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5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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KENNETH GOLDSMITH
IN CONVERSATION
5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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Te series editor of Critics in Conversation would like to
acknowledge Te Museum at De La Salle University, its curator
Ms. Lalyn Buncab, and its board member Ms. Della Besa for
granting his request to reproduce the painting, Yellow Trio
(Musicians) by National Artist Arturo Luz, from the Wili and
Doreen Fernandez Art Collection for the cover art of the series.
Critics in Conversation
General Editor: DAVID JONAHAN Y. BAYO
De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines
Critics in Conversationis a series meant for readers who want an
accessible and engaging introduction to the ideas of the leading
minds in the field of literary studies, cultural criticism, and
critical theory.
Already available:
Catherine Belsey in Conversation
(with David Jonathan Y. Bayot)
Jonathan Dollimore in Conversation
(with David Jonathan Y. Bayot)
5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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KENNETH GOLDSMITH
IN CONVERSATION
Kenneth Goldsmith
and
Francisco Roman Guevara
De La Salle University Publishing House2014
5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
Copyright 2014 by Kenneth Goldsmith
All rights reserved.
No part o this monograph may be reproduced in any orm
or by any means, or in any inormation storage or retrieval system
without the written permission o the copyright owner and the publisher.
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University Publishing House2401 Taf Avenue, Manila, Philippines 1004
Tel. No: (632) 524-4611 loc. 271
Teleax: (632) 523-4281
Emails: [email protected]
Website: www.dlsu.edu.ph
Te De La Salle University Publishing House is the publications office
of De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines.
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
PN Goldsmith, Kenneth
81 Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation / Kenneth Goldsmith and
.G64 Francisco Roman Guevara.Manila : De La Salle University
2000 Publishing House (2014)
z 50p. ; 15 cm.(Critics in conversation : a DLSU Publishing
House series)
ISBN 978-971-555-596-8
1. Criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature) 3. LiteratureHistory and
criticism. I. Guevara, Francisco Roman. II. Title. III Series: Critics in
conversation : a DLSU Publishing House series
Cover Design: Shedina de GuiaLayout: Althea Marie Mallari
5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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KENNETH GOLDSMITH
IN CONVERSATION
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5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation
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FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA: Te reason why I wanted
to be in conversation with you is because o what I perceive to be thesignificance o your recent work, Seven American Deaths and Disasters.
Its significant precisely because o how it bends without breaking the
rigors o uncreative writing you were grappling with in the aferword o
the book:
But afer ten books o quotidian compilations, an
unexpected thing happened: I began to tire o the
everyday. Afer all, the job o retyping the entire Internetcould go on orever, driving me to seek a new line o
investigation. Still deeply entrenched in a digital ethos,
I remained tied to a mimetic and uncreative way o
writing, yet ound mysel struggling with how to expand
my ocus without radically altering my long-standing
practice.
I think the book explores a variation o your digital ethos byopening up a remarkable amount o possibilities or thinking about the
unreadability o your work, which you discuss in your poetics statement
titled Being Boring rom the anthology American Poets in the 21st
Century: Te New Poetics, edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell:
I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. I there
were an Olympic sport or extreme boredom, I would get
a gold medal. My books are impossible to read straightthrough. In act, every time I have to prooread them
beore sending them off to the publisher, I all asleep
repeatedly. You really dont need to read my books to get
the idea o what theyre like; you just need to know the
general concept.
Over the past ten years, my practice today has boiled down
to simply retyping existing texts. Ive thought about my
practice in relation to Borgess Pierre Menard, but even
Menard was more original than I am: he, independent
o any knowledge o Don Quixote,reinvented Cervantes
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4 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
masterpiece word or word. By contrast, I dont invent
anything. I just keep rewriting the same book. Isympathize with the protagonist o a cartoon claiming
to have transerred x amount o megabytes, physically
exhausted afer a day o downloading. Te simple act
o moving inormation rom one place to another today
constitutes a significant cultural act in and o itsel. I
think its air to say that most o us spend hours each day
shifing content into different containers. Some o us call
this writing.
Seven American Deaths and Disasters,particularly World rade
Center, becomes an interesting text precisely because o the way it
explores multiple levels o unreadability rom the boredom o what you
call your quotidian compilations to the unreadability o the American
deaths and disasters being transcribed and perormed on the page.
Id like to begin by addressing the implications o your beginning
and how this has affected the interesting shifs o your long-standingengagement with readability rom your sculptural work to 73 Poems
(1994) to Soliloquy (2001) to Seven American Deaths and Disasters
(2013). In an interview with Marjorie Perloff or Jacket Magazine, you
discuss the shif rom, to use Perloffs words, A (V culture in Long
Island) to B (Cage and Joan La Barbara) and C (a combination o high/
low) by talking about the shif o your practice rom art to poetry. Can
you discuss your reading o poetry or the poetry you read rom A to B
to C and how they affected your inquiries with language and the levelso your strategic nonintervention or quotidian compilations rom your
sculptural work to 73 Poems to Soliloquy to Seven American Deaths
and Disasters? Im interested in the potential relationships ormed by
the poetry you read at the time you wrote your works and the works
engagement with readability. Tis is a roundabout way o asking you
two things: 1) how your reading has inormed the readability o your
work and 2) an attempt to ask you about your personal and intellectual
history via the art and poetry youve read.
KENNETH GOLDSMITH: I began in the 80s as a visual artist and
became rather successul at it. I was selling everything I made and
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 5
showing in the best galleries. But I was miserable, mostly because Id
become what I went into art to avoid: a businessman. I had a studio ullo assistants and was pumping out work or shows around the world. My
values were becoming very much in sync with materialistic culture, and
I was straying ar rom where I knew I needed to be. Eventually, these
conflicts o values became too much or me to bear. And so I crashed
and lef the art world. I spent several years in the early 90s in limbo,
trying to figure out what to do next.
Te solution came in the orm o John Cage. When I was a student,
I picked up a copy o Silenceand couldnt really understand it, but whenI was looking or a way out o the predicament Id gotten mysel into,
I remembered it. In the book, Cage proposes an inversion o logic,
suggesting that through nonlinear thinking, one could find a kind o
reedom, seeing possibility instead o ear in lies random events. While
he adopted many o his ideas rom Eastern thought, he couched them in
terms o art and aesthetics, so I was able to adopt them in nonreligious
ways.
Afer finding Cage, I became devoted to that kind o thinking, whichled me to embrace anything having to do with the avant-garde(UbuWeb
is a direct outgrowth o this situation). I spent the early 90s reading
everything that I could get my hands on that could be termed avant-
garde: the entire oeuvres o Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Pound, Cummings,
and so orth. Joyce led me back to James, which led me to Zola (I
devoured his entire Rougon-Macquart series, which taught me about
documentary-based writing), and Zola led me to the everyday poetics
o Boswell and Sterne. Moving in the other direction, I went deep intoAmerican experimental fictionGass, Markson, Gaddisand ell into
concrete and sound poetry, as well as some o the Beats: Kerouacs more
experimental stuff (Old Angel Midnight), Ginsberg, and Burroughss
cut-ups. I ound Gysin and Ballard through RE/Search, an early 80s San
Francisco-based industrial culture zine, which opened up the world
o punk writers like Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, and Kathy Acker.
On the other side, Cage led me to Mac Low, who led me to Language
poets like Bernstein, Andrews, Hejinian, and Silliman. Silliman was
particularly important with his use o overt conceptual procedures and
constraints. Finally, Marjorie Perloff s critical writings ramed many o
these tendencies into something sensible to me.
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6 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
In terms o readability, I read all those so-called unreadable texts.
I spent a whole summer reading Finnegans Wakecover to cover. I readUlyssestwiceonce in India, when it was the only book I took on my
month-long trip. In my reading, I discoveredand reveled inthe
range and flavors o difficulties. For instance, I ound Jamess Te Golden
Bowlto be marvelously unreadable due to its density and mathematical
structure while Becketts trilogy was equally difficult, although it was
written in the simplest language. I discovered that difficult texts were
not unreadable, just differently readable. exts could be objectslike
concrete poetry and Steins fields o visual languageor so ridiculouslyepic, as in the case o Benjamins Arcades Project, that they begged
engagementrather than reading.
GUEVARA: I like the way your experience o literature was oriented
around the experience o rereading John Cages Silence. Instead o
reading the literary tradition chronologically as most students o
literature are required to do, you began seeking works rom a concern
with your perceived maniestations o language in an attempt toarticulate this malaise you had with being an artist in the art world.
So much o your interests with the concept o unreadability seem
inextricably tied to the perceived literary trajectories and inheritances
begun by John Cage and, as well discuss later on, Andy Warhol. Both
made significant contributions to the field o literature (i.e., Silence
[1961] and X [1983] or Cage and a: a novel [1968] and Te Andy
Warhol Diaries [1989] or Warhol) inasmuch as they were important
practitioners o music and art, respectively. In this way, your idea ouncreative writing seems to be a careul negotiation o music, art, and
literature. Can you talk urther about the difference between conceptual
and constraint-based or procedural writing given this interdisciplinary
negotiation?
GOLDSMITH:Cage and Warhol are rarely thought o as writers even
though, as you say, they made significant contributions to the field. But
Im interested in the primary production o these artists so that their
secondary lines o production, so to speak, become or me their main
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 7
occupation.1 Im also very interested in what happens when you work
in a field or which you are not trained. You dont know the rules, soyou can do new things. Tis is what happened with me and writing.
What seemed to be a perectly intuitive investigation or me required a
radical sel-questioning or my advanced-degree conceptualist peers like
Rob Fitterman, Christian Bk, and Craig Dworkin, who were trained to
know all the rules. As a result, they had to work much harder to unlearn
them in order to do their present work. I dont wish to cleave too closely
to the idea o the outsider, but it does open things up. Also, a training
in visual art is not only about visual art: one learns about all types oexperimental music, film, perormance, and literature, which one eels
ree to incorporate into ones practice. Art schools are unny places like
that: they tend to posit canons and are open-ended and flexible; you
are encouraged to take bits and pieces rom wherever you want and
make them your own. Te manner o education is very casual, intuitive,
experiential, improvisatory, and fluid; it teaches you to totally ignore
rules.
GUEVARA: When you outlined your ideas o conceptual writing in
Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing, you appropriated Sol LeWitts
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, which first appeared in the magazine
Artorum in 1967, by substituting Writing or Art and all the
corresponding shifs in nomenclature throughout the essay. You also
strategically omitted parts o LeWitts essay that engaged art in a way
that I assume could not be translated to conceptual writing. You ended
the piece with this statement: Conceptual writing is good only when theidea is good. Im curious about the way you negotiate the particularities
o Sol LeWitts conceptual art into your conceptual writing. Perhaps
one o the more significant aspects o this negotiation is the experience
o idea. Can you discuss urther this experience o idea rom art to
writing and the distinctions you make (i any) between conceptual and,
to elevate the previous inquiry, nonconceptual writing? Also, how does
this experience o idea relate to a writing that is considered creative and
uncreative?
1 UbuWeb is almost entirely based on this idea. On Ubu, or example, most visitors know aboutthis amazing electroacoustic musician rom the 1950s named Jean Dubuffet; later, they findout that hes also a painter.
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8 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
GOLDSMITH: A pure LeWittian notion o conceptual writing has,
over the past decade, been ully explored to the point where suchprovocations have become clichd. You now have generations o poets
data scraping vast portions o the Web, throwing their trove into
InDesign, and uploading it to Lulu as print-on-demand books that,
most likely, will never be printed. Just today, or instance, I was shown
an impressive-looking first book called Supergroup rom a young
author, Andy Sterling. It was our hundred pages long. Te contents
(poems) were lists o session players rom long-orgotten LPs rom the
70s, clipped rom Discogs, pasted onto a Word document, and sentup to Lulu. Its a big, dumb, sexy thinga sort o move that Seth Price
might do in visual artand plays with ideas o authorship and value in
ways that are very different than what I did with Day. My works always
had some kind o denouement and were heavily reliant on value
(although I heralded valuelessness) in order to make some larger point
about language and culture. In hindsight, compared to these younger
works, my books eel conservative, clinging closely to the Author,
with a capital A. Yet theres something really contemporary aboutSupergrouprom conception to production to distributionthat goes
against the LeWittian/Apollonian ideas o what conceptual writing can
be. Teres something marvelously wrongand impure about Supergroup
that I never couldve done. It really does eel like the next step.
I we map this onto the history o the visual art world, we might get
a glimpse o where the poetry discourse is headed. Te first generation
o 60s conceptualists like LeWitt used the pure grid as the basis or their
primary structures. But the next generationneeding to deconstruct orexpand or soil their gesturestook the grid and proverbially wrapped
it in cloth, making it sof and organic; the grid was still there, but it
had changed. Fast orward a ew years ahead, and by the mid-70s, the
grid was completely buried and was no longer necessary as an armature,
hence the opening up o neo-expressionism and the return to figuration.
I see gestures rom younger writers like Sterling, risha Low, and Steven
Zultanski (but to name a ew) adhering pretty closely to this narrative:
in their work, the grid is still very much visible, but its been sofened
and twisted in ways that first-generation conceptualists wouldnt have
dreamed o. Te result o this sort o history, in the best-case scenario,
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 9
has produced artists like Mike Kelley, whose work I see these younger
poets being very much related to.But this whole model is to be taken with a grain o salt as visual art
and poetry are very different in terms o production, distribution, and
economics, not to mention the act that this is playing out nearly a hal-
century later; nor can we underestimate the impact that technology is
having on both worlds. So while its a historical reerence point, things
most likely will play out very differently.
GUEVARA: In a note on the process o selecting the texts that madeup Seven American Deaths and Disasters, you narrowed down your
choices by beginning with the John F. Kennedy assassination and the
American post-Kennedy era because all seven events depicted [there]
were ones that [you] lived through which changed [you], and a nation,
orever. Why was it important that these transcriptions were based on
events you lived through? And how do you understand the dynamic
between the author and the idea in Seven American Deaths and
Disasters, the New York rilogy (i.e., Weather [2005], raffic [2007],and Sports[2008]), and your older works?
GOLDSMITH: I must answer these questions as an American, as
my relationship to them is tied into this countrys narrative and
mythologizing o itsel. Tis book presents and problematizes ideas o
patriotism and xenophobia, reinorcing stereotypes and mythologies that
are very particular to my country (when I read rom my book abroad, the
readings are, generally speaking, poorly received, whereas when I readthem in America, theyre very hot, emotional events). My work could
even be termed local, but o course, due to Americas large presence
in the world, its global as well, adding yet another layer o complexity
and problematicsto the text. I think that someone, say, rom Mexico
would construct a very different book called Seven Mexican Deaths and
Disasters. Indeed, anyone could have written any o my books, and they
would be completely different rom my version. I you wrote down every
word you spoke rom the moment you woke up on a Monday morning
until you went to bed on the ollowing Sunday night, you would write
a completely different book than Soliloquy. Likewise, someone in Hong
Kong or Los Angeles writing raffic would end up with a completely
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10 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
differentbut equally intriguingartiact. I like to think o my books
as open concepts, ones in which anyone could inhabit and come up withsomething unique.
We never orget where we were when we first heard news o
tragic events, which are instantly rendered iconic. Te power o the
icon is the way in which it penetrates and inhabits our subjectivity,
thereby internalizing that which is external, so that public discourse is
transormed into private, woven into the narrative abric o our own
lives. Trough this process, one witnesses the collapsing o dichotomous
concepts (objective/subjective, public/private, external/internal),resulting in an iconic event. As a devout Catholic, Warhol (rom
whose series o paintings this book takes its name) understood the
transormative nature o the icon and effectively deployed it throughout
his career, somehow turning the very public image into something at
once both shared and personal. He also understood how the iconic grows
more powerul through repeated exposure, making savvy connections
between icons and advertisingno icon or ad is good i viewed only
once: they both become more effective through repetition. Warhol eltthat art should be experienced in the same way.
In this way, all my works are autobiographical, being predicated
upon raming devices which are expressive o the time in which I am
living. In Te Weather, or instance, all I had to do every day in 2003
was turn on the radio and tape. Yet the act that the Iraq War was
begun the first day o spring that year is where the historical and the
autobiographical collide.
GUEVARA: In a recent interview conducted by Christopher Higgs or
Te Paris Review,you talked about the way you identiy your work as
poetry:
I suppose that the work has become more novelistic as
times gone on, but when I started down this path some
twenty years ago, it was only the poets and the poetry
world that could accept what I did. So I hung out with
them. You take your love where you get it. But youre
right, Ive never really written a poemI dont think
Id know how to. Yet theres some sort o openness in
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 11
the poetry world concerning writing that I havent been
able to find elsewhere. Some o the Language poets, inparticular, sort o blew apart notions o prescriptive
lineation in avor o margin-to-margin madness.
Can you discuss the conditions o this openness in the poetry world
that has allowed you to identiy with your work as poetry? Why do you
think this sort o openness cannot be ound in other orms and genres o
art?
GOLDSMITH: Not all o the poetry world is so open; its just that I
tapped into a vein that was ounded upon innovation and thereore
unusually open to different approaches. Afer having read all that
modernism, I sort o assumed that it had pretty much died out by the
time I arrived on the scene in the early 90s, when I was, by chance,
introduced to Language Poetry, which was then on its last legs.
Nonetheless, I was thrilled to find warm, living bodies in New York
City who actually seemed to be interested in extending the modernistethos. I honestly had no idea they existed. It was through them that I
encountered the writing o Marjorie Perloff, who went on to become a
great champion o my generations work. While many people eel that
Conceptualism challenged the dominance o Language Poetry, time will
show that Conceptualism is, in act, an outgrowth o Language Poetry,
one which extends a century-long investigation o radical poetics. On
many levels, theyre the same project, with Conceptual writers adapting
time-tested avant-garde strategies or the digital age.Other orms and genres o art have something to lose. Not ours.
I youre a successul painter, the last thing you want to do is change
your style or try something too new or ear o rattling your market.
Anywhere where a market is concerned, youll generally find aversion
to experimentation. But these are not poetrys troubles. O course
conceptual art long ago became a commodity, but poetry still holds
out that radical potential. Warhol once said that i you want to collect
anything in New York, youve got to find what no one else wants,
hence his hoarding o weird ceramic cookie jars. Once Warhol started
collecting them, everyone wanted one, and they became very valuable.
I Warhol were alive today, hed be interested in poetry.
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12 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
GUEVARA: Speaking o Warhols preoccupation with the valences o
value (i.e., the power o the icon and the unwanted weird ceramic cookiejars), you say that Andy Warhol is the single most important figure or
uncreative writing in the chapter Inallible Processes: What Writing
Can Learn From Visual Art rom your book Uncreative Writing.You
also edited a book o Warhols selected interviews titled Ill Be Your
Mirrorin 2004. At the end o your aferword to the book, you discuss the
significance o Warhols interviews:
Afer an encounter with the words o the words o AndyWarhol, ones relationship to language is never the same:
long-held assumptions o place, time and sel are all up
or grabs. Although Warhol was known or his suraces,
what we are lef with is an unusually strong sense o
interiority. In the end, Warhols mirror reflects on us;
as such, this book is really about us and who we are as
filtered through the apparition o Andy Warhol.
You said that the title o your book Seven American Deaths and
Disasters is a reerence to Warhols Death and Disasterseries, which he
composed during the 60s, much in the same way you appropriated E.E.
Cummingss 73 poemsor your similarly titled collaboration with Joan
La Barbara. Can you discuss the ways in which Seven American Deaths
and Disastersengages with Warhols Death and Disasterseries?
GOLDSMITH:
What was uncanny about Warhol was how he wasable to sense in the heat o the moment that a particular image would
become iconic. For instance, how could he possibly have known that
the image o Jackie mourning would still resonate fify years later? One
answer might be that Jackie hersel was aware o her media presence
during that event; she was perorming the role o the mourning First
Lady or the cameras, and Warhol picked up on this. So the whole thing
becomes sel-reflexive, with mirrors bouncing off mirrors. And the
image o the mirroror Warhols use o silverin the early 60s signifies
the beginning o simulacra-inused media culture, which in the digital
age has gone into overdrive.
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 13
Warhols Deaths and Disasterswas not a portrayal o grand, historical
events the way mine is. His was much more quirky, ocusing on smaller,eerier tragedies like people who died rom eating contaminated tuna
fish or anonymous victims o car crashes. He was magniying the
hidden death and disaster in the weave o American culture. I am taking
national tragedies and examining them through the lens o language.
We all know the outcome o my pieces; the narrative isnt as compelling
as the language is.
None o my books are original; theyre all based on historic
precedents. You already mentioned Cummings or 73 Poems; Soliloquyjumps off rom Warhols a; Fidgetresponds to Beckett; Te Weatheris a
tribute to Cages Lecture on the Weather; rafficis inspired by Godard;
Capital is a rewriting o Benjamins Arcades Project or New York in
the twentieth century. Dayis in dialogue with an obscure book called
One Day, which reprints every word o a 1928 single days issue o Te
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin except or the advertising. Te entire
newspaper was reormatted to fit into a book. Te reason or this was
that the newspaper was accused by readers o pandering too much toadvertisers at the cost o content. So the publisher decided to take one
days newspaper and turn it into a book to show how substantial its news
really was. My book, o course, has no point to make. It just is.
GUEVARA:Tis idea o the mirror comes up again in a chapter titled
Why Appropriation? rom your book Uncreative Writing. You talk
about the significance o appropriation using an analogy o the candle
and the mirror in relation to Picassos Still Lie with Chair Caning(1911-12) and Marcel Duchamps Fountain(1917):
A useul analogy is Picasso as a candle and Duchamp
as a mirror. Te light o the candle draws us to its warm
glow, holding us spellbound by its beauty. Te cool
reflexivity o the mirror pushes us away rom the object,
throwing us back on ourselves.
Instead, Duchamp invokes the mirror, creating a
repellant and reflective object, one that orces us to turn
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14 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
away in other directions. Where it sends us has been
exhaustively documented. Broadly speaking, we couldsay that Duchamps action is generativespawning
worlds o ideaswhile Picassos is absorptive, holding us
close to the object and close to our own thoughts.
owards the end o the chapter titled Inallible Processes: What
Writing Can Learn From Visual Art, you discuss Warhols value in this
way:
His ongoing strategic removal o himsel as author let the
works live on afer all the days drama was done with.
As Barthes says, Once the Author is gone, the claim
to decipher a text becomes quite useless. What on the
surace appears to be a web o lies in Warhols lie is
actually a smokescreen o purposeul disinormation in
order to deflate the figure o the author.
Can you discuss urther this preoccupation with the mirror in
your appropriation practice and the way it relates to how your books
unction, to quote rom your response to a previous question, as open
concepts, ones in which anyone could inhabit and come up with
something unique? What is it about the ongoing strategic removal
o [onesel] as author that speaks to your writing practice? Im also
interested to hear about how these concerns unction as both a way to
speak to the conditions o reproducibility and readability today and as aorm o ethics.
GOLDSMITH: In the digital age, language is a shared resource. Te
mere cutting and pasting o anothers words into your document makes
them yours temporarily until someone else reuses them, claiming
them as their own. Te removal o onesel is essential to contemporary
authorship. On the Web, ownership o concepts and language is an
illusion.
In such an environment, ethics needs to be reconsidered. Here,
stealingor sharingis not wrong; it is native to the environment.
Where authors run into trouble with plagiarism is when they try to
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 15
sneak it by; no one has ever gotten angry at me or my acts o plagiarism
because I state rom the outset that I am plagiarizing. In the New Yorkimes, a poet whose poems were swiped by another award-winning poet
wrote an editorial piece, admitting as much when she said, I can admire
conceptual poets like Kenneth Goldsmith, whose pieces are ofen a
transparent pastiche o borrowed texts. Tis is none o that.2
Barthes talks about the difference between the writerly and the
readerly texts. Te readerly is the master or tutor text, that which is
sprung rom the singular genius o the Author. Te writerly text is the
deconstructed text, the one that is open to remixing and reinterpretation.I tend to view these categories in terms o computer language and UNIX
permissions: the writerly text is the open-source textthe shared text
the readerly is read-only, unable to be tampered with. Read-only is
controlled by a distant sys admin who doesnt have your best interests
in mind. Te writerly, on the other hand, courses through the networks,
open to all, embracing instability. In terms o hardware, the readerly
is like an iPad, a device meant or the consumption o prepackaged
objects; the writerly is like a laptop, with the ability to download, alter,manipulate, and remix cultural artiacts that were once read-only. Te
idea o my books being open concepts ully champions the ethos o the
writerly.
GUEVARA: I appreciate your call or doing the impossible in poetry
precisely because o poetrys marginality. And the removal you mention
reminds me o what Cage said when he was asked about whether or not
he viewed his compositions as his compositions:
Instead o representing my control, they represent
questions that Ive asked and the answers that have
been given by means o chance operations. Ive merely
changed my responsibility rom making choices to asking
questions. Its not easy to ask questions.
Im interested in the obligation you talk about and how it gestures
towards a way o thinking about unreadability in relation to your
2 www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/nice-poem-ill-take-it html?pagewanted=all
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16 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
comments on Cage and the Language poets. You discuss Cage to Perloff
in the interview or Jacketmagazine in the ollowing way:
Its one o my peeves with Cage. I Cage truly was to
accept all incidental sound as music, then thats what he
should have done. Obviously this was not the case and
this is where claims or poethics comes into play. I dont
have a problem with an overriding ethical structure
guiding an artists work, but in Cages case, an ethical
agenda is in conflict with his philosophical structure oaccepting all sounds equally. Tere were a lot o sounds
that werent permitted in the Cagean pantheon and a lot
o times when the sounds that were permitted happened
at inopportune moments, it could ruin a perormance.
Likewise Cages eathers were easily ruffled at what he
considered to be wrongheaded interpretations o his
works by musicians and orchestras.
I find that Warhol took Cages ideas much urther.And although the results arent as pretty (or ethical), I
eel that Warhol truly accepts the quotidian worldwith
all its lumps and bruises (as well as beauty)into his
work. He was completely permeable in ways that Cage
could only theorize.
My own work has tended recently to move more
toward the Warholian model than to the Cagean.
In the hour-long documentary on your work titled Sucking on
Words, which premiered at the British Library in 2007, you mention the
Language poets, which I summarize here:
A primary concern o Language writing was its political concern,
the collapsing o the reader and writer. I the author presented a field
o disparate and disjunctive language, then the reader could put those
words together in any order they chose, thus making the reader the
writer. But the project ailed when ew readers actually bothered to do
the work, resulting in the same author / reader relationship that they
began with. Te act was actually a coercive one, akin to putting a gun
to the readers head and saying, Now put me back together. Its rather
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 17
tragic and speaks o a ailed politic, one which demanded a relationship.
I dont demand a readership. I sort o start off by saying I assume noreadership, which rees one up to engage with the work in which ever
way they choose, which includes the option to not read it at all.
Also, you mention your disagreement with Vanessa Place and
Robert Fittermans claim that ailure is the goal o conceptual writing
in the Paris Reviewinterview with Higgs in avor o what Peli Grietzer
calls an aesthetics o sufficiency in Grietzers review o the anthology
you coedited with Craig Dworkin titled Against Expression: An
Anthology o Conceptual Writing or the LA Review o Books. Canyou discuss urther this aethicality or amorality and the way your
perceived outsider or raudulent status productively shapes the
way you think o the success and ailure o your texts specifically and
conceptual writing in general? (Tis is a question Im asking in the hopes
o setting up the question about collaboration.)
GOLDSMITH:Aethics or amorals permit a poet to claim words that
they didnt write as their own, even when the poet doesnt agree withthose words. Fiction or screenwriters do this all the time in the service o
narrativethose who write biopics o serial killers or Nazi dramasand
nobody has a problem with that. But when Vanessa Place re-presents
the words o a rapist in her prose poems, she is accused o exploitation.
Somehow, poetry is still very much wedded to notions o authenticity
and sincerity. I dont disagree that poetry can express subjectivityI
just preer it not to be exclusively my own. Authenticity is another orm
o artifice. It is possible to be both inauthentic and sincere. I trust sel-consciousness and pretensiontheyre indicative that a position has
been considered, distanced, objectivized, and, in some way, theorized.
Tings should be double thought. Fraudulence is correlative to these
ideas. By admitting raudulence, conceptual writers immediately
distance ourselves rom authenticity. Once we get past that, ethics and
morals become consensual, flexible, and playul. As Marcel Duchamp
said, Every word I say is stupid and alse. All in all, I am a pseudo.
GUEVARA:Lets go back to the circumstances that began your twenty-
year investigation. Can you talk about 73 Poemsand your collaboration
with Joan La Barbara? How does the process o collaboration figure into
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18 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
your conceptual practice rom 73 Poems to current investigations like
Seven American Deaths and Disastersand Capital?
GOLDSMITH: I had made this beautiul suite o drawings over the
course o a yearI think it was 1990 or 1991and a small publisher
approached me with the idea o making them into a book. Te title came
rom E.E. Cummingss 73 Poems, a book that I was very enamored with
at the time due to its use o visual languagesimilar to but so different
rom concrete poetry. Cage had set two o Cummingss poems to music,
and one o them, Forever and Sunsmell (1942), was perormed byJoan La Barbara on her album Singing Trough: John Cage, which I was
listening to a lot o at the time while making the drawings. When we
were working on the book, the publisher suggested that we might like to
have someone use the poems as a score or a vocal piece, and naturally, I
thought o Joan La Barbara. We contacted Joan, and she ell in love with
the project. While shes primarily known as an interpreter, shes also a
wonderul composer, and this was a chance or her to compose an epic
work or her voice. I passed off ull-scale reproductions o the drawingsto her, and she set to work, emerging with a stunning interpretation o
my poems. I couldnt have been more delighted with the result. I had no
input whatsoever into her music, so it wasnt so much o a collaboration
as it was her interpretation o my works, which is the only way I eel
comortable working with someone else.
GUEVARA: Te reerences constellating 73 Poems are quite
interesting. You have John Cage as a historic precedent or settingCummingss poems to music perormed by Joan La Barbara, Joan
La Barbara hersel interpreting your 79 poems, E.E. Cummings as a
reerence to 73 Poems (inasmuch as there are in act 79 poems in the
book), and concrete poetry. What I appreciate about your work is the
multiple levels o interpretation it permits rom their community o
reerences and historic precedents, their unction as perormable open
concepts, the way they propose a thinkership, and how it ollows an
aesthetics o sufficiency, yet these levels arent necessarily dependent on
each other during the act o reading.
Youve talked a great deal about the implications o moving
inormation today as a significant cultural act in and o itsel in
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 19
Uncreative Writing, other interviews, and this interview, but Im
curious about how your compositions (i.e., composing via historicprecedent, perormable open concepts, thinkership, and aesthetics o
sufficiency) engage with the way inormation is produced and received
via language today.
At the same time, how do you understand the experience o the
book today, and how does it activate and participate in your mode o
composition and their multiple levels o interpretation? Im interested
in your ideas about inormation and the book precisely because o the
apparent death knell o the book today, yet so much o the interestingwork you do seems to be a circumstance o moving inormation into a
book, specifically the page, in contrast to hypertext writers who compose
or the computer screen.
GOLDSMITH: Im very old ashioned. For all my talk about the
digital world, when it comes right down to it, I barely use the Internet
in my writing, other than as a way to gather materials. Seven American
Deaths and Disasters, my most recent book, is all transcriptions o oldradio and V broadcasts, as is Te Weather, Sports, and raffic. And
my massive one-thousand-page book Capital is done by digging into
dusty old books in libraries and retyping passages rom them. But the
ethos o the digital permeates my work. Te digital has allowed me to
express mysel in an analog medium. Furthermore, my literary career
has been built upon my production o paper books and the subsequent
commentary on them by established critics. My careerlike all those
beore mewas constructed vertically. Books still signiy milestones orme.
Te challenge to the new generationthe ones who publish entirely
on the Webis how careers and critique will unction. In Uncreative
Writing, I posited the writers career might unction more like a meme,
unsigned and rippling over the networks like wildfire, extinguishing
just as quickly. Im ascinated by a literary career modeled afer the
meme. Imagine the writer as meme machine. Its thrilling. On the other
hand, i everybody is published by Lulu, where are the critical systems
to determine that one work or author is better than another? Perhaps
this is o no concern to them, but it could signal a new opportunity or
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20 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
criticism, which is currently dormant. But I dont see any signs o this
perhaps its too early in the game.Im also keeping an eye on how these writers orge careers on the
vast horizontality that is the Web. So ar, the only one whos been able
to do it has been ao Lin, who, like so many Youube stars, has spun
Web success into a successul conventional career with a mainstream
publishing house. But many others appear to be comortable producing
machine-based, anonymously authored books. While Im very interested
to see how this plays outand am enviousI dont think I could ever do
what they are doing.
GUEVARA: You published a blog entry or Harriet (the literary blog
o the Poetry Foundation) on April 26, 2012, titled Te New Aesthetic
and the New Writing, where you talk about this mapping o the digital
world onto the physical:
While its hard to say where writing fits into all this
(thus ar, Te New Aesthetic has been primarily ocusedon visual orms), much o the digital page-based writing
over the past decadebased on strategies such as sorting,
parsing, remixing, culling, collecting, scraping and
republishinghas insisted on multiple identities, born
o one process while materializing in another. Marcel
Duchamps concept o the Inrathina state between
statesmight apply here. Duchamp defines the Inrathin
as Te warmth o a seat (which has just been lef) orVelvet trousers- / their whistling sound (in walking)
by / brushing o the 2 legs is an / inra thin separation
signaled / by sound. Like an electronic current, the
Inrathinhovers and pulses, creating a dynamic stasis,
reusing to commit to one state or the other. Like much
contemporary writing, it is concerned with the expansive
using o opposites: ephemeral and permanent, digital
and analog, becoming multidimensional, flexible, and
radically distributive.
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 21
Can you elaborate on your understanding o the ethos o the digital
urther and the way it potentially relates to Marcel Duchamps concepto the Inrathin?
GOLDSMITH:It seems that the whole digital world is Inrathin. What
interests me is the changeability o media states, their flexibility, their
instability. For instance, the very simple act o printing something out
rom the Internet. In one small moveyou could call it Inrathin
we have a completely different materialization o the same material:
rom pixels to paper. I wrote about this in Uncreative Writingwhen Idelimited various digital/textual states as an ecosystem, the way that
media fluidly morphs rom one state to another, both materializing and
dematerializing at the same time. Te Inrathin is an embrace o the
unstable, which strikes me as a particularly prescient way to describe
much o our digital world.
ake the torrent file. On my computer, it begins as a complete file,
but as it is uploaded and distributed, it is broken into untold amounts
o data packets, scattered about the network, at once exploding andreconstituting in unknown places. Te torrent is the equivalent o a
ourth-dimensional object, at once expanding and contracting, remaining
unified whilst exploding, at once singular and multiple. Separated rom
its tribe and flung to ar corners o the earth, it is reunited not just once
but many times over, day afer day, year afer year, an eternal return, a
ceaseless yet always satisying outcome to a blind pilgrimage.
Data packets are by nature both stable and nomadic; like restlessly
dividing cells, they are the circulatory system o the Internet, providingmuch o the body heat or our machines. aken on their own, they dont
add up to much, but swarmedas they tend to dothey constitute
whole and vital parts. Like the image o a fish made up by a school o fish
or a flock o migrating geese that constitutes a picture o a singular goose,
they are at once both distributed and stable, unique and regimented.
In a way, it goes back to Duchamps inatuation with optical illusions
and puns; the idea that an object can exist in two states at oncethe
Inrathinreally seems to articulate what it means to be digital.
GUEVARA: You ofen use the word investigation when you
talk about your conceptual practice. Cage also uses the notion o
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22 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
investigation vis--vis questions when he thinks o his compositions. Can
you discuss what it is youve learned and what you continue to learnrom your aorementioned investigations (i.e., Te Weather, Sports,
raffic, and Seven American Deaths and Disasters)? Im interested
in the way they are grounded on an experience o the digital expressed
in the analog medium o the book and how you think they have
reconsidered the way you think about both the digital and the book.
GOLDSMITH: I continue to be ascinated with the quantity o
language, more than the meaning o it. In some ways, I eel meaning andcontent take care o themselves. Terere too many interesting things in
the worldviewed in a certain way, everything is interestingso I try to
take a step back and embrace container as the new content, rather than
what it contains. Its similar to what Flusser says when he discusses the
apparatus in photography. He claims that the artiactthe photograph
carries much less inormation than does the camera, the apparatus that
produced it. He goes on to say that the apparatus is overwhelmingly
determinative o the content that it produces. Tis is quite differentrom the writings on photography by Barthes and Sontag, who tend to
ocus on the literary qualities o the artiact while ignoring the apparatus
that produced it. Te upshot o this is that we are now realizing that
literary criticism will only take us so ar in the digital world; i we want
a vocabulary with which to adequately theorize and rame todays
production, we need to look to media and communications theory.
GUEVARA:
Continuing with the literary maniestations o the digitaltoday, you state the ollowing in your blog entry or Harrieton April 19,
2011, titled Archiving Is the New Folk Art: Writing on an electronic
platorm is not only writing, but also doubles as archiving; the two
processes are inseparable. You also talk about the way our present
experience o the digital has changed the way we think about the archive
during your MoMA Poet Laureate lecture on March 20, 2013:
What weve experienced is an inversion o consumption,
one in which weve come to engage in a more proound
way with the acts o acquisition over that which we are
acquiring; weve come to preer the bottles to the wine.
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 23
Tis, then, could be proposed as a orm o institutional
critique o artiacts and the ways they circulate in thedigital worldTe new creativity is pointing, not
making. Likewise, in the uture, the best writers will be
the best inormation managers.
Can you talk urther about the ways in which the archive is being
reconstituted today? Im interested in the way an archives aims towards
preservation can unction in the Inrathinquality o the digital world.
UbuWeb seems to be a response to that. How has your experiencewith UbuWeb inormed your understanding o the simultaneity o
writing and archiving? Im interested in the inseparability o UbuWeb
and your investigations, specifically the way UbuWeb has affected
your investigations and vice versa. How has UbuWeb determined and
reflected your investigations since its inception? And how can current
books that hover between the digital and paperbound potentially change
todays notion o the archive?
GOLDSMITH: One o my great inspirations is aaaaarg.org, which is
the UbuWeb o critical theory. Whenever I have time, I try to grab as
much o that site as I can, downloading it to my hard drive. Over the
past ew years, weve seen great ecosystems o culture wiped out by the
file-sharing wars. Im still kicking mysel or not having downloaded
such-and-such artiact, navely believing that it would be there orever.
Now whats on my drives locally is absurd; there are literally gigabytes o
books, more than Id ever be able to read in the next ten lietimes. Andyet I keep getting more. Same with MP3s. And videos. Weve become
digital hoarders; instead o stuffing junk into closets, we keep buying
more hard drives. I dont mean this to be dismissive or judgmental in
any way; instead, its a act o our digital lives. We archive because we
can, thus making each o us an unwitting olk archivist as our ocus has
moved away rom the artiact itsel to the management o that artiact.
UbuWeb is symptomatic o this tendency. Ive always been a collector
o books and records. When the Internet came around, I started throwing
my collections online to share with other like-minded collectors. At the
same time, I began displaying my collection on UbuWeb, which has
been growing or the past two decades. Im not trained as an archivist
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24 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
or librarian. UbuWeb is an example o the olk archive, wrapped in the
clothing o an institution.Documenta 13 asked me to claim UbuWeb as an artwork, which
I did or them in my book Letter to Bettina Funcke. Its not something
Ive ever done beore, and I dont really like to rame it that way because
then it becomes a vanity project. I try to keep mysel out o it as much
as possible. But my experiences in curating and building UbuWeb have
reinorcedor at least grown simultaneously alongsidemy writing
practices, particularly in the beginning with archival writing projects like
No. 111and, more recently, Capital. Both books are giant accumulationso ound material, organized into complex schemes. Teres something I
adore about gathering, organizing, and archiving preexisting materials.
Its the collector in me, I think.
GUEVARA: How did your WFMU radio show change your
relationship to language? In the PennSound archive, you have
these humorous audio perormances o texts rom theorists and
philosophers that you sing with accompanying music (i.e., WalterBenjamin with the music o Eyvind Kang, Ludwig Wittgenstein with
Igor Stravinsky, Roland Barthes with Te Allman Brothers, Jean
Baudrillard with Francis Lai, Fredric Jameson with John Coltrane,
etc.). How do you understand these perormances in relation to the
theories and philosophies youre perorming? And in what way are
these perormances related to the work you did in your radio show?
Im curious about this aspect o your relationship to language because
you talk about it in the aferword o Seven American Deaths andDisasters, specifically in your transcription o 9/11 radio broadcasts
in World rade Center. Im curious about how your time in radio
created this spectrum o investigations rom singing philosophical texts
to transcribing radio broadcasts o American historical events.
GOLDSMITH:As time has passed, I realize how much WFMU played
a role in my work. I learned to perorm language on the radio, which has
strongly influenced the public readings o my own work to this day. I
learned how the voice works (pitch, timing, delivery), how to improvise
when needed, how to read things that I didnt write in my own voice, and
so orth. I learned about audience as well. I learned that the radio has an
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 25
off switch, thus making it easy to indulge in extremely long and difficult
thingssomething I would never do in a live perormance situation.Also, being on the radio concretized and materialized speech or me. I
never tried to use the broadcast medium in a transparent way; rather, I
chose to use my voice more as sound poetry, ocusing not so much on
what I said, but on the way I said it.
Like most DJs, I began as a presenter o other peoples music but got
bored o that and began to insert mysel more as time went on. It soon
morphed into a weekly three-hour perormance, which is how the sung
theory pieces evolved. Some weeks, Id just sing or three hoursand Ihave a lousy voice. I also began to merge my own work with my radio
show, so that or several weeks running, Id read all o Te Weatheron
air without explanation. Ten the next ew weeks, Id play the tapes o
the radio reports that I had used to transcribe them. Mind you, this was
all in the middle o the dayprime timeand it beuddled and drove
many listeners crazy. But who cares? I was allowed to do it, so I did.
I love the sound o the voice. And I love transcribing it even more.
ranscription is such a personal actno two people can transcribean audio clip in the exact same way, so its wildly interpretative and
subjective. And those decisions we make in transcription tell us as much
about who we are as do more tradition types o autobiographies and
personal narratives.
My years at WFMU contributed to the writing o Te Weather,
raffic, and Sports. It was natural or me to seek out radio air checks
o deaths and disasters and transcribe them or Seven American Deaths
and Disasters. Te sound o radio haunts the texts over the fify or soyears that the book spansyou can almost hear the crackling o the AM
static in the JFK assassination piece. Te Lennon piece was taken rom a
tape someone made the night Lennon was assassinatedthey just kept
flipping through the dial with the cassette player on record. Even the
2009 Michael Jackson death air check has time traces in it, mirroring the
coldness o todays slick media landscape, littered with shock jocks and
national corporate broadcast affiliates.
GUEVARA:Im interested in exploring this dynamic between UbuWeb,
your WMFU radio show, and your pedagogy urther. How is your
relationship to language affected by your experience teaching in a
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26 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
classroom? In what way are your investigations implicated by your
pedagogy? What is it about your participation in the university that eelsgenerative? I ask because you devote a whole chapter rom Uncreative
Writingto teaching a class with the same title. At the same time, you are
currently MoMAs first Poet Laureate, as which you deliver lectures and
readings and organize other events in the MoMA that seem to reflect
your temperaments as an archivist, DJ, and teacher.
GOLDSMITH: Pedagogy is a great way o testing hunches in a real
situation. I would have no way o proving, say, that transcription canbe an individual and personal act unless I was able to try it with my
students. So I use my classroom as a way o bolstering my own practice
and poetics. My next critical book is going to be about the cultural
artiact in the digital age, and again, something Im eeling might be true
can be confirmed or challenged by my students. Ofentimes, in the case
o Web culture, they live it much more intensely than I do; they tell me
about things Id otherwise have no access to. So or my thinking, my
students are really both a sounding board as well as a lieline.At MoMA, Im trying to be expansive in my curatorial vision by
bringing in a variety o essayists, novelists, journalist, musicians,
poets, and so orth, many o whom all ar outside o my own aesthetic
purview, yet I admire them greatly. During my ransorm the World!
Poetry Must Be Made by All! event at MoMA held in April o 2013
during National Poetry Month, I was given the entire ourth floor or an
hour during the busiest time on a Saturday afernoon. Te space is huge,
consisting o many galleries, so I was able to bring in over 150 poetsto read simultaneously in each and every gallery on the floor so that
no matter where you went, youd hear poetry. My goal was to show the
entire spectrum o American poetry, rather than just, say, conceptualists
or experimental poets. My MoMA series is much closer to my WFMU
radio show, where I would play a much greater range o things than I
would listen to at home. For FMU, i it sounded rightregardless o
what type o artist made itI used it.
GUEVARA: On May 31, your residency at the MoMA will come
to an end with a tour o New York titled Astonishing City Free o
Microbes and Captive Elephants: A Pataphysical Bus our With
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 27
Kenneth Goldsmith. Te tour will be ollowed by a reading o your
work-in-progress Capital, which you discussed in an earlier part o thisinterview. In conjunction with our previous discussion about pedagogy,
Im interested in hearing more about your work-in-progress Capital, the
Pataphysical Bus our, and the constellation o reerences it utilizes,
specifically Alred Jarry, Walter Benjamins Te Arcades Project, and
New York in the twentieth century. Te tour seems like, as you discussed
in the previous response, an opportunity to test hunches in real
situations. Can you discuss the hypotheses youre currently working on
and how you hope this can affect the composition o Capital?
GOLDSMITH: Ive been preparing or the tour, and Ive come to
realize that the tour itsel is going to be rather different rom the book.
Te tour will narrativize various NYC landmarks and streetscapes in
the twenty-first century, whereas the book very much lives inand
imaginesthe twentieth. Te overlaying o one century on top o
another is pyschogeographic, resulting in a pataphysical bus tour. Bus
tours usually give accurate inormation; Im doing the opposite.So or the tour, Ive been going through the book and extracting all
sorts o cool mentions o, say, the Empire State Building in the twentieth
century, which I will be reading as we pass by the building itsel. Or
when the bus is going by the South Street Seaport, which is completely
boarded up and shut down afer Hurricane Sandy, Ill be reading these
eerie passages rom an H.P. Lovecraf novel written in the 1920s about
a flood that destroys New York. So, in essence, Ive been writing a
completely new piece (all culled rom Capital), or the bus tour. Capitalis marvelously sprawling and massive; its great to make several books
rom this one book. But the bus tour is literally a detour, and when its
done, Capitalwill proceed on as usual, probably to be finished in about
three to five years rom now. Te process will take about fifeen years all
told to write.
GUEVARA:In the number o years it has taken you to write Capital,
what have you learned about the architecture o Benjamins Te
Arcades Project? What about your relationship to language has changed
in your engagement with Benjamins book and its architecture on the
page?
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28 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
GOLDSMITH:Te first thing to know is that this really isnt a rewrite
o Te Arcades Project since it was a book that was never written byBenjamin. It was just a bunch o notes sorted into various olders. Were
still not sure what final orm the book was meant to take by Benjamin.
So the book itsel was actually written when it was constructed as a book
decades afer his death.
I began with Benjamins identical convolutesbut, over the course o
time, have replaced just about all o them with my own and then have
added dozens o original ones. But still I admire the architecture o his
project because it so closely resembles UbuWebs: simple categories intowhich an infinite number o artiacts can be filed. And its flexible: new
categories can be added or subtracted at will. Te architecture is the
perect orm or collectionsin this case large collections o language
which is what I have done or decades in my own writing practice:
finding language and sorting it into categories. Benjamin proves that the
act o collecting and sorting is enough to make a beautiul work.
GUEVARA: Te act o sorting in Capital, your understanding o thearchitecture o Te Arcades Project, and UbuWeb seem to reflect your
idea o archiving as the new olk art, which you discussed earlier in the
conversation. At the same time, you are also involved in a project to
print the Internet. In the site, you propose the ollowing:
LABOR, UbuWeb and Kenneth Goldsmith invite you
to participate in the first-ever attempt to print out the
entire internet.
Te idea is simple: print out as much as o the web as you
wantbe it one sheet or a truckloadsend it to Mexico
City, and well display it in the gallery or the duration
o the exhibition, which runs romJuly 26 to August 30,
2013.
Te process is entirely open: I it exists online and is
printed out, it will be accepted. Every contributor will
be listed as a participating artist in the show and will be
listed on this umblr.
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 29
What you decide to print out is up to youas long as
it exists somewhere online, its in. Were not looking orcreative interpretations o the project. We dont want
objects. We just want shitloads o paper. Were literally
looking or olks to print out the entire internet. We have
over 500 square meters o space to fill, with ceilings that
are over 6 meters high.
Tere are many ways to go about this: you can act alone
(print out your own blog, Gmail inbox or spam older)or you could organize a group o riends to print out a
particular corner o the internet, say, all o Wikipedia,
the entire New York imes archive, every dossier leaked
by Wikileaks or starters. Te more the better.
Te whole project is in memory o Aaron Swartz, who passed away
shortly beore going to trial early this year or the alleged use o MI
acilities and Web connections to access the JSOR database in order tomake academic essays available to all online or ree. Can you talk about
the act o sorting youre trying to negotiate with this project and how it
relates to Aaron Swartz?
GOLDSMITH: In 2010, Pamela Echeverria, the owner o LABOR in
Mexico City, held a conerence called Who Owns the Image? which
ocused on the way that images and their reception have been changed
by digital culture. Echeverria, like so many o us, was living a double lie;on one hand, she dealt in exclusive and unique objects at the gallery while
at the same time, she was downloading the infinitely replicable materials
that file sharing had to offer. Te conerence sparked numerous heated
conversations, many o which Echeverria and I continued to discuss
long afer the conerence ended.
In early 2013, Pamela asked me to curate a show dedicated to the
memory o Aaron Swartz shortly afer he passed away. I was intrigued
and honored. Although I had never met himI had only learned o
him afer his arrestmany o his ideas and actions resonated with my
ethos in building and maintaining UbuWeb, an all-volunteer effort
that distributes hard-to-find avant-garde materialsofen ignoring
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30 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
copyrightor ree. You could say Swartz and I were working on parallel
tracks yet operating in very different theaters; his pirating o intellectualmaterials rom a multimillion dollar corporation carried a much higher
price than does my bootlegging o concrete poems.
When I began working on the show, I pondered the sort o immensity
that Swartz, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden were dealing
in. What would it look like i their hauls were somehow materialized,
and how would it make us think differently about them? With a more
conventional exhibition in mind, I began by seeking artworks that
explicitly dealt with concretizing the digital. For instance, I discovered ahuge book that consisted o every photograph o Natalie Portman on the
Internet. I also came across a piece by an Iraqi-American artist that was
a collection o every article published on the Internet about the Iraq War,
bound into a set o 72 books, each book a thousand pages. Displayed
on long tables, they made a stunning materialization o the quantity o
digital culture. I even stumbled upon something called the Library o the
Printed Web, a vast collection o dozens o books comprised entirely o
Internet flotsam and jetsam, all printed in beautiul editions.But somehow these gestures, although immense, were not immense
enough. Tey were too precious, too boutique, and too small to get at the
magnitude o huge data sets that I was seeking to replicate. I wondered
how I could up the ante. Te Iraq War books showed that printing out
even a small corner o the Internet was an insane proposition. My mind
made a poetic leap: what i I was somehow able to crowdsource printing
the entire Internet?
GUEVARA:What I find interesting about the project is the speculation
over the amount o paper that will be used, which is to say that so much
o the backlash seems to stem rom deending the potential waste o
paper in the process o using it to print the Internet. Tis is interesting
precisely because o the ways in which the value o paper is being
negotiated through the conceptual nature o the project. At the same
time, the project seems to make a remarkably amplified argument or
the materiality o language in relation to our current experience o the
digital and contemporary poetic practice.
In one o the entries to your site devoted to printing the Internet,
you mention the ollowing:
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 31
Im a poet and I eel the internetcomprised completely
o text-based alphanumeric languageis the greatestpoem ever written. As users o the web, we are all
contributing to this poetic projectlets call it the
ultimate crowdsourced poem.
You explore the idea o digital images as alphanumeric language
in Uncreative Writing, specifically the first chapter titled Revenge o
the ext. How do you potentially plan to curate the material youre
currently receiving? And do you plan to accept or reject printouts basedon their un/creativity?
GOLDSMITH: Tis project is an extension o everything else
Ive done or the past 25 years, be it quantiying the amount o words
I spoke or a week in Soliloquyor the insane accumulation o UbuWeb.
I we begin to weigh all o this material around us, well find that we
are surrounded by a culture o abundance (or an abundance o culture).
Even our ephemera and code are more raw material, begging to betransormed into art. So you see, as artists, our work is never done,
nor can we ever lack inspiration once we begin to move outside o our
individual egos. Te Internet is, in act, a crowdsourced poem, one being
written every dayjust as Dayshowed us that every day, the best novels
are effortlessly being written daily. Its just a matter o reraming it as
such, theoretically proposing it as possible.
Te show will consist o whatever is sent to the gallery, be it two
sheets o paper or one billion sheets o paper. Tere will be no judgmentsmadeeveryone is welcome to contribute what they like. But like
conceptualisms, the conversation surrounding the action is more
interesting that the result, and judging by those standards, its already a
massive success. Te act that a mere proposal can set the world ablaze in
argument and conversation proves the importance o this provocation.
GUEVARA: Tis attempt to quantiy the immaterial can be seen in
your ideas about the project rom an article on myspiltmilk.com:
I you had to store all your music in your apartment,
you couldnt move, Goldsmith says. Instead, you keep
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32 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
it on hard drives. Te whole idea is also a critique o
consumption. I you were aware o how much shit youactually have there, maybe youd think twice. Why are
you consuming all o this? Its a concretization o our
consumption. Te problem with digital culture and
our consumption o digital culture is that its entirely
untheorized. Tis provocation has made you have to
theorize something you do every day.
In the previous response, you talk about the quantification o theimmaterial as an artist. By creating a conversation about spatializing
the Internet using paper and crowdsourcing, what are you beginning
to understand about the nature o our digital consumption today as a
consumer? In what way has this project and its accumulating paper and
conversation affected your own practice o digital consumption?
GOLDSMITH:Well, it makes me notwant to print out or materialize
everything thats sitting on my hard drives. It also reminds me o howbig my own physical library is and how ew books or records on my
shelves Ive actually read or listened to. It serves as a reminder that long
beore the Internet, we had more cultural materials than we knew what
to do with. It also made me want to materialize things that had long been
languishing on my hard drive in order to eel their magnitude. So this
project has orced me to look at my meatspace through a different lens.
GUEVARA:
In the witter account you set up or printing the Internet,you mention that the piece is an enactment o capital accumulated to
the point that it becomes an image. Can you clariy this urther? Im
interested in the way this enactment is crowdsourced in contrast to the
printing o currency, which is another orm o enacting capital. Also, in
what way does this act o printing render the enactment into an image?
GOLDSMITH: Te quote comes rom Debord, o course, who was
prescient in theorizing the mechanics o the spectacle, which this project
has become. I ound that quote apropos in the way that this project is
about rendering something completely ephemeral literally into an
image. Te blowback around the project is about its accumulation and
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 33
is a great discourse about the nature o global capital and our eelings o
guilt surrounding it. We crave spectacle, we desire capital, and when ithappens, we eel the need to prevent it, guilt, and redemption.
Printing money might be a better idea than printing the Internet or
poems. Charles Bernstein has said that a piece o paper with a poem on
it is worth less than a blank one. I think that we can extend that idea to
this project. All that paper, which could be used or invoices and legal
documentsthe language o logos: the word o the citadel, the ort, the
court, the boss, the suitsis being wasted on art. It calls into question,
really, what is waste and what is value.
GUEVARA: Te questions you pose in your response to the previous
question seem to highlight a significant provocation and curatorial
dilemma. Part o the project is based on the material you receive;
however, you ask an interesting question in a umblr entry you wrote
on July 5, 2013, titled Printing the Internet: Its Getting Personal:
Its shocking how much personal inormation people arecontributing to Printing out the Internet. Were getting
thousands o bank statements, credit card numbers, legal
documents, divorce settlements, and o course, lots o
nude photos. All leading us to wonder, how do we handle
privacy issues when displaying this in the gallery?
While I appreciate the conceptual nature o the work and its ocus
on the conversation, Im also interested in how the conversation istaking place rom a curatorial level. I want to ask the same question I
previously asked in terms similar to the question you asked in your
entry: how do you potentially plan to curate the material youre
currently receiving? And what other curatorial dilemmas have you been
encountering since you put out the call to print the Internet? How do
you understand the responses or suggestions you have received (i any)
to the question you posed in the umblr entry? Im curious about how
your curatorial decisions might productively reflect or push against a
shape to the experience o guilt towards global capital you mentioned
in the previous question. Im also curious about what you think o
the notable (and provocative) orms o the Internet youre currently
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34 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
receiving including the ones you discuss in the aorementioned entry.
GOLDSMITH:
(Beore the show)
Tis is an open processeverything sent will become part o the
show. However, Im probably going to go through much o it and choose
to display certain pieces on long tables in the gallery. But I wont know
what curatorial decisions I will make until I am with the work. At thispoint, I have no idea o whats there. When I get there, what I need to do
will become apparent.
(Afer the show)
What happened was that the amount o material I received or the
show was so vastover ten tons o printed Internet, contributed by over
20,000 peoplethat concerns about content and privacy were renderedsuperfluous. Tis was yet another case in which our notions o content
were inverted by magnitude. What ended up being received didnt
matterinstead, we could literally weigh the words, all o which were
thrown into a giant pile, some six to seven meters high.
So the curation took care o itsel: i it was on the Internet and it
was printed out, it was included. Everyone who submitted something to
these guidelines was able to be a part o the show. Tis is a crowdsourced
and inclusive act, one which works against the elitism and singularity othe art world. In the end, the spectacle was ar rom guilt ridden; instead,
everyone was carried away in the joy and pataphysical absurdity o the
proposition. In the shows afermath, interestingly enough, the critical
voices have subsided, and instead, mainstream media have picked up
on the act o the showin all its incumbent spectacleas a thing o
wonder, beauty, and amazement. In the end, I won.
GUEVARA:You recently wrote an essay titled Being Dumb or Te
Awlon July 23, 2013. In it, you talk about the different combinations
between being smart and dumb:
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 35
Tere is dumb dumb and there is smart dumb. Tere
is also smart smart. Dumb dumb is plain dumb andsmart smart is plain smart. Smart dumb rejects both
smart smart and dumb dumb, choosing instead to walk
a tightrope between the two. Smart dumb is incisive and
precise. In order to be smart dumb, you have to be really
smart, but not in the smart smart way.
Dumb dumb is rednecks and racists, ootball hooligans,
gum-snapping marketing girls, and thick-necked officeboys. Dumb dumb is Microsof, Disney, and Spielberg.
Smart smart is ED talks, think tanks, NPR news, Ivy
League universities, Te New Yorker, and expensive five-
star restaurants. By trying so hard, smart smart really
misses the point. Smart dumb is Te Fugs, punk rock, art
schools, Gertrude Stein, Vito Acconci, Marcel Duchamp,
Samuel Beckett, Seth Price, ao Lin, Martin Margiela,
Mike Kelley, and Sofia Coppola. Smart dumb plays atbeing dumb dumb but knows better.
Variants o smart dumb also miss the point but in a
different way. wee (McSweeneys, Miranda July, Ira
Glass, David Byrne) eigns dumb but wont allow itsel to
be dumb, or ear that someone might actually think its
dumb, god orbid. Hipster appropriates chunks o dumb
(trucker hats, acial hair, tattoos) but as a ashion trend,
reuses to theorize its dumbness, thereby alling squarelyinto dumb dumb. Smart dumb reuses to commit to
either one state or the other. Smart dumb, or instance,
incorporates elements o camp but reuses to be camp
enough to actually be camp. Dumb vs. smart is not a
rehash o hip vs. square. Dumb is both hip and square.
Smart dumb has its theoristsde Certeau, Goffman,
Debordthose who articulate the mysteries o the
mundane and the extraordinariness o the everyday.
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36 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
In a previous essay on Jackson Mac Low titled Te King o
Boredom, which was published in Te Brooklyn Rails March 2006issue, you use the same type o rhetorical maneuver to talk about
boredom:
He was boring in a way that I call boring boring as
opposed to the general tendency today toward the
unboring boring. Ive written elsewhere: John Cage
said, I something is boring afer two minutes, try it
or our. I still boring, then eight. Ten sixteen. Tenthirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring
at all. Hes right: theres a certain kind o unboring
boredom thats ascinating, engrossing, transcendent,
and downright sexy. And then theres the other kind
o boring: lets call it boring boring. Boring boring is
a client meeting boring boring is having to endure
someones sel-indulgent poetry reading boring boring
is watching a toddler or an afernoon boring boringis the seder at Aunt Fannys. Boring boring is being
somewhere we dont want to be boring boringis doing
something we dont want to do. Jackson was the king o
boring boring.
Tere were many stories about Jacksons amous
ability to bore. My avorite one comes rom a David
Antin talk piece where he describes an antiwar poetry
reading where Jackson went on and on, reusing to stopuntil the auditoriumwas it the Fillmore East?was
emptied, taking the air out o that specific anti-war
event.
Never mind. Jackson and his generation had a
mandate to be boring.
Im curious about how these rhetorical maneuvers unction as
theoretical interventions and how they permit you to conceptualize your
ideas about being dumb and boring, especially since being dumb and
boring seem to be important tenets or your work. Slavoj Zizek, in his
video lecture Te Reality o the Virtual, does the same thing when he
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WITH FRANCISCO ROMAN GUEVARA 37
discusses the psychoanalytic proundity o Donald Rumselds statement
on the known and unknown and the triadic structure o the LacanianReal. Im also curious about how you philosophically and theoretically
map the experience o being unboring boring similar to your accounting
o being smart dumb. Apart rom Cage, who are the writers and thinkers
you look to when you think about being unboring boring?
GOLDSMITH:I have an unfinished manuscript thats called I Look to
Teory Only When I Realize Tat Somebody Has Dedicated Teir Entire
Lie to a Question I Have Only Fleetingly Considered. Honestly, thatstrue. I try to do a kind o critical writing that almost no longer exists, one
ree o citation or credentials. I think o Barthes or Sontag and how they
rarely elt the need to reerence anyone outside o their own empiricism.
I love that writing because you can eel someone trying to think through
issues. You almost never saw a ootnote or citation in either one o
those authors works. Somehow the proessionalization o academia has
created a critical writing that cant exist without such reerences. Im
not trained in these things, nor am I particularly interested in them. Ianything, I come to critical theory afer the act to shed some additional
light on my own empirical conclusions.
You are correct that both o these essays are siblings; I wrote Being
Dumb all the while thinking about Being Boring, although they were
written, I think, nearly a decade apart. Its unny, but my critical writing
is circular and repetitious; nothing I write is 100% new. I take pieces
rom old essays and slide them into new ones. Or, as in this case, I reuse
orms, write things that are almost identical. Here it starts with I amthe dumbest writer who has ever lived, and there it started with I am
the most boring writer who ever lived. Te critic Judith Goldman was
inuriated by this so much that, reerring to my book Uncreative Writing,
she wrote, In the maze o sel-quoting brie essays, introductions, and
interviews on Conceptual poetry published prior to this book, which
also includes sel-citation, Goldsmith continually re-mounts the
argument that versions o uncreativity based on strategies o textual
appropriation are warranted because the old versions o creativity are
beyond worn out. And thats exactly my point. I am unoriginal; I just
keep stealing, plundering, and robbing mysel.
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38 KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION
GUEVARA: In the essay Being Boring, you cite John Cages quote
on resolving boredom through repetition, and you cite John Cagesstaging o a twelve-hour perormance o Erik Saties Vexations, which
constitutes a single piano sheet with the instruction that it be played
840 times, in your essay Being Dumb. Can you talk urther about
your engagement with time and, specifically, the nuances o repetition
you harness in your conceptual practice? And how does repetition
participate in the dynamics o being dumb?
I also ask the question because there have been some interesting
mainstream durational perormances in the last couple o months,and Im curious about what you think about them in relation to your
practice. On May 5, 2013, Ragnar Kjartansson presented a piece
called A Lot o Sorrow, where he had the US rock band Te National
perorm their song repeatedly or six hours live in MoMA PS1. On July
10, 2013, Jay Z perormed his song Picasso Ba