In an essay from 2001, poet and editor of the fantastically free online poetry and sound archive, ubuweb, Kenneth Goldsmith outlined his plan for being uncreative. His strategy for achieving this state was to hand-type the Friday, September 1, 2000 edition of the New York Times from front page to back page, including every single word and bit of punctuation. He states, “The object of the project is to be as uncreative in the process as possible.”
Toward what end, I ask?
Valuelessness, he says, and ultimately to stretch the category of appropriation that the visual arts have adopted, into literature. As a practitioner of “extreme process writing,” this strained, meticulous, activity of typing someone else’s writing for days, even months on end is nothing new to Goldsmith. He has made practice of recording extremely mundane details such as keeping track of every move his body makes in a day’s time. In defense of these projects, he quotes John Cage, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
Repetition and appropriation can be found all over the Walker galleries with artists like Andy Warhol, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince and of course, Marcel Duchamp. In fact, Goldsmith sites Warhol’s long, static and essentially “unwatchable” films as an inspiration for his “uncreativity.” If you were here for the screenings of Haircut (No. 1); Eat; Sleep and Kiss in January, you know what unwatchable means.
So how does it all connect? Can poetry take on appropriation in the same way that visual art has? Or maybe more importantly, should it? Goldsmith asks, “One hundred years after Duchamp, why hasn’t straight appropriation become a valid, sustained or even tested literary practice?” Find out tonight at Goldsmith’s talk here at the Walker at 7:30 pm for FREE. Come learn how to be uncreative!