Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 21. L'Affiche contemporaine : Discours, supports, stratégies |
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Words to Be Looked At. Language in 1960s Art |
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Author: Jan Baetens Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At. Language in 1960s Art |
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Liz Kotz's book is a very important contribution to our knowledge of both intermediality and medium-specificity in the art of the 1960s, the transitional decade between Modernism and Postmodernism in which the role and the position of language became paramount in the visual arts. Yet this study goes dramatically beyond the traditional and over-easy interpretation of this phenomenon, which tends to see the increasing importance of language as a symptom of the shift towards conceptual art within the visual field, on the one side, and the reduction of language to its merely material dimensions, on the other side. The author's acute awareness of the duplicity of the conceptual 'sign', which she reads both as an 'idea' (to be read, to be understood) and as a 'form' (to be looked at, to be aesthetically perceived), as well as her strong feeling of the relationship between conceptual art and broader historical transformations, which exceed in many regards the isolated field of the visual arts, make this book as original as thought-provoking.
Words to Be Looked At does not start at the 'conceptual turn' (nor takes it as its starting point the broader 'linguistic turn' in Western culture). It opens instead with an in-depth analysis of John Cage's watershed composition "4'33", which she considers -and I think very rightly- the basis of the revolution that will characterize the two following decades. Yet "4'33" is not read here in itself, as merely a musical composition (or anti-composition). Nor is it read only for the aesthetical and philosophical ideas that are behind it (for instance a reflection on the boundaries between silence, music, and noise, or a reflection on the status of chance in music and art). It is read on the contrary in its double status of score as well as performance (the two being obviously linked). The insistence of the score, i.e. on its visual aspects as well as on its successive versions (very different from one another), and on the details of the performance, i.e. on the production of the work, help Liz Kotz to foreground two characteristics of Cage's work that will prove crucial for a better understanding of the art to come. First of all the growing awareness of composition (and later of art in general) as a process, in which the making of the work is taking the place of the work itself. This vital shift is then linked to a second transformation, which is the role of chance and unpredictability. Both elements contribute to a radical transformation of the status of the work. A work of art is no longer a fixed and finished object, but becomes a score for further performances, and of the relationship between author and public, the latter becoming as important in the life of the work as the former.
It is clear that, from this point of view, not just the conceptual turn but also many other innovations of the 1960s like the performance art movement, can be explained. Yet Liz Kotz does much more than rereading the 60s as a post-Cagean period. In her book, three other major ideas are thoroughly argued (and convincingly demonstrated).
First of all, the revolutionary impact of the use of language, which had been excluded from the field of the Modernist visual field, and whose spectacular return (for words and images had never ceased being crossed and combined in Western culture) has been essential to the critique of visual representation: the very combination of words reduced to their bare material essence reinforced the critique of the accompanying visual artefact as 'works in themselves' and accelerated their transformation into 'scores for performances'.
Second, the conviction that this revolution can not be circumscribed to the sole domain of painting and sculpture, but that movements like conceptual art, minimalist art, and performance art, have to been understood in relationship to one another in the expanded field of art as score and performance. Kotz's interest for literature, inside as well as outside the word of the visual arts, might be the first step toward a real paradigm shift in our conception of minimalism and conceptualism. Not only does she puts to the fore the relationships between little-known work by John Ashbery (namely his experiments with sampling in "Europe") and the Cage-inspired chance compositions by Jackson Mac Low, but her book pays (finally!) great attention to the literary production of major visual artists such as Carl Andre and Vito Acconci (the archives used by the author are particularly fascinating in this regard). The continuity between words and images becomes very clear, as becomes clear the signification of the artists' battle against traditional forms of representation as symbol of the broader battle against art as a mere 'object' (cut of from its process) that is rule-bound (instead of remaining open to chance and change) by the will of its maker (who is just part of a larger process of making in which the audience plays a key role too).
Third and finally, the idea that the new vision of art and artist has to be understood against the background of larger social transformations, which appear to be technology driven. Both the work of Cage and that of conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, and the many literary experiments of the 1960s, are inextricably linked with the revolution(s) introduced by the mechanical reproduction of sound, image, and word. The analysis of Andy Warhol's 1968 book a: a novel gives the author a good opportunity to emphasize the importance of what Kittler calls the regime of the various writing machines (gramophone, film, typewriter), not just as reproductive but as productive technologies. The use of various instruments and techniques in order to create new events (instead of using them in order to fix and reproduce given objects) is then the major thread that is running throughout the 1960s, a period opened by Cage's experiments of the 40s and 50s and informing the most irrecoverable and illegible works -or should one say 'actions'- by Warhol. |
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Jan Baetens is teaching at the Institute for Cultural Studies of the KU Leuven and is founding editor of Image [&] Narrative. Jan Baetens enseigne à l'Institut d'Etudes Culturelles de la KU Leuven et codirige "Image [&] Narrative". |
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