The aesthetics of silence, withdrawal and negation in conceptual art

An essay by Jo Melvin exploring two interweaving strands of ideas that came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which inform a discussion of works by Barry Flanagan (1941–2009) and Christine Kozlov (1945–2005). These were the newly emerging concept of publication and distribution as a site for exhibition and the attitudes identified by Susan Sontag in her 1967 essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’.