Kenneth Goldsmith
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 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.
P. Adams Sitney
Of the many strengths of Words to be Looked At, Kotz's synthetic vision stands out. She has a gift for bringing together previously isolated works in ways that illuminate both elements of her comparison. The discussion of John Ashbery and Jackson MacLow offers us a superb example of this within the domain of poetry, while the chapter on George Brecht's performance piece and Joseph Kosuth's photographic installation provides a model for the synthesis of different arts.
Endorsement
Of the many strengths of Words to be Looked At, Kotz's synthetic vision stands out. She has a gift for bringing together previously isolated works in ways that illuminate both elements of her comparison. The discussion of John Ashbery and Jackson MacLow offers us a superb example of this within the domain of poetry, while the chapter on George Brecht's performance piece and Joseph Kosuth's photographic installation provides a model for the synthesis of different arts.
P. Adams Sitney , Director, Program in Visual Arts, Princeton University
From the Publisher
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, Dia Art Foundation
Lynne Cooke
"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