In the 1960s, Christine Kozlov (born 1945) was one of the few women working in the male-dominated sphere of conceptual and “intermedial” art, the latter term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe artworks that emphasize the dialectic between media (Higgins, 1984). No Title consists of an unexposed length of film in a metal film can that from its very inception was not intended by the artist for projection. Kozlov’s negation of film’s performative function transforms both the canister and the filmstrip into pure material potentiality—an unmade film piece and a sculpture. Like Joseph Beuys’s Das Schweigen, the static materiality of Kozlov’s film evokes the concepts of silence and nothingness. But unlike Paik’s Zen for Film, Kozlov’s work is never activated. Rather, it can be understood as either a potential for performance that is yet to happen or its inverse: the leftover of a performance that may have never happened. —LS

Image: Collection Marilyn Thompson.