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Structure Drawing of Elementary Structure for Sound Structure No.2, Structure Drawing of Elementary Structure for Sound Structure No. 1, 1965. Collection Fabre. Photograph by Marcus J Leith.<\/p>\nIn her 1967 essay \u2018The Aesthetics of Silence\u2019, Susan Sontag writes that art, in the \u2018modern era\u2019, has become \u2018something to be overthrown\u2019. In this context, \u2018a new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition \u2013 and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself\u2019. A recent exhibition at London\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019s collective and dialogic character, as well as to ask questions about its parameters and history.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 a key format for the conceptual art of the time \u2013 throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the age of twenty-two, a series of \u2018Sound Structures\u2019 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\u2019s One Month in 1969; she also took part in MoMA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Among conceptualism\u2019s 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\u2019s interest in ideas over \u2018visual products\u2019. 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\u2019s exhibition, many conceptual artworks were \u2018made using readily available materials such as office supplies and photocopies, and devices to hand such as typewriters and sound recorders\u2019. Execution of artworks was a secondary concern \u2013 \u2018a perfunctory affair\u2019, as Sol Le Witt wrote in Artforum in 1967. In a 1969 essay, \u2018Art after Philosophy\u2019, Kosuth argued that \u2018being an artist now\u2019 meant \u2018questioning the very nature of art\u2019, which entailed a challenge to its materiality \u2013 and therefore also its commodification.<\/p>\n
Structure Drawing of Elementary Structure for Sound Structure No.2, Structure Drawing of Elementary Structure for Sound Structure No. 1, 1965. Collection Fabre. Photograph by Marcus J Leith.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u2018Sound Structures\u2019 (1965-67) \u2013 an idiosyncratic system of musical notation in the form of a series of schematic diagrams representing the overlapping duration of sounds \u2013 alongside a likely prototype for Kosuth\u2019s famous \u2018Art as Idea as Idea\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u2018Today\u2019 series (1966\u20132013), a collection of daily paintings the artist that record the date, is an example of this latter impulse \u2013 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\u20136\/12\/69) Figurative Work No. 1 (1969), comprising twelve typewritten sheets which record everything the artist ate in the days encompassed by its title\u2019s dates, and Self-Portraits (1968\u201370), 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 \u2018all of the articles published during a given year in the field now called neuroscience\u2019, between 1961 and 1969. The piece, Anastas explains, is a \u2018representation of the thinking about the thing that thinks.\u2019<\/p>\n
If one impetus of Kozlov\u2019s 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\u2019s mordant subversion of art as both object and product \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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Eating Piece (2\/20\/69\u20136\/12\/69), Figurative Work No. 1\u00a0(detail), 1969. Collection Fabre. Photograph by Marcus J Leith.
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If Kozlov\u2019s work can appear abstruse, her notes \u2013 samples of which are on display \u2013 are lucid, and often reveal her sense of humour. In the foyer of Raven Row was Kozlov\u2019s This Is Not Art (1969), made by printing the words \u2018THIS IS NOT ART\u2019 on a sheet of white paper in black ink. Elsewhere in the gallery, one of Kozlov\u2019s notes refers to this as a spoof of the Duchampian readymade. The interest of the work lies in its operation on two levels \u2013 overturning not only the art object itself but an art-historical idea \u2013 and in its paradoxical, self-undermining character. Declaring the sheet \u2018not art\u2019 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 \u2018LAS MAJAS\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s paintings are reworked in purely verbal terms, without any visual homage.<\/p>\n
This Is Not Art (1969) typifies Kozlov\u2019s interest in ambiguity and contradiction. It is echoed in the semantic logic \u2013 or perhaps illogic \u2013 of numerous tricksy declarations on display throughout the exhibition. Information, No Theory, for instance, is accompanied by a framed sheet of typewritten paper that \u2018explains\u2019 the piece. It reads: \u2018Proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability.\u2019 The sentence reads as a kind of nonsense, a paradox \u2013 a joke. Contradiction is manifest elsewhere in her \u2018half-redactions\u2019 \u2013 scored-out text that remains legible. This technique is used to great effect in Untitled (Social Structure of Bees) (c. 1965\u201367), 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\u00a0\u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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Information: No Theory, 1970. Collection Fabre. Photograph by Marcus J Leith.
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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: \u2018Particulars related to the information not contained herein constitute the form of this action.\u2019 What is not there, what is missing, is exactly the work \u2013 \u2018the action\u2019 \u2013 in question. Kozlov seems to say that a close reader of her work \u2013 and perhaps of art history \u2013 will consider what is being omitted or excluded as much as what is present.<\/p>\n
Set alongside work by her contemporaries, Kozlov\u2019s 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 \u2013 such as a set of postcards from Kawara \u2013 blur the line between art and correspondence between friends. Particularly poignant is the handwritten address, \u2018To Christine\u2019, on Kosuth\u2019s \u2018Art as Idea as Idea\u2019 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 \u2018is not so visible or available anymore, somehow forgotten\u2019. Kosuth responds:<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 I was more of an activist while she was a quiet, introverted person \u2013 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 \u2018Well, you are doing it for both of us now\u2019 and I said: \u2018No, you cannot say that!\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s withdrawal as an extension of her commitment to the principles of conceptual art and its interrogative function \u2013 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\u2019s questioned itself into obsolescence.<\/p>\n