This is 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 Younge, and others.Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s - in the form of printed texts, painted signs, word...
This is 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 Younge, 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.
Paradoxically, both words and images were often understood to function transparently, as if they could provide direct, unmediated access to the things they represent. Such a focus on the photograph's evidentiary status might seem to emphasize photography's difference from language: as a seemingly raw, purely denotational image, without overt symbolic, ideological, or artistic connotation, the photograph appears as a purely indexical sign- an uncoded trace, unlike the inherently arbitrary, figural, coded nature of the linguistic sign.
1960s' artists' recurrent obsession with the most minimal, redundant and empty of messages can be seen as an effort to foreground the channels of transmission and the conditions of reception in these new communications media (查看原文)
what is so perverse about so much of late 1960s' art is not the use of text as explanatory discourse, as a kind of caption, but the desire to reduce language itself to something like 'the mute presence of an uncoded event'- to the kind of pure facticity and presence of the photograph or indexical mark, whose ultimate message, Krauss asserts, is 'I am here'.
Huebler proclaimed, 'I choose not to make objects anymore. Instead I try to create a quality of experience that locates itself "in the world". I now make work that consists of "documents" that form the structure of an idea or system whose function is to create a conceptual "frame" around a space/time content.' We can see how Huebler in effect struggled to transfer the phenomenological dimensions of Minimal art- focusing on the viewer's... (查看原文)
0 有用 零二 2018-07-06 12:32:14
60年代還是一個很重要的時間點，美國的當代藝術也從此躍居世界，實驗音樂、詩歌、視覺藝術層出不窮，語言，或文字成為一種創作的材料被觀看，而不是被閱讀的時候，對日本的具像詩，視覺詩的研究就打開新的思路。