Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art [Hardcover]

Liz Kotz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 2007

"Book-ended by Cage's 4'33'' and Warhol's a: a novel, by 'silence' and 'glossolalia', Liz Kotz's text tracks a hitherto uncharted trajectory in what she terms "the turn to language" in vanguard art practices of the 1960s and 70s. Kotz's nuanced probing of linguistic operations serving instrumental or instructional ends and/or deployed as material entities illuminates an impressively wide range of works in various fields from experimental music and poetry, to the visual arts. Acutely attentive to that era's displacement of conventional categories, she constructs a network of cross disciplinary readings that freshly parses the interrelationships of Fluxus, Conceptual, performance and post-minimal art works with concurrent disciplines."--Lynne Cooke, Curator, Dia Art Foundation

(Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation )

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In 1959, Brion Gysin famously claimed that poetry was fifty years behind painting. Gysin's prophecy still holds true: half a century later, contemporary poetry is just beginning to explore ideas forged by language-based artists in the 1960s. As such, this book is a roadmap, bursting at the seams with inspiration and ideas for current literary practices. By embracing an intermedia approach -- one where music, photography, visual art, poetry and performance all live in the same room -- Liz Kotz elegantly creates a compelling portrait of our digitized networked present. The implications are radical: by gazing backwards, this book predicts the future."-- Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Pennsylvania

A critical study of the use of language and the proliferation of text in 1960s art and experimental music, with close examinations of works by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Cage, Douglas Huebler, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, and others.

Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s--in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, recorded speech, and more. In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz traces this practice to its beginnings, examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. In many of these works, language has been reduced to an object nearly emptied of meaning. Robert Smithson described a 1967 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery as consisting of "Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read." Kotz considers the paradox of artists living in a time of social upheaval who use words but chose not to make statements with them. Kotz traces the proliferation of text in 1960s art to the use of words in musical notation and short performance scores. She makes two works the "bookends" of her study: the "text score" for John Cage's legendary 1952 work 4'33"--written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets-- and Andy Warhol's notorious a: a novel--twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed--published by Grove Press in 1968. Examining works by artists and poets including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, George Brecht, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Weiner, Kotz argues that the turn to language in 1960s art was a reaction to the development of new recording and transmission media: words took on a new materiality and urgency in the face of magnetic sound, videotape, and other emerging electronic technologies. Words to Be Looked At is generously illustrated, with images of many important and influential but little-known works.Liz Kotz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

"An excellently researched archaeology of the emergence of Conceptualism in New York in the '60s and a reminder of the extraordinary fecundity of the dialogues that were occurring in avant-garde circles at that time." Michael Gibbs The Art Book

"Book-ended by Cage's 4'33" and Warhol's a: a novel, by 'silence' and 'glossolalia', Liz Kotz's text tracks a hitherto uncharted trajectory in what she terms "the turn to language" in vanguard art practices of the 1960s and 70s. Kotz's nuanced probing of linguistic operations serving instrumental or instructional ends and/or deployed as material entities illuminates an impressively wide range of works in various fields from experimental music and poetry, to the visual arts. Acutely attentive to that era's displacement of conventional categories, she constructs a network of cross disciplinary readings that freshly parses the interrelationships of Fluxus, Conceptual, performance and post-minimal art works with concurrent disciplines." Lynne Cooke, Curator, Dia Art Foundation

"Book-ended by Cage"s 4"33" and Warhol"s a: a novel, by "silence" and "glossolalia", Liz Kotz"s text tracks a hitherto uncharted trajectory in what she terms "the turn to language" in vanguard art practices of the 1960s and 70s. Kotz"s nuanced probing of linguistic operations serving instrumental or instructional ends and/or deployed as material entities illuminates an impressively wide range of works in various fields from experimental music and poetry, to the visual arts. Acutely attentive to that era"s displacement of conventional categories, she constructs a network of cross disciplinary readings that freshly parses the interrelationships of Fluxus, Conceptual, performance and post-minimal art works with concurrent disciplines."Lynne Cooke , Curator, Dia Art Foundation

"In 1959, Brion Gysin famously claimed that poetry was fifty years behind painting. Gysin"s prophecy still holds true: half a century later, contemporary poetry is just beginning to explore ideas forged by language-based artists in the 1960s. As such, this book is a roadmap, bursting at the seams with inspiration and ideas for current literary practices. By embracing an intermedia approachone where music, photography, visual art, poetry and performance all live in the same roomLiz Kotz elegantly creates a compelling portrait of our digitized networked present. The implications are radical: by gazing backwards, this book predicts the future."Kenneth Goldsmith , University of Pennsylvania

"Kotz, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, has a keen eye and ear for language in art. And she has also gamely tackled close readings of some of the twentieth century's most impenetrable, enigmatic artworks and poems, drawing out a succession of fascinating details and compelling contextualizations." Art on Paper

About the Author

Liz Kotz teaches in the Art History Department at the University of California, Riverside.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (September 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262113082
• ISBN-13: 978-0262113083
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,515,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enter the Word, November 26, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Hardcover)

I've been reading Liz Kotz's book for many months and I still haven't plumbed its depths all the way to the bottom, however what I have made of it, I love. In its range and in the brilliance of its insights it reminds me a bit of Pamela Lee's Chronophobia book, which likewise was always coming and throwing delightful curves at the reader, though Kotz goes beyond Lee, or so I feel, in the arcane angles from which she pursues her subjects. She also has a lot more humor than Lee, which is all to the good. Kotz' thesis is--well, I can't boil it down here on Amazon since her arguments, like the mythical Hydra, are multi-headed, but she takes on the donnee of much contemporary art writing, that in the 1950s and 1960s language made enormous and telling inroads into the world of visual art, and she tries to account for this `turn towards language' by pursuing various cultural and historical markers. Simultaneously she shows that the process itself (the `turn') devolved into a `re-turn,' and the art became conscious of itself as being embroiled in a genre-churning mash-up. So there's all this activity, and some of it looks inward--and coupled with the social revolutions of the 1960s, there's a lot of ways in which anyone trying to make sense of all this material could go wrong, and Kotz evades every trap. You feel like cheering for her to succeed the way one cheered on D.B. Cooper's getaway after that hijack caper.

Book begins with a consideration of John Cage's enigmatic 4'33" and its three scores. Kotz has a lot of fun about which one of the three is most canonical; in the end, we are led to agreeing with her that it doesn't matter, but that the resistance of critics to the so-called 1960 version is largely due to the fact that it is represented not in conventional musical terms, nor even by the familiar plunging graphics, but in words--humble but actual words (this is the one with the "Tacet"/"Silence" interchange that always strikes me as monastic. In any case working her way through conflicting claims, Kotz arrives at one of her most striking points, that after 1952, duration becomes one of the building blocks of art. Soon, Sol LeWitt is claiming to see that the idea becomes the machine that makes art, so that torques a little to reveal that the event is the machine that makes art. She tracks the progress of artists as different as Ashbery and Acconci through the 1960s, and winds up with a dazzling look at Warhol's novel "a" as the ultimate 60s durational work, a "project that must be undergone to be understood." Along the way she has a ball with the contemporary critics of "a," and I always love reading that sort of thing--Michael Sherry performed a similar analysis of contemporary reviews of Samuel Barber's Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra in last year's Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy. Really some of the same knuckleheads were involved in tearing apart both "a" and the "empty-mind" operas of Barber.

Hmm, makes me afraid that 40 years from now, the scholars of the future will be pouncing on all the 1 star reviews I've written for Amazon, and showing that the works of art I hated will be universally held up in 2049 as works of genius and I'm a fool. I know it's going to happen, and knowing I'll be dead by the time that happens doesn't make me less afraid for myself!