Liz Kotz
Cultural Historian
Thursday, March 8, 2007

A professor at the University of Minnesota, Kotz’s research focuses on different aspects of the cross-disciplinary and inter-media aesthetic practices that emerged in the post WWII era. She has published essays on contemporary art, film & video, sound art, and poetry; her book Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Kotz will be presenting a lecture titled Carl Andre’s Poetics of War. The lecture discusses the little-known 1960s poetry of the sculptor Carl Andre, to show how Andre used strategies of removal, isolation and fragmentation to reveal what he saw as the “textual unconscious” of American genocide. Read in retrospect, these poems offer fascinating efforts to grapple with the language of war and cultural eradication.