, is displayed at Raven Row. Kozlov experimented with documentation in works such as Eating Piece (2/20/69–6/12/69) Figurative Work No. 1 (1969), comprising twelve typewritten sheets which record everything the artist ate in the days encompassed by its title’s dates, and Self-Portraits (1968–70), a set of 43 black-and-white headshots taken in a photo booth. The most impressive of her works in this mode is Neurological Compilation: The Physical Mind Since 1945 (Project 1: The Bibliography) (1969): 554 typewritten sheets, held in 9 chronologically organized binders, each of which holds ‘all of the articles published during a given year in the field now called neuroscience’, between 1961 and 1969. The piece, Anastas explains, is a ‘representation of the thinking about the thing that thinks.’
If one impetus of Kozlov’s art was to document, another was to undermine or efface the results of that process. Her work is attuned to the fact that, once an idea is documented, an object, however rudimentary, is produced; a means of dematerialization was therefore often built into the piece to cut against this. Information, No Theory (1970) is a reel-to-reel tape recorder that continuously records and erases the ambient sounds of the room in which it is installed. The piece is emblematic of Kozlov’s mordant subversion of art as both object and product – formalized elsewhere in acts of rejection, refusal and negation. Displayed at Raven Row are telegrams sent to curators with instructions or lists of her previous works, to be exhibited in lieu of the pieces themselves; elsewhere, a typewritten sheet atop a sheaf of blank paper delineates the number of ideas the artist has rejected; reels of film are displayed but left unprojected, their content only intimated by the title on the cannister. With such gestures, Kozlov repeatedly denies the viewer access to the aesthetic object.
If Kozlov’s work can appear abstruse, her notes – samples of which are on display – are lucid, and often reveal her sense of humour. In the foyer of Raven Row was Kozlov’s This Is Not Art (1969), made by printing the words ‘THIS IS NOT ART’ on a sheet of white paper in black ink. Elsewhere in the gallery, one of Kozlov’s notes refers to this as a spoof of the Duchampian readymade. The interest of the work lies in its operation on two levels – overturning not only the art object itself but an art-historical idea – and in its paradoxical, self-undermining character. Declaring the sheet ‘not art’ transforms it into a work of art: the gesture of negation is self-negating. Untitled (After Goya) (1968) offers another art-historical spoof. A painting of the words ‘LAS MAJAS’ in white text on a grey background, it alludes to a pair of paintings in which Goya depicted a female subject, first nude, then dressed. Kozlov’s notes explain that her rendition continues the tradition of artists reinterpreting the work of their forebears, yet her work subverts the tropes of reinterpretation; Goya’s paintings are reworked in purely verbal terms, without any visual homage.
This Is Not Art (1969) typifies Kozlov’s interest in ambiguity and contradiction. It is echoed in the semantic logic – or perhaps illogic – of numerous tricksy declarations on display throughout the exhibition. Information, No Theory, for instance, is accompanied by a framed sheet of typewritten paper that ‘explains’ the piece. It reads: ‘Proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability.’ The sentence reads as a kind of nonsense, a paradox – a joke. Contradiction is manifest elsewhere in her ‘half-redactions’ – scored-out text that remains legible. This technique is used to great effect in Untitled (Social Structure of Bees) (c. 1965–67), which presents typewritten information about bees on a large sheet of paper. The first few lines are intact, but the remainder is crossed out with straight black lines. The effect is to complicate the information presented – on the one hand indicating that the viewer should disregard it, but on the other, drawing our attention to it, coaxing us to look more closely to decipher the meaning.
A telegram from 1970 addressed to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College offers something like a key to reading this body of work: ‘Particulars related to the information not contained herein constitute the form of this action.’ What is not there, what is missing, is exactly the work – ‘the action’ – in question. Kozlov seems to say that a close reader of her work – and perhaps of art history – will consider what is being omitted or excluded as much as what is present.
Set alongside work by her contemporaries, Kozlov’s unflinching commitment to the principles of conceptualism are brought into relief. The curation also illustrates the intimacy she shared with them. Several of the pieces on display at Raven Row were personal gifts to Kozlov, while others – such as a set of postcards from Kawara – blur the line between art and correspondence between friends. Particularly poignant is the handwritten address, ‘To Christine’, on Kosuth’s ‘Art as Idea as Idea’ prototype. The ghost of their friendship haunts the exhibition, and after leaving I began to wonder what became of it. Looking around, I happened upon an interview that Kosuth gave to the Italian conceptual art magazine, Juliet,in 2002. At one point, the interviewer asks about Kozlov, noting that her work ‘is not so visible or available anymore, somehow forgotten’. Kosuth responds:
Christine and I were in art school together and had a personal relationship. She was also my best friend and we had a great dialogue. She had her particular kind of work which was very much her own and I think that we both learned a lot from each other as art students do. Then, things begun to happen and, as I was the ambitious male and a little more theoretically oriented – I was more of an activist while she was a quiet, introverted person – I was out fighting for this idea of art. At a certain moment she said something which filled me with tremendous feminist guilt (me as a feminist, not her); she said ‘Well, you are doing it for both of us now’ and I said: ‘No, you cannot say that!’ But it was quite horrible. I remember Lucy [Lippard] being in contact with her because at that point she really stopped; I tried also to encourage her and she eventually began to do work again but at a certain critical period she was quiet when she should not have been quiet, because we needed her. She was really the first woman in the Conceptual art context.
The exhibition offers no explanation for why Kozlov left New York and largely gave up making art, nor what she did instead. The absences leave room for speculation. Rather than shyness, or the gender politics of the art world, one might see Kozlov’s withdrawal as an extension of her commitment to the principles of conceptual art and its interrogative function – something that Kosuth himself arguably lost sight of as his own work gained prominence and a market. The point of art was to question itself; to appeal, tacitly or overtly, for its own abolition, as Sontag wrote. Kozlov’s questioned itself into obsolescence.
Read on: Peter Osborne, ‘Interesting Art’, NLR 150.