goldsmith guevara kenneth goldsmith in conversation

5/20/2018 Goldsmith Guevara Kenneth Goldsmith in Conversation

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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)


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KENNETH GOLDSMITH

IN CONVERSATION

Kenneth Goldsmith

and

Francisco Roman Guevara

De La Salle University Publishing House2014


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KENNETH GOLDSMITH IN CONVERSATION

Copyright 2014 by Kenneth Goldsmith

All rights reserved.

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without the written permission o the copyright owner and the publisher.

Published and distributed by

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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


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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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


29/50


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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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

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