The Undeniable Influence of Christine Kozlov

Exhibited in the palatial South Gallery of the newly reopened American Academy of Arts and Letters, Christine Kozlov’s Information: No Theory (1970) consists of a large, antiquated recorder and a ‘continuous’ loop tape, which an accompanying print by Kozlov states will record ‘all the sounds audible in this room’ throughout the duration of the exhibition. Yet, this recording will not be a complete document of the exhibition as ‘the nature’ of the tape requires ‘that new information erases old information’. The recorder will reset every two minutes. The work, then, shows that ‘proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability’.

Curated by Rhea Anastas, ‘Christine Kozlov’ – the artist’s largest solo (and to date, only) exhibition in the United States – showcases the brilliance and intellectual rigour of Kozlov’s practice, focusing on her years in New York’s conceptual art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. The immaculately researched and organized vitrines spread across the gallery spaces establish Kozlov as a major figure in this mode of artmaking. She collaborated with Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language, and her work was included in landmark exhibitions curated by Lucy Lippard and Kynaston McShine.

And yet, despite her omnipresence from the late ’60s to the mid-1970s, her work largely faded into obscurity following her emigration from the United States. Her exclusion from the boys’ club of art history is addressed in a companion essay written by Anastas, which states that ‘an angry wound… lies in the background of our work, and that is how many women artists and women writers have been written out of history’. Kozlov seemingly predicted her own impending obscurity, even at the height of her career. In Untitled (Tokenism manuscript) (n.d.), she annotates a list of artists represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery, expressing her rejection of this ‘token inclusion’ of women in the conceptual art scene and framing it as a continuation of art-world capitalists’ deeply entrenched hostility to leftist politics and community solidarity.

There is a manner in which Kozlov’s exclusion from the art historical canon ironically – even tragically – interplays with her oeuvre, as the works presented in Christine Kozlov are oriented toward the immaterial. Sound works occupy Arts and Letters’ peripheral galleries, and yet, these spaces are largely silent. The ‘Sound Structures’ series (1965–67) is documented through sheet music and written instructions, but no audible music accompanies the works. The absence of sound is carried out to horrifying effect in Information Drift (1968), where a mounted roll of audiotape is labelled as ‘combined recordings of news bulletins of the shootings of Andy Warhol and Robert Kennedy’. How jarring it is to see an artist whose work utilized redaction and replacement be largely redacted from cultural memory, only to be celebrated nearly two decades after her passing.

In the days following my visit to Arts and Letters, my mind wandered back to a work lying flat in an unassuming vitrine in the front gallery. Self-Portraits (1968­–1970) is a series of black and white photobooth portraits of Kozlov over the course of two years – and is one of the only works in the exhibition that shows the artist’s face outside of her brief appearance in Zoran Popović’s experimental documentary Struggle in New York (1976) with other members of Art & Language. In a body of work where Kozlov’s identity is mostly out of sight, it reads as a defiant statement of artistic – and personal – identity. The canon may shift, but Kozlov’s ‘proof of existence’ – her art, her writing and her undeniable influence – remains.  

‘Christine Kozlov’ is on view at Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, until 9 February.

^{Main image: ‘Christine Kozlov’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Christine Kozlov Estate; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; photograph: Charles Benton}