When Christine Kozlov showed her »Compositions for Audio Structures« (»Sound Structures«) in the legendary Lannis Gallery in 1967, she was 22 years old and still a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The equally legendary exhibition was called » Non-Anthropomorphic Art by Four Young Artists« and marked one of the starting points of conceptual art, just like the Museum of Normal Art, which Christine Kozlov and Joseph Kosuth founded on the premises of the Lannis Gallery in the same year.

In her »Sound Structures«, Kozlov notates – using a photo-mechanical method, with white writing on a brown background on several sheets of paper - the structure and duration of various constant or overlapping notes that, as a logical statement, represent an experimental set-up. »The Structures are concerned with symmetry, asymmetry, progression or with their own intrinsic logic« says an accompanying statement,1 which can be seen as one of the earliest programmatic writings of conceptual art. Kozlov here represents the concepts, developed together with Kosuth, of a form of art distinct from minimal and object fetishism, but goes beyond this to include proto-conceptual procedures, i.e. the shift in emphasis from the material to the idea as envisioned in Cagean Conceptualism and by Henry Flynt and La Monte Young from 1961.

As one of the few women in the male-dominated sphere of conceptual art, Kozlov created works that, on the one hand, examine the self-referential meaning of language, as in »Practice Project« of 1966, which she exhibited in 1968 in »Language II« in the Dwan Gallery. On the other, she worked on process-oriented compilations, one of which, » Neurological Compilation: The Physical Mind since 1945« of 1969, a collection of texts about brain research, is among her largest-scale works; she showed it in parts in the exhibition »Twenty-six Contemporary Women Artists« in 1971 in the Larry Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield. This project contains, as Part One, a bibliography on neuropathology, neurochemistry and neurophysics from 1945 (her year of birth) to 1961. In its totality, this work shows Christine Kozlov’s great ability to assimilate and represent things. In »Las Majas« of 1968, she reduces the two famous paintings by Goya to one text, written in white writing on a grey background, that can be interpreted as a legend, a formula or a name. Even during her time as a student, when she produced her first picture, she aimed to deprive painting of its subjectivity and gestic character. She painted over this picture again and again with grey paint to end up with a layered structure of great weight that was just as resistant to criteria of meaning and content as her works »Transparent Film« or »Black Film«, which were not meant to be shown and were exhibited as objects that had something of the Wittgensteinian gesture of pointing about them.

In the sixties, Christine Kozlov regularly took part in exhibitions, including »Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book« in the Museum of Normal Art in 1967, »One Month« by Seth Siegelaub in 1969, and »557,087« and »955,000« by Lucy Lippard. Lippard speaks of a »rigorously >rejective< work«2 and is the first to point out, in a work from 1967, the gesture of rejection that is so often contained in Kozlov’s works: »Christine Kozlov sends out xeroxed calender strips systematically canceled.« Whereas Lucy Lippard was obviously a patron of Kozlov, this was not the case in the »Boys’ Club«, as Alexander Alberro describes the group associated with Seth Siegelaub, although she was the only woman among around thirty men in the »One Month« show. Alberro points out the important role of Rosemarie Castoro, Hanne Darboven, Christine Kozlov, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer, but himself does nothing but perpetuate this history of exclusion: in this publication,3 one of the most recent on conceptual art, Christine Kozlov is mentioned in the index only under »Kosuth/relationship to Kosuth«, and is thus not given a standing in her own right.

An interview by Elena Carlini with Joseph Kosuth4 in 2002 is interesting in this regard. In it, Kosuth concedes that Kozlov did a » particular kind of work which was very much her own« and emphasises the influence they had on each other, but he is far from describing the early period as a period of cooperation. However, this interview does show a changed point of view that can have arisen only as a reaction to the work of Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, who rediscovered the work of Christine Kozlov from the mid-nineties.5 As late as 1989, Kozlov was not mentioned in the catalogue of »l’art conceptuel, une perspective«,6 and appears neither in the introduction by Benjamin Buchloh, who was even actually writing about the start of conceptual art, nor in a statement by Kosuth.

In her works of the years around 1970, which were equally conceptual but now more media-related, Kozlov focused increasingly on the information content, as it was discussed, for example, at the MoMA exhibition »Information« in 1970 against a background of technological innovations and the growing importance of mass media. What is often called a turning point in conceptual art also had the same meaning in the works of Christine Kozlov. As her contribution to the »Information« exhibition, Kozlov sent the curator Kynaston McShine a telegramme with the text: »Particulars related to the information not contained herein constitute the form of this action C. Kozlov«. In the work, »Information: No Theory« (1971), the recorded text is always being deleted by new information, and serves as proof that the information is based on the principle of probability: »Proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability.«

Kozlov took part more or less regularly in exhibitions until 1973. From 1973 to 1979 she was the assistant of Robert Rauschenberg and was involved in making the film »Mostly about Rauschenberg«, which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1974. The works she produced in the seventies show clearly that she was still moving into an inter-medial field that can be characterised by drawing a clear relation to »Art and Language«. Kozlov was a member of Provisional Art and Language, worked in 1974 on the »Corrected Slogans« (Art and Language and the Red Crayola LP), on Zoran Popovic’s »Struggle in New York« in 1976 and on the Music-Language video in the same year. What back then was perceived as egalitarian in the joint, collective ambitions of the group seems today to be to the disadvantage of the women, whose share in the work barely received critical notice. For example, to take just one instance, the three women involved in »Struggle in New York«, Paula Ramsden, Kathryn Bigelow and Christine Kozlov, are given only a marginal mention in Charles Harrison’s »Essays on Art and Language«. Harrison mentions Christine Kozlov as being among the authors of The Fox 3 of 1976, the »Lumpenheadache«, while talking about the structure of the group, in which Kozlov must have been heavily involved, ending up on the side of the »Provisional Art and Language« when the group divided. Like Paula and Mel Ramsden, Mayo Thompson and Christine Kozlov went to London, where they were to live from then on – later with their daughter Marilyn. However, in the years that followed, she was not often to appear in public as part of this group.

We have Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer to thank for making the works of Christine Kozlov once more part of the discourse about conceptual art. A reassessment of the seventies and the following period has yet to be undertaken. In 1999, works by Kozlov could be seen in the exhibition »Global Conceptualism« in the Queens Museum of Art. In 2004, Christine Kozlov came to Vienna for the exhibition »Kurze Karrieren« (»Short Careers«), visited many Wittgenstein sites and spoke of a new »work in progress«, a project about wars that strongly recalled early works like the »Eating Piece« and the »Neurological Compilation«. The fact that her production was still wide-ranging and was able to include both intellectual texts and skilfully made pieces of sewing shows clearly that her exit from art had two sides, but never meant the end of her artistic work.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---