I come from nowhere: the suburbs of Long Island, a waste land bereft of culture … I know nothing of politics. I’ve spent the past thirty years in the studio. What do I know of the world? I know the network, I know art, I know music, I know literature. To think that I know more than that is preposterous.
On March 13th 2015, Kenneth Goldsmith received a death threat on Twitter from Cassandra Gillig shortly after giving a reading. The reading took place at Brown University and was a remixed St. Louis county autopsy report of African American teenager Michael Brown, who was murdered by police and whose death sparked nationwide protests against police brutality including in Ferguson (Brown’s home town). Goldsmith’s performance was titled “The Body of Michael Brown” and the resulting commentary was widespread.
So much of the initial criticism of Goldsmith’s Brown performance was about Goldsmith as a “white man”, so much so that it has tended to reify the liberal author function according to sets of criteria that do not adequately reflect lived and embodied experience let alone acknowledge his Jewishness or the “death of the author”.[xiii] It also assumed there was race solidarity, that people cannot be homonymic or fellow travellers. So, what is the white person to do? What are “we” to do after Barthes notwithstanding the self-promotion that has enabled Goldsmith to be a celebrity “Court Poet”?[xiv] I speak as someone who considers himself white and not.[xv] I as an author am not dead, though I do not necessarily want to suggest biographical detailism stand in for abstract “status groups”.
Goldsmith’s silence during and since the controversy has been conspicuous and his defenders have mainly come in private social media exchanges, especially Facebook, rather than through public channels. The reluctance to defend, exonerate, rescue Goldsmith is possibly due to the social reluctance to potentially position oneself as a racist as much as it is about the exhaustion of Conceptualism’s brand.
It is also important to note that what matters in America matters in the world such is the global reach of official avant garde culture. American hegemony is, of course, challenged internally and thus we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.[xvi] Indeed, conceptualism is a diverse and varied field with roots in previous avant gardes and other arts.[xvii] Kenneth Goldsmith is not in the same place as Vanessa Place; nor Erin Morrill, Craig Santos Perez, Myung Mi Kim, Dawn Lundy Martin, Douglas Kearney, Jeremiah Rush Bowen or Joey Yearous-Algozin. Moreover, there is a difference between the everyday focused forms of Goldsmith’s earlier Day, Soliloquy, Fidget and New York Trilogy and the spectacular turn demonstrated by Seven Americans Deaths and “The Body”. Yet, what comes after, besides, next to Goldsmith, next to conceptualism after his Brown silence?
Bonito Oliva: You have said that the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.
I do not want to suggest Goldsmith is alienated or not, but to argue that there can be a politicised response to Goldsmith outside, beside, without the ideological frame of identity politics.
I want to draw from Beuys post-conceptually and focus on “social poetry”.[xxi] Post-conceptualism – a mode of thinking, approaches and a lineage (of people taught by Goldsmith and other conceptualists) – been excavated, presented and promoted by Felix Bernstein in “Notes on Post Conceptual Poetry”, as part of a special edition of Evening Will Come, which also featured writings by former students Sueyun Juliette Lee and Steve McLaughlin. Although there is discussion of aesthetics and politics in Bernstein’s work, particularly in relation to queer theory, there is little attention given to the frame outside liberalism or a critique through analogous structures. As yet, criticism of Goldsmith, and by extension Conceptualism, has not attended to criticisms of Duchamp.
This idea of art encouraging freedom does not, of course, originate with Beuys, but it meant the expansion of his own practice. His early actions and his term “social sculpture” were malleable and wide-ranging, free-ranging ideas. There was the shift from gallery actions to mass plantings of trees, from teaching a limited number of students to public outreach and the founding of organisations, bodies, institutes. Notwithstanding the complications of utopianism (and even a certain mysticism that has been projected onto Beuys because of his “action” that saw him commune with a coyote), there was a strategic and material engagement with the world outside art, with politics, that is absent in Goldsmith.[xxvi] Central to this was the Seven Thousand Oaks project and the Free International University.
Beuys’ social sculpture was “how we mold and shape the world in which we live”.[xxvii] It was radical and dialogic: “Communication occurs in reciprocity: it must never be a one-way flow from the teacher to the taught. The teacher takes equally from the taught.”[xxviii] As a corollary, “social poetry” is the language of how we mold and shape the world in which we live. As a term, it does of course refer back to social poetry as it has been applied to those in the Spanish Civil War, Texan Chicanos and Auden as well as containing within it reference to society, sociology, social realism and socialism. But these are historical references that re-affirm a definition that social poetry is poetry as committed commentary.
In referring to social sculpture we might want to think how “everyone is a poet”, how every language activity can be framed to be poetic, which surely comes as a sibling of Goldsmith’s early conceptualism that brought everyday language, the mundane metonymic detritus of conversation and the newspaper to the fore.[xxix] It is the re-discovery of the utopianism inherent in this framing that enables one to practice an “opening” “to come”, which has political resonance; we might yet find touchstones that have material implications in the spirit of early conceptualism. A social poet could indeed plant seven thousand eucalypts. A social poet could indeed recycle newspapers. A social poet may not need “felt” or “fat” or “hares” to keep him or her company in the language games that take politics as their cue.
This is to say nothing of M. NorbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Fred Moten or Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthologies (What I Say and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone).
Mais’ text begins with a quote from Coleridge, firmly situating him in a Romantic and British tradition. His is a tour of the greats. By contrast Middleton refers to Emily Dickinson, placing her in a proto-modernist frame. Middleton’s is a tour of tours; it is meta. What then does it mean to haunt and be haunted by this text? It may mean to engage with the presence of forebears, particularly if one mainly works in a lyric tradition as Middleton often does; it may mean to haunt them, to reclaim them in return. It might also mean to allude to land that is haunted by spirits, yarlies and massacres.
The chapter is a reflection on walking, on myth, on religion and on aging. It assumes a type of nationalism and references Old England with a sentimental and positivist tone. Its politics are subterranean but we can assume that Mais is discomforted by the intrusion of the modern world – “a car-park … and a cinema betray a strange obliquity of vision”.[xxxvii] At the centre of it is a rational, contained, nostalgic “I”. There is, we can gather, a liberal, Romantic, conservative politics.
buried between architecture and archaeology.
the flat brown road, hedgeless at flood level.
Withies upright at the junction.
the withy-bed: sell the unstable canoe, half-full of water.
After landing be content with the remnants of a blue silk flag.
And you unravel the tangled skein of rock. More. Of grail.
In Middleton the periphery is tied to the metropole in a complex tangle of relations. If we want to get there we must follow what we are told in the next section: “to reach” one must perform tasks, act in a certain way as if the poet can be a speaker from a place of experience. Once one arrives, once one lands, if ever one can, we are told how to feel – “be content with the remnants of a blue silk flag”. Flag, that symbol of nation, is merely a “remnant”, not a proud, unfurling, striking semiotic claim to virgin, unsettled land. “Pardon and vigilance” – opposites of the juridical system collide. With “black piled heap of black / shawls” we are held in wait over a line break to see if it is black “bodies” not shawls. However, shawls too, in their feminist connotation, haunt us in the tragic figuration as a piled heap – one remembers memorials of the daily in this iteration.
The Dog Star, which the naked eye perceives as a single star but is actually a binary star system, references Hesiod’s poetic Work and Days. This interplay and use both of a colonial reading background and a system of establishing binaries only to destabilise them suggests the open possibility, the indeterminate politics of Middleton’s work, and that is what gives it a generative power when read alongside other works of unoriginality. It may connect with Conceptualism at the level of method of construction, but in its ability to be read, in its ambivalent political caring for the land, No Land is decidedly post-Goldsmith by paradoxically being pre-Goldsmith and reminiscent of Charles Bernstein’s adaptation of Erving Goffman’s Asylums.[xxxix] As Peter Allen or Gertrude Stein might say “everything old is new again”.
[vi] I disagree with Conrad then when he writes: “In the case of ‘The Body of Michael Brown’ he slashed and cut into county autopsy reports, essentially the language representing the bone and flesh of the slain young black man.” This seems a wilful and deliberate act of misreading about what a county autopsy report actually is.
[xii]See Conrad, “Kenneth Goldsmith Says He Is an Outlaw”; Ken Chen, “Authenticity Obsession or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show“, Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
[xiv] See Conrad, “Kenneth Goldsmith Says He Is an Outlaw”.
[xv] See Mascara piece on this.
[xvii] See Carolin Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2010); Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (New York: Northwestern University Press, 2011); Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (New York: Ugly Duckling Press: 2009). See Peli Grietzer, “The Aesthetics of Sufficiency“.
[xix] See Blake Butler, “Ubu Publishes the Unpublishable“.
[xxi] Although I am aware of John Stubley’s work, which uses the phrase “social poetry”, it seems in my mind to be an undeveloped poetics without adequate consideration of both the social and poetry. It, moreover, is not concerned with conceptualism. See also “social art” in Bourdieu’s formation and Jared Zimbler’s article on that: “For Neither Love nor Money: The Place of Political Art in Pierre Bourdieu’s Literary Field”, Textual Practice, 23.4 (2009): pp. 599-620.
[xxix] This not only resonates with Beuys’ “everyone an artist” but with Tristan Tzara’s “poetry is for everyone”.