Alec
Wilkinson's forgiving and sympathetic piece on Kenneth Goldsmith has recently made the poetry rounds and came across my
various feeds this morning. I read it. The piece raises many of the concerns
about the whiteness of the Conceptualism movement, and about the avant garde
poetics of North America's past fifteen years or so. The piece also gives
Goldsmith ample space to explain his motivations behind the performance of
"The Murdered Body of Mike Brown's Medical Report" last March,
2015.
Goldsmith
makes his living as a writer of, as he coins it, "uncreative
writing," wherein most text produced is found and resituated. Fair enough.
Remarkable insights can be gained when familiar texts get defamiliarized; in
fact, any poem that fails to perform that shift fails also to really be a poem.
Goldsmith's work has been remarkable in that he strives to defamilarize not
only the text, but its media, as seen in his work Day, in which he retypes an
issue of the New York Times into a standard (but lengthy) codex book.
It's this
attention to recontextualizing media that not only serves to fuel Goldsmith's
work, but also to undermine the work. According to Wilkinson, Goldsmith sought
to apply his techniques to a "hot" text. That term explicitly flags
Goldsmith's interest in treating such a text as a McLuhanesque media; hot as
interactive and as a site of sensory overload. Goldsmith's performance quickly
got hot in another sense, as he became a focal point for racialized America's
fury over the continued mistreatment of its young, black men by powerful, white
men and their institutions.
Conceptualism
sought to replace Modernism as an antiquated mode devolved to analysis of
granular units of meaning. By replacing content with context, the
Conceptualists draw attention to the inherent fact of 21st Century North
American life; that everything known is online, thus granular, thus
recontextualized as motes of static and irreducible except as modes, or media.
This is the age of both meta- and mega-data, and Goldsmith's work has
habitually drawn attention to the way text works in our time, and done so
effectively, which has (as Wilkinson points out) valorized Goldsmith in
Academia.
The
experiment fails, however, when Goldsmith signals that such out-dated
modernisms as hot or cold media provide the motive force behind his work.
McLuhan is old, and his work has long since been understood as useful only
within a remedial context of understanding media as representative of human
communication; the sort of thing one learns in a first-year Communications
class. Media no more replace human experience than Baudrillard's simulacra
do.
Race
theorists understand this. Feminists understand this. Gender and power
theorists understand this. Apparently, however, Goldsmith did not understand
this, and in not understanding it, he proceeds to shift his artistic attention
from his own cold, white manhood and reading practices, to the "hot,"
racialized and contentious body of a dead, young man who had been brutalized by
white guys with power.
By
viewing Brown's body as a text the same way that he had previously viewed his
own body in such works as Soliloquay and Fidget,
Goldsmith dehumanizes Brown. By doing so and ignoring his own position of race
and institutionalized privilege, Goldsmith dehumanizes Brown. By inserting
unflattering comments about Brown's genitalia that appear differently than
their context in the coroner's report, Goldsmith dehumanizes Brown and reveals
his own insecurities. By doing all of this when Brown's body remains a focal
point of trauma, Goldsmith dehumanizes Brown and disregards those for whom
Brown's most important contribution to American culture is the very body that
Goldsmith dehumanizes, even as that body gets appropriated as a simulacrum by
people who self-identify with it because of their own bodies.
Goldsmith
admits making a mistake to Wilkinson, but does not clarify what that mistake
is, at least not in Wilkinson's article. One of the great failings of Modernism
remains its investment in things, in the concrete, in the quotidian details of
lived experience, at the expense of what modernists viewed as the overly
sentimental investment in emotion evidenced by their Romantic forbears.
Conceptualism sought to reclaim context without investing either in granular
things, or subjective emotions, but by disregarding his own context, and by
disregarding the lived context of his actual, human subject, Kenneth Goldsmith
fails both that context and his own movement. He becomes just another white
relic from a context whose time has passed.
I cannot fault anyone who refuses to
forgive Goldsmith this trespass against the body of Michael Brown. Conversely,
I agree with Goldsmith's assertion that the role of the artist is to provoke;
certainly, as an agent provocateur, he has performed this role with aplomb.
Many artists and poets have declared their intention to do whatever is
necessary to disrupt Goldsmith's career, of whom the anonymous Mongrel
Coalition stands as one singular voice among those many. Is such action
justified? It strikes me that, whether they like it or not, whether Goldsmith
likes it or not, such continued attention to his work will only serve to enable
his provocations further. That, after all, is the nature of media.
