Acts of Self-Erasure | Anahid Nersessian

The American Academy of Arts and Letters sits in the back of Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights, flanked by Boricua School and the Hispanic Society Library and Museum. It’s one among eight Beaux Arts buildings tucked into this stunning and disorienting pocket of Manhattan, the place the names of Spanish writers, artists, and conquistadors—Cervantes, Velazquez, Columbus, Balboa—are carved into the friezes and a large bronze sculpture of El Cid dominates the plaza. The location is a throwback to a different New York, when the structure emulated Paris and cash flowed into museums as an alternative of half-empty high-rises. Straight behind Arts and Letters is Trinity Cemetery, a nineteenth-century burial floor whose notable residents embrace Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Ralph Ellison, and Ed Koch.

This Wharton-esque scene seems to be a great setting for a spare, acerbic, and completely thrilling exhibition of chosen works by Christine Kozlov, the New York–born and, for some time, New York–based mostly conceptual artist who died in 2005, on the age of sixty. Curated by Rhea Anastas and the artist Nora Schultz, the present—Kozlov’s first solo outing in the US—is directly an appraisal of the depth and vary of the New York artwork scene within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies and a startlingly up to date presentation. With out leaning on a story of feminist recuperation or revival, Anastas and Schultz make a case for positioning Kozlov alongside her far more broadly lauded male contemporaries, most notably her collaborators Mayo Thompson, of the experimental rock band Purple Krayola, and Joseph Kosuth. Within the present, Koslov’s work stands fully by itself deserves: equal components playful and haunting, typically sinister, and at all times completely critical.

Born in New York, Kozlov attended the Faculty of Visible Arts between 1963 and 1967. It was at SVA that she met Kosuth, with whom she opened the Lannis Gallery, later often called the Museum of Regular Artwork. (In an essay printed in 1969 Kosuth describes himself as having “founded” the area “with the aid of Christine Kozlov and a couple of others.”) The short-lived museum hosted a number of essential reveals, together with an exhibition of “Non-Anthropomorphic Art” by Kozlov, Kosuth, Michael Rinaldi, and Ernest Rossi in 1967. Different collaborators included Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin; the curator and critic Lucy Lippard was named as a trustee. Kozlov was particularly prolific in the course of the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, and that is the interval finest represented within the exhibition. Nonetheless, you may as well see a mordant assortment of drawings and xeroxes from the Nineties, together with newspaper photos of the US’s arsenal of B-2 Stealth Bomber jets. 

In the primary room sits a boxy reel-to-reel tape recorder, a snaky white twine trailing behind it towards a wall on which a textual content is mounted inside an aluminum body. That is Info: No Concept (1970), and it’s best described by the textual content that accompanies it:

1. THE RECORDER IS EQUIPPED WITH A CONTINUOUS LOOP TAPE.
2. FOR THE DURATION OF THE EXHIBITION THE TAPE RECORDER WILL BE SET AT RECORD. ALL THE SOUNDS AUDIBLE IN THIS ROOM DURING THAT TIME WILL BE RECORDED.
3. THE NATURE OF THE LOOP TAPE NECESSITATES THAT NEW INFORMATION ERASES OLD INFORMATION. THE ‘LIFE’ OF THE INFORMATION, THAT IS, THE TIME IT TAKES FOR THE INFORMATION TO GO FROM ‘NEW’ TO ‘OLD’ IS APPROXIMATELY TWO (2) MINUTES.
4. PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE INFORMATION DOES IN FACT NOT EXIST IN ACTUALITY, BUT IS BASED ON PROBABILITY.

First proven at “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” a landmark exhibition held on the New York Cultural Middle in 1970, the piece has most of the apparent markers of conceptualist observe: a preoccupation with time, length, and the dialectic of presence and ephemerality, which is one other method of claiming a preoccupation with the place, precisely, the work is. (The reply is, in nobody place.) Info: No Concept additionally engages with the specter of surveillance: we’re, it’s useful to recollect, solely a few years out from Watergate and Francis Ford Coppola’s eavesdropping neo-noir The Dialog (1974). However at the same time as Kozlov’s piece prompts our paranoia—“all the sounds audible in the room will be recorded”—it additionally reassures us, unsettlingly, of our personal inconsequence. The sounds we make can be erased, written over as a lot “old information.” 

Kozlov invitations us to ponder our attachment to our personal ontological signature, our need to depart some hint of ourselves in and upon the world. In a droll little bit of mise-en-scène, the gallery home windows on both facet of her tape recorder look out on Trinity Cemetery, with its rows of gravestones and marble tombs. These shrines to non-public id are roped right into a relationship with Kozlov’s piece, which guarantees to remove what the cemetery has managed to retain. The juxtaposition makes an sudden touch upon the connection between aesthetics and social historical past. It suggests a palimpsest of various New Yorks not a lot overwriting as ironizing each other, the world of Gilded Age luminaries jostling towards that of an both overtly or implicitly anticapitalist creative observe that strives to avoid its personal commercialization.

Kozlov’s intensely cerebral oeuvre additionally presents some sensual pleasures, thinned out however unmistakable. Kneeling down beside that recorder to catch the liquid hiss of its tape sliding across the reels, I felt like one of many patrons of the Scope, the bar with the “strictly electronic music policy” that Oedipa Maas visits in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49. Because the Scope’s bartender says, “We got a whole back room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man.” (The passage could allude to the San Francisco Tape Music Middle, the experimental hub spearheaded by Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, and Pauline Oliveros within the early Sixties.) In Pynchon’s novel, the concept a crowd of drunks would fall silent to hearken to a “chorus of whoops and yibbles burst[ing] from a kind of juke box” is performed for laughs (“That’s by Stockhausen”), however Kozlov’s present is stuffed with these types of idiosyncratic alternatives, whether or not within the whirl of a tape recorder or within the improvisational clamor of her performances with the Artwork & Language collective, performed right here on a video monitor in black and white. 

Essentially the most radical side of conceptualism is its ambivalence or downright disdain towards institutional seize, its need to tweak the elementary assumption that if an artist has agreed to indicate her work there have to be one thing for folks to see—and, by extension, to purchase. In a single room of Arts and Letters, there’s a framed telegram addressed to the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen, Germany. The museum had invited Kozlov to contribute to an exhibition, and in her telegram she presents to ship “a series of cables during the exhibition [that] will supply you with information about the amount of concepts that I have rejected during that time.” “This cable,” she provides, “and the ones following will constitute the work.” On the opposite facet of the gallery, a stack of clean paper is recognized, by a sentence typed out on the highest sheet, as “271 BLANK SHEETS OF PAPER CORRESPONDING TO 271 DAYS OF CONCEPTS REJECTED.” By dispersing or dislocating the thing itself, Kozlov challenges not solely standard notions of the murals as discrete, entire, autonomous, and reliant on the artist’s singular, virtuosic expertise, but in addition the political financial system of the artwork world, pushed as it’s by the desire and style of the non-public collector or else by main museums, whose pursuits are likely to align with these of their company sponsors.

Equally, two small, practically sq. work from the late Sixties, A Principally Portray (Purple) and Untitled (After Goya), play with the décalage or hole between picture and textual content as representational methods. Untitled (After Goya) refers to a pair of late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century work by Goya—La maja desnuda and La maja vestida, or The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja—depicting a modern lower-class lady (or maja) in states of undress and gown, respectively. In its day La Maja Desnuda was sufficiently scandalous that it was stored by its proprietor, the Spanish Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy, in a non-public room reserved for attractive work, together with Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. In 1808 Godoy, his private curator Don Francisco de Garivay, and Goya all fell afoul of the Spanish Inquisition, however Goya managed to flee prosecution when officers accepted his declare that he was following in a well-respected custom—that’s, portray bare ladies within the model of Titian and Velázquez, versus portray bare ladies merely as smut.

Kozlov’s Untitled (After Goya) makes use of this art-historical anecdote as a launchpad for a thought drawback directly philosophical and feminist. A canvas painted fully grey aside from the white block capital lettering spelling out “LAS MAJAS,” the work performs on the non-identity between what semioticians name the signifier, reminiscent of a phrase, and the signified, or the idea or that means the phrase picks out. On this case, the phrase evokes Goya’s two work as a single unit with out referring to them straight. Providing itself as an abstraction or, higher, a radical attenuation of these lush eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canvases, Kozlov’s work prompts the viewer to consider the relation between an idea (or reminiscence) of the work and the work themselves, and about what, if something, of the aura of exceptionality that surrounds a terrific murals could also be communicated merely by its title. However there may be extra happening right here than a coy postmodern sport. Kozlov’s grey and white canvas suggests a black-and-white {photograph} or else newsprint, hinting on the discount of Goya’s work, and maybe figurative portray extra typically, to a sort of reportage.

Given the historical past of La maja desnuda, Kozlov’s portray additionally invokes the generic standing assigned to the feminine physique in Western artwork—consider Godoy with all his nudes in a single room. The distinction between a maja clothed or bare is probably negligible, Kozlov implies, when even her title is unknown. On the similar time, Kozlov is keen to absent herself from her personal objects, in acts of self-erasure which may trace at a want not to hitch the lengthy line of infinitely iterable feminine our bodies listed by the phrases “Las Majas.” One of many vitrines at Arts and Letters features a poignant doc on which Kozlov has recorded the names of the artists represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery—two out of the thirty-three are ladies—and written “our ‘token’ participation reinforces + supports the gallery system which has both historically excluded and exploited us. The point is that ‘token inclusion’ of the select few undermines our potential organization in the art community.” To refuse tokenization can be to refuse interchangeability; to make oneself virtually invisible is to flee being merely “one of the girls.”

There may be, all through this exhibition, a noticeable absence or obsolescence of the artist’s hand, in counterpoint to the idealization of the gesture that famously outlined American portray in the course of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. Whereas Kozlov diffuses her work throughout a number of websites of creation and reception, she additionally all however utterly conceals her personal tracks, utilizing quite a lot of applied sciences to distance herself from her mark: xerox, photostat, typewriters, telegrams, and a writing instrument which may have been a DINgraph, a handheld instrument that permits for an virtually excellent mimicry of printed textual content. All this can be a significant departure from the extra conventional, to not say patrimonial, notions of attribution and credit score that even many male conceptualists (Kosuth amongst them) had hassle relinquishing. At a second when feminist artwork was starting its affiliation with the messy, inconvenient, grotesque, and infrequently flagrantly erotic intrusion of the physique into the proverbial white area of the gallery, Kozlov’s work tended stubbornly within the different course. She steps backward from the social logic of personhood and the financial precepts of possession and property to develop a observe that’s materials, even sensuous, with out being constrained both by its personal objectification or by that of the artist herself.

On the similar time, an emphasis on repetition runs all through this present, placing Kozlov within the firm of different ladies artists and writers who, additionally within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, embraced seriality as a feminist (and leftist) riposte each to the mechanized regimes of business manufacturing and the airless fable yoking genius to originality. In Consuming Piece (2/20/69–6/12/69), Figurative Work No. 1 (1969), Kozlov writes down what she ate each day for a interval of 4 months; Info Drift (1968) is a mounted analog tape on which information bulletins of the shootings of Andy Warhol and Robert Kennedy have been recorded, suggesting the artist at residence along with her radio on, possibly working, possibly doing chores, possibly doing nothing in any respect.

Like Bernadette Mayer’s Reminiscence, a group of journal entries and pictures made each day in the course of the month of July 1971, or her Midwinter Day, a protracted poem written over the course of twenty-four hours, these items are immersed within the odd not as a substitute for the extra public actuality of the newsreel, or the grand narrative of the artist remoted from the quotidian, however as the fabric situation of aesthetic and mental life. They grasp dailiness, subjecting its traces to philosophical scrutiny and singling out artwork as exactly that type of human labor that toggles philosophy and existence. Their theme is the ethical weight of that proposition.