Liz Kotz: Words To Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2007)

“Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s—whether in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, or recorded speech. 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 used 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.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262113082, 9780262113083
333 pages

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Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973)

“The central figure in this portrait of a crumbling society giving birth to the modern world without realizing it was Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker whose great book remains the key to modern thought and who went on to influence a whole generation of English thinkers, artists and scientists.

As a portrait of a man, this book is superbly realized. It is even better as a portrait of the age and milieu in which our modern ideas were born–not only in philosophy, but in art, music, literature, architecture, design and style.”

Publisher Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973
A Touchstone Book
ISBN 0671217259, 9780671217259
314 pages

Review: Barry Seldes (H-Net, 1996).

Wittgenstein’s Vienna (English, 1973)
La Viena de Wittgenstein (Spanish, trans. Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, 1998; removed on 2017-10-3 upon request of publishre)

Roman Jakobson: Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1976/1978)

As Lévi-Strauss writes: “These innovatory ideas, towards which I was no doubt drawn by my own thought but as yet with neither the boldness nor the conceptual tools necessary to organize them properly, were all the more convincing in that Jakobson’s exposition of them was performed with that incomparable art which made him the most dazzling teacher and lecturer that I had ever been lucky enough to hear.”

This book is marked by Jakobson’s elegance and demonstrative powers. Jakobson never pursues abstract and sometimes difficult course of his argument without illuminating it by examples from a great variety of languages and from the arts.

Originally published as Six leçons sur le son et le sens by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1976.
Translated by John Mepham
Preface by Claude-Lévi Strauss
Publisher The MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262100193
116 pages

Jakobson at Monoskop wiki

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