{"id":234,"date":"2015-01-22T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T01:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/?page_id=234"},"modified":"2019-07-18T15:07:35","modified_gmt":"2019-07-18T22:07:35","slug":"liz-kotz","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/arthistory.ucr.edu\/faculty\/liz-kotz\/","title":{"rendered":"Liz Kotz"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Associate Professor
\n<\/span>Ph.D., Columbia University<\/p>\n<\/i> 227 Arts Building
\n<\/i> (951) 827-5921
\n<\/span><\/i> <\/span>ewkotz@ucr.edu
\n<\/a><\/i> Curriculum Vitae
\n<\/a><\/i> Personal website<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n
Biography\/Education<\/strong><\/span>Research\/Teaching<\/strong><\/span>Selected Publications<\/strong><\/span>Books<\/strong><\/span><\/div>
\n

Liz Kotz<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liz Kotz has taught at UC Riverside since 2007. She is the author of Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art <\/em>(MIT Press, 2007), which traces the proliferation of language as a material across experimental practices in music, performance and the visual arts. Drawing on more than two decades of research on 1960s avant-gardes, Kotz is completing a book on the emergence of interdisciplinary artmaking, through an examination of An Anthology of Chance Operations<\/em>, the influential collection of scores, poems, drawings, and manifestos assembled by the composer La Monte Young in 1961 (and published in 1963). Other recent\/forthcoming essays discuss the landmark Dwan Language shows of 1967-1970, the 1972 gallery exhibition Memory<\/em> by the poet Bernadette Mayer, and the poetry of the sculptor Carl Andre. She also publishes widely on the work of contemporary artists, including Amy Adler, Lutz Bacher, Madison Brookshire, Richard Hawkins, Evan Holloway, Zoe Leonard, among others. Her recent graduate seminars have examined Los Angeles Art of the 1970s, Post-WWII Painting, and Art After the Object.<\/p>\n

Education<\/strong><\/p>\n

2002 Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Columbia University, with distinction
\nThesis: \u201cWords on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Read as Art: Postwar Media Poetics From Cage to Warhol\u201d (Sponsor: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh)
\n1996 M. Phil. Comparative Literature, Columbia University
\n1992 M.A. English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
\n1989-91 Graduate study, Film Studies, San Francisco State University
\n1986 B.A. Humanities, Honors, Stanford University
\n1983-84 Litt\u00e9rature Moderne, Universit\u00e9 de Paris VII<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Areas of Specialization:<\/strong> mo<\/em>dern and contemporary art history, with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary art practices including performance, experimental film and video, text and sound; psychoanalysis and theories of the subject; the history and theory of photography.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cLanguage Upside Down,\u201d in Mary Bauermeister: The New York Decade<\/em>. Smith College Museum of Art, 2015.<\/p>\n

\u201cConversation with Tashi Wada,\u201d Simone Forti, Thinking with the Body<\/em>. Austria: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cConvergence of Music, Dance and Sculpture c1961,\u201d in Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance<\/em>. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry Machines\u201d (on work by George Maciunas and Dieter Roth), in +\/-1961: Founding the Expanded Arts<\/em>. Madrid: Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy Memory Matters: Notes on Bernadette Mayer\u2019s Work,\u201d Concreta<\/em> 02, Barcelona: Fall 2013: 4-19. Spanish and English.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeth Siegelaub: Passages,\u201d Artforum<\/em>, December, 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cDark Rides,\u201d Evan Holloway<\/em>. London, UK: Ridinghouse, 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake an object to be lost: multiples and minimalism,\u201d The Small Utopia: Ars multiplicata<\/em>. Venice: Fondazione Prada, 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cAttention Span 2012\u201d<\/p>\n

Books<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz, eds. The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading<\/em>. New York: Semiotexte, 1995.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/header>\n

<\/p>\n

\n


\n\"\"Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art
\n<\/a><\/span>2010, The MIT Press<\/span>
\nLiz Kotz, author<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s\u2013in 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 \u201cLanguage to be Looked at and\/or Things to be Read.\u201d 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 \u201cbookends\u201d of her study: the \u201ctext score\u201d for John Cage\u2019s legendary 1952 work 4\u201933\u201d\u2013written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets\u2013 and Andy Warhol\u2019s notorious a: a novel\u2013twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed\u2013published 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n