CAA News Today

Liz Kotz Named Art Journal Reviews Editor

Liz Kotz has been appointed reviews editor of Art Journal; she began her term January 1, 2007. Kotz is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and an affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She succeeds Robin Adèle Greeley, associate professor of art history at the University of Connecticut, in the position.

Kotz received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University in 2002, with a dissertation on “Postwar Media Poetics from Cage to Warhol.” Her research investigates cross-disciplinary aesthetic practices that emerged in the post–WWII era, including visual art, film and video, sound art, and poetry. Her teaching and scholarship explore the relationship of these more contemporary practices to earlier twentieth-century avant-gardes and to cultural and aesthetic impacts of new technologies of recording, reproduction, and transmission.

Kotz writes, “Contemporary art has become a vast field of activity, one that is increasingly interdisciplinary and international in scope. Art Journal aims to review important and groundbreaking books that reflect this range—potentially covering not only work from university presses and other scholarly writing, but also the exhibition catalogues, small-press publications, and artist-produced books that animate our field. Perhaps because my background is cross-disciplinary, I would like to see Art Journal address artwork and scholarship in screen-based media, sound art, and the like, as well as the myriad philosophical and theoretical perspectives that inform recent art history and criticism. Because Art Journal reaches artists, art historians, curators, and other art professionals, it plays a vital role in articulating fresh critical perspectives and bringing coherence to this dynamic, constantly changing field.”

Her first book, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (forthcoming from MIT Press), is a critical study of uses of language in midcentury American art. It starts by examining scores and compositions by the experimental composer John Cage and tracing his impact on artists and poets in the sixties, including La Monte Young, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, and Andy Warhol. Her second book, Six Sound Problems, will address projects by Cage, Young, David Tudor, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, and James Tenney. She is also working on a collection of essays, Aesthetics of the Expanded Screen, that will explore film and video installations and the condition of the durational image.

Kotz’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, such as October, Cinematograph, Documents, Text zur Kunst, and Artforum, and in edited books and catalogues, including Jack Pierson, Desire/Despair (2006), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (2006), and Dia’s Andy (2005). At the University of Minnesota, she has taught classes on visual culture and media history, documentary cinema, and film history, and seminars on Andy Warhol, film theory, and psychoanalysis.