Ron Silliman on Kenneth Goldsmith 27/4/24, 22:38

Kenneth Goldsmith
by Ron Silliman
Monday, February 27, 2006

What does it mean for a work of art to be eminently likeable and

almost completely unreadable? That, I think, is the ultimate trick
at the heart of the project of Kenny Goldsmith's self-announced
uncreative writing. Perhaps it's his background as a visual artist, a
degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, or his
work as a radio DJ (he is, after all, a man who wears many hats),
but Goldsmith has found the perfect mix between complete
mischief--a little deadpan, with a big wink--and serious
investigation into the meaning of art and writing in the 21st
century. And found more than a few folks who are willing to take
his projects with rapt attention & perfect seriousness. Even as he
seeks to arrive at a mode of writing that he himself characterizes
as "nutritionless," ever striving to get closer to something that
would really really be boring. Typing the whole of one edition of
The New York Times, a year's worth of weather reports,
documenting every move his body made for a day or every word
he spoke in a week, Goldsmith has emerged as the most critically
well-inspected writer now under the age of 50 in the United States.
I knew people were taking him seriously when, over five years ago,
the MacArthur Foundation called to ask me if I thought he was a
genius.

The latest verification of Goldsmith's anti-poetic strategy is the

newest issue of Open Letter, Twelfth Series, Number 7, which is
devoted to "Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics," and
jointly guest edited by Lori Emerson and Barbara Cole, 18 mostly
thoughtful pieces about Goldsmith's work. Joshua Schuster quotes
Goldsmith directly:

I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If

there were an Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I
would get a gold medal. My books are impossible to
read straight through. In fact, every time I have to
proofread them before sending them off to the
publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly. You really don't need
to read my books to get the idea of what they're like;
you just need to know the general concept.

Schuster, like Marjorie Perloff, Johanna Drucker, Caroline Bergvall,

Christian Bok, Geoffrey Young, Robert Fitterman, Craig Dworkin,
Bruce Andrews, Darren Wershler-Henry & others, seems
completely fascinated--I want to use the word enchanted, in all its
connotations--by this.

One of the major social functions of art is to reveal the world to us,
its inhabitants. At this, Goldsmith is certainly an unqualified
success. That's the part I think everyone gets--the language of The
New York Times, including the tidal information and classified
advertising, is indeed what we confront, as citizens & readers alike.
When Goldsmith invokes, as he almost invariably does when
interviewed, John Cage, Andy Warhol & Jeff Koons as predecessors,
this is exactly what he's getting at. Goldsmith is not only revealing
to us the world as it is, but by doing so in the most extreme ways

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Ron Silliman on Kenneth Goldsmith 27/4/24, 22:38

possible, reveals the presumptions that lie behind our art

categories as well.

Yet what he is not saying is, I think, more intriguing and

problematic. First, there is the cult of the artist as his own work of
art. Open Letter is remarkably silent on the relationship of
Goldsmith's work to that of other simultaneous authors of
appropriated materials, especially Mark Peters & Peter Balistrieri,
both of whom are pointedly absent in this first festschrift of
Goldsmith's career. From Duchamp's urinal to Kathy Acker's version
of Harold Robbins (or Bernadette Mayer's inclusion of the entire
text of a Jerry Rothenberg poem into one of her works),
appropriation of the social world, whether aesthetic (Acker, Mayers)
or anti-aesthetic (Duchamp), is as old as the hills. It's not that
Goldsmith, the archivist of Ubuweb, doesn't know this. It's because
his projects, by design, never stand on their own, that his
commentators invariably turn back to the cult of Kenny. It is, after
all, his body, his words. Then, by repeatedly reciting the same few
names over & over, the presence of a much broader landscape
seems to fade from critical consciousness.

Another part of what makes Goldsmith's project work is that he

always holds back from the truly nutrition-free text. The full text of
The New York Times is not the same thing as the full text of one
day of the Kansas City Star-Tribune. Choosing to record your
movements for one full day and then picking June 16th,
Bloomsday, is to position yourself up against Joyce. This may not
be the same mawkishly sentimental usage that Cage makes when
he reads through Finnegans Wake, but in its own way it's every bit
as precious.

To the degree that his commentators seem conscious of these two

issues in Goldsmith's work, their pieces have value, tho nobody
addresses these adequately. In fact, the very best piece in the new
Open Letter comes last--Darren Werschler-Henry's consideration of
the implications of Goldsmith's work is a perfect foundation for
thinking through its resonances for future practice. It's guaranteed
to make you think about what you do as an artist.

The other piece that I recommend here is Caroline Bergvall's

interactive interview with Goldsmith, done while traversing the
streets of New York (a trope that Robert Fitterman also employs for
his homage). Bergvall does get one almost obscenely naked
comment out of Goldsmith, who otherwise seems thoroughly
barricaded by the Cult of Kenny figurine throughout:

Q. Your favourite historical figure.

I dont care much for history with a capital eitch so Ill
have to say that I dont have a favourite historical
character.

That's really worth thinking about. History is of course impossible if

not written from a point-of-view and much, tho not all, of
Goldsmith's work tries very hard to erase that. It's also diachronic
where Goldsmith is, if not strictly synchronic--the paper comes all
at once, it's how you read it that adds temporal progression, which
the paper can only partly dictate through design. History also

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Ron Silliman on Kenneth Goldsmith 27/4/24, 22:38

requires a critical dimension--again something Goldsmith

systematically seems to erase. It's not that Goldsmith is writing in
opposition to history & its inevitable "this is how it felt to us
winners" narratives, but rather that he tries to envision how things
might look absent that dimension altogether. Imagine, for
example, someone documenting every move a homeless person
made during the course of one day. That would be an utterly
dissimilar project than any of Goldsmith's, calling up all kinds of
social issues around poverty, but also around surveillance and real
"appropriation." All these choices would set up a network of
connotations, including contradictory political dimensions, that the
reader/viewer would have to confront. But since Kenny Goldsmith's
actual art project is the projection of Kenny Goldsmith, these are
the kinds of questions his work passes over in silence.

Back to Kenneth Goldsmith's Author Page | Back to EPC

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