The 20th/21st Century Workshop is pleased to welcome:

Christopher Gortmaker

PhD Student, English, University of Chicago

Mary Ellen Solt, Concretizing 1968

The essay takes up Mary Ellen Solt’s experimental performance poem The Peoplemover (1968), and interprets it in the context of Solt’s artist-scholar practice and the tumultuous political environment of the US in 1968. Although The Peoplemover is a major work and Solt one of the foremost proponents of Concrete poetry in the world, the poem has received no critical attention. I claim the The Peoplemover as a significant work in the the history of Concretism and as such, a transitional work, marking a historically and geographically specific moment in which the modernist problematic of the “concrete” is subsumed within the neo-avant-garde formation of political performance art in the US. Solt calls the work a “demonstration poem,” and my essay tries to show how it not only transforms what might otherwise be wall-hung works of concrete poetry into tools for protest; but also how the poem more fundamentally demands interpretation of what this transformation of art into activism means—in 1968—in art-philosophical and political-economic terms.

Monday, October 19 from 3:00pm-4:20pm on Zoom

with respondent Deborah Nelson, Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and the College, University of Chicago

Christopher’s paper (to be read in advance) and Zoom meeting info can be found here. The paper is password-protected; please contact the workshop coordinators if you need access. If you join our subscriber list, you will receive passwords for upcoming events in our event announcement emails.

This event is free and open to the public. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the workshop coordinators, Zachary Hope (zhope@uchicago.edu) and Zoe Hughes (zbhughes@uchicago.edu).