“Conceptual Art and Christine Kozlov”

Rhea Anastas’s exhibition—her second to foreground the work of Christine Kozlov—situates the artist in dialogue with works by On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, and Lawrence Weiner (among others) to demonstrate her participation in, and strategic absence from, Conceptual Art’s networks.1 Kozlov, we find, was always there: co-founding, with Kosuth, the short-lived Lannis Gallery in New York (which notably hosted the “Non-Anthropomorphic Art” exhibition in 1967); participating in Conceptual Art's landmark exhibitions, making guest appearances with experimental rock band Red Krayola; and working as film editor for Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Jonas.2 She was there until she wasn't. In 1977 she emigrated to the United Kingdom, and slowly began to withdraw, without explanation, from showing art publicly.

The work—documents upon documents set within clean frames and vitrines—is, at first sight, puzzling. Although characteristic of Conceptual Art’s “epistemological turn” in the 1960s, Kozlov’s work proved that reasoning needn’t produce rational results.3 She presented riddles disguised as syllogisms, revealed her workings while withholding her conclusions: all, in her own words, “taking the piss.” Wittgenstein described philosophy as “an attempt to be rid of a particular kind of puzzlement,” but unlike Conceptual Art’s many bar-room philosophers pontificating mind-body problems (as lampooned by Red Krayola and Art and Language in the songs from their 1976 video 9 Gross & Conspicuous Errors), Kozlov’s thought-experiments were not set in the abstract.4

Kozlov’s grist was the material culture of office work—typewriters, xeroxes, photostats. Benjamin Buchloh’s view of Conceptual Art as an “aesthetic of administration” nods to the Adornian “administered world” of increased rationalization.5 It was also a world altered by live television, satellites, early computing, and air travel: mappable, quantifiable, and “always on.” Artists responded by scrutinizing increased interconnectivity and access: one work shown here, Douglas Huebler’s Duration Piece #10, Reported Locations (1969), asked fellow artists to reveal their location and activity at a certain time of the day. Prefiguring today's digital culture of virality and distributed authorship, artists were exchanging ideas and producing extremely similar works within the span of hours.6 Kozlov explored collapsing spatio-temporal coordinates in Information Drift (1968), a mounted audiotape that combined news bulletin recordings announcing Andy Warhol and Robert Kennedy’s shootings, superimposing events that occurred days apart, anticipating the dissonance between “live” feeds and algorithmic hierarchy.

Information overload tends to equate to little-to-no information retention, and negation was a central preoccupation for Kozlov. For “Information” (1970), Kozlov sent MoMA curator Kynaston McShine a telegram: “Particulars related to the information not contained herein constitute the form of this action.” Her reel-to-reel tape recorder Information No Theory (1970) repeatedly recorded, erased and re-recorded its surroundings, so that “NEW INFORMATION ERASES OLD INFORMATION.” Working through the United States’s Cold War culture of paranoia, surveillance, and secrecy, Kozlov mimicked and mocked mechanisms of institutional corruption, pointing to suppressed and inaccessible information—methods maintained in today's hide-and-seek release of redacted Epstein files, and the cultures of strategic ambiguity that enabled such crimes.

In 1964, as the US government spread stories of communist brainwashing (whilst funding mind-control research), neuroscience emerged as a distinct field. Kozlov’s Neurological Compilation: The Physical Mind Since 1945 (Project I: The Bibliography) (1969) files 554 pages across nine binders listing academic papers from neuropathology, neurochemistry, and neurophysics, with titles suggesting the problem of mind can be solved with lobotomized rat brains and thought summoned through electrosimulation. Neurological Compilation—“a representation of the thinking about the thing that thinks”—teases Joseph Kosuth’s commitment to “Art as Idea.”

Kozlov’s incessant lists constitute willful self-surveillance. In Eating Piece (2/20/69–6/12/69), Figurative Work No. 1 (1969)—twelve typewritten sheets detailing food and drink consumed in a day—she proves the ideal biopolitical subject. One vitrine holds forty-three photobooth self-portraits of Kozlov taken between 1968–70, methodically shot in front and side profile, one day in a beret, the next with a new fringe. You might drink your usual coffee in the morning, but by mid-afternoon your life could be upended— here, diarizing and data collection purposely reveal both something and nothing of Kozlov. In “Continuing to Live” (1954), Philip Larkin writes that “once you have walked the length of your mind, what / You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not [...] be thought / To exist.”7 Larkin's “list” seems the ultimate conceptual art gesture, a quasi-objective quantification of experience-as-information corralled into bureaucratic form, making stark the gap between what can be written and said vis-à-vis felt and thought. Kozlov’s lading-lists don’t claim finality. It is notable, too, that the curators withhold wall text from the exhibition, reinforcing the impossibility of complete reading.

Kozlov’s silence is an authoritative disavowal. From the late seventies, Kozlov maintained a position of non-participation and non-production—leaving us to work through her puzzles. On the exhibition’s first floor, the unreleased film Mostly about Rauschenberg (1975) plays on loop. When editing this documentary, Kozlov would have heard, and reheard, Rauschenberg  pronounce this line: “A good painting is one that is misunderstood for a very long time.” The same can be said of Kozlov’s own body of work.