2025 Theses Doctoral

Conceptualism and the Connexionist World: The Art of Hannah Weiner, Eduardo Costa, and Christine Kozlov

Ochmanek, Annie

In the 1960s, Conceptual artists departed from traditional mediums and forms of artistic production by using text- and data-based procedures, embracing telecommunications and mass media, and minimizing subjective expression or composition. Newly mobile, ephemeral, and interdisciplinary, Conceptual artworks circulated internationally and traded in ideas, language, and information. These characteristics place conceptualism in contentious relation to a globalizing economy enabled by information technologies, and to the creative destructions wrought by capital in the decades following the movement’s inception.

As sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have detailed, from the 1970s onward, an exploitative, “connexionist” system—marked by expectations of self-management, flexibility, and continual connection-making—became dominant. They argued that this was in part a result of corporate adoptions of late 1960s counterculture and liberation movements’ calls for the leveling of hierarchies and was hastened by networked communications.

This dissertation reassesses conceptualist developments against the historical backdrop provided by Boltanski and Chiapello as well as by more recent discussions regarding the impact of digital and algorithmic technologies on the consolidation of wealth. Whereas others have collapsed conceptualism to notions of recuperation or failure, deeming the movement symptomatic of post-Fordist developments or naïve 1960s optimism, however, this project instead offers a reparative reading, highlighting the anticipatory and critical powers of artists’ treatments of alphabetic language in the period under question.

The argument centers on three artists and poets working in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Hannah Weiner (1928–1997), Eduardo Costa (b. 1940), and Christine Kozlov (1945–2005). Weiner and Costa were key affiliates of the interdisciplinary genre known as poetry events, which this dissertation reclaims as an important conceptualist arena of collaborative production. Kozlov was part of the canonical circle of Conceptual artists associated with Seth Siegelaub; however, her contributions have since become little-known. Close readings of Weiner’s poetic reappropriation of military signal systems, Costa’s parodies of commercial fashion media, and Kozlov’s serial data streams show their textual strategies for responding to forms of reification and reveal in their works queer and feminist deconstructions of dominant norms.

Combining literary and cultural theories of signification with media studies, this dissertation analyzes these artists’ uses of written language on semiotic as well as operational registers, articulating ways in which their art emulates non-semantic, mechanical code and its effects on interpersonal communication. What surfaces is a picture of early conceptualism as a form of critical analysis particularly attuned to the emerging “connexionist” world.