Kenneth Goldsmith

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Kenneth Goldsmith (2012)

Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961 in Freeport , Long Island , New York State , USA ) is an American writer and conceptual artist. He is considered the inventor of "uncreative writing" and is the founder of the online art archive UbuWeb .

Family and professional background

Goldsmith comes from a Jewish-Russian family that was originally called Goldschmidt . He studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design , which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1984 . He then worked as a performing artist for about ten years and made wooden sculptures.

Goldsmith lives in New York City with his wife, concept artist Cheryl Donegan , and two sons .

Work as an author

Printing out the Internet (public domain?, 2013)

In 1993 he first came into contact with a computer, which should influence his work. Goldsmith was inspired by the Internet for his method of "uncreative writing". This medium is basically only based on text or code , and transforms it into text, sound, images and film.

"Never before has language possessed so much materiality - so much fluidity, malleability, suppleness - that almost cries out to be actively managed by the writer."

- Kenneth Goldsmith : Süddeutsche Zeitung

The key experience he mentions was an accident when he copied text from the browser window into his Word file. From this he developed the method of "uncreative writing". With this method you don't have to write your own texts to produce art. You take an already existing text and place it in a new context ; the so-called " reframing ". Goldsmith finds that using this method, any text can be poetic material. Goldsmith believes that copyright law is out of date. He reveals all sources.

Goldsmith prefers to produce books that he has not written himself in the traditional sense. They are based on the basis of uncreative writing . Including, for example, the complete copy of an edition of the New York Times , published as an 836-page volume under the title Day . He also transcribed weather reports, traffic reports and a radio report on a baseball game . When asked about the reception of his works, he said that his books were “terribly boring, nobody reads all of that. I don't read it myself. "

On Bloomsday in 1998, Goldsmith commissioned singer and speaker Theo Bleckmann to perform an interpretation of his work Fidget at the Whitney Museum of American Art . In 2011 it was part of an event entitled Celebration of American Poetry in front of Barack Obama and his wife at the White House in Washington, DC

In 2013, Goldsmith invited anyone online to post to an art gallery in Mexico City . The contributions received there from July 26, 2013 to August 31, 2013 were then printed out by Goldsmith. The project was called Printing Out the Internet (to German: print the Internet ) and found more than ten tons of printed paper.

Academic teacher

Goldsmith has taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing since 2003 . His courses are called Non-Creative Writing , Interventionalist Writing, or “How to Waste Time on the Internet”. In collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia , he gave the course Writing Through Art and Culture . In the latter course, participants were encouraged to use tools such as appropriation / appropriation, robbery, theft, fraud and others.

In 2010, Goldsmith was visiting professor for The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University in Princeton , New Jersey .

Art archive

Goldsmith founded the online art archive UbuWeb in 1996 . It started as a Concrete Poetry website . It has been expanded to include audio and video material. The artists are neither asked for permission nor do they receive any money for it. With tens of thousands of works, UbuWeb 2017 is larger than the digital collection of the Museum of Modern Art .

Prizes and awards

Publications

  • Fidget . Coach House Books, 2000.
  • Sololiquy . Granary Books, New York City, USA 2001, ISBN 1-887123-53-9 .
  • Day . The Figures, 2003.
  • The Weather ; four parts: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. Make Now, Los Angeles 2005.
  • Traffic . Make Now, Los Angeles 2007.
  • Sports . Make Now, Los Angeles 2008.
  • with Craig Dworkin: Against Expression. An Anthology of Conceptional Writing . Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 2011, ISBN 978-0-8101-2711-1 .
  • Letter to Bettina Funcke in: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts / 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts No. 17, dOCUMENTA (13) , Kassel 2012; Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2011, ISBN 978-3-7757-2866-9 .
  • Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century . Verso Publishers, New York City 2015, ISBN 978-1-78478-156-9 .
  • as editor: Interviews with Andy Warhol . Verlag Kurt Liebig, Schmieheim 2006, ISBN 3-938715-02-2 .
  • Uncreative writing. Language management in the digital age. Translated by Hannes Bajohr and Swantje Lichtenstein . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2017. ISBN 978-3-95757-252-3 . (There is a specially written chapter in the German edition.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Wolfgang Farkas: It's all said , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 21, 2017, p. 13
  2. ↑ Felix Stephan: UbuWeb: Priceless Art - for all, free on the net . In: THE WORLD . January 10, 2013 ( welt.de [accessed November 2, 2017]).
  3. ↑ Art frees us from data terror in FAZ of June 23, 2014, page 11
  4. ↑ Kenneth Goldsmith: UbuWeb Resources. All avant-garde. All the time. In: UbuWeb. 2011, accessed on July 28, 2017 .
  5. ↑ When mirrors become glass in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on November 29, 2015, page 67
personal data
SURNAME Goldsmith, Kenneth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and conceptual artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Freeport , Long Island , New York State , USA