A textual vanitas

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Raphael Rubinstein

Day, by Kenneth Goldsmith, Great Barrington, Mass., The Figures, 2003; 836 pages, $20.

The challenge that faces every esthetically ambitious artist is not simply to create individually successful works but to develop over time in interesting ways. For some, this means consistency and focus, while for others it means continual innovation. Both approaches have their dangers as well as their potential rewards. Artistic consistency can turn into rote production or self parody, while try ing to achieve a radical break in every new body of work often leads to mere theatrics. When someone creates a powerful new painting or poem, the ante is upped for his or her next effort, which must be at least the equal of its predecessor and, preferably, an advance on it.

Over the last decade, artist-turned-writer Kenneth Goldsmith has published three long books, each of which seemed, by itself, an impossible act to follow. First came No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (1996), an intricately arranged 606-page compendium of phrases the author had found coursing through American culture over the three and a half years noted in the title [see A.i.A., Apr. '96]. This was followed by the more economical Fidget (2000), in which he attempted to describe every physical movement he made during a 13 hour period, and Soliloquy (2001), a record of every word be uttered over the course of a single week. Stylistically, the books are quite different from one another: No. 111 is an encyclopedic romp through human discourse; Fidget reads a bit like slowed down Samuel Beckett; the quotidian, gossipy Soliloquy is Warholian, though with a risky honesty that puts me in mind of French autobiographer Michel Leiris. Despite these differences, the books share an aspect of writing-as-ordeal. It's clear that Goldsmith, who trained as a sculptor and began his career as a text artist exhibiting in galleries, owes a good deal to conceptually based performance art (early Vito Acconci, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Tehching Hsieh, etc.). But by melding endurance art and experimental writing, Goldsmith has created a compelling new mode. While involving their author in increasingly grueling tasks, his books have found an unexpected way to look at the role of language in everyday life. Each of these projects also seemed to raise the stakes for Goldsmith. Since Soliloquy, I've been wondering what his next move would be.

On the back cover of Goldsmith's latest book, Day, he writes: "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." It took Goldsmith nearly six months of full-time work to complete his self-imposed task of transcribing that day's edition of the Times. Although Day must have been excruciating to "write," the results, published in the form of an 836-page, trade paper sized volume, are surprisingly absorbing. I've happily spent longer with it than I normally do with a regular, freshly printed edition of the Times. I'll admit, however, to merely riffling through the 200 or so pages of stock market quotes, but can well imagine some more financially savvy person than I discovering even those deserts of obsolete data intellectually rewarding. Visually, the dense blocks of numerals and initials have a kinship with works by On Kawara and Roman Opalka. Another visual aspect of the book, its blue cover, seems to allude to the cover of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, a book that also takes a single 24-hour period as its subject.

After only four years, much of the Sept. 1, 2000, Times has acquired an almost antique aura. The sense one gets of examining an artifact from an irrevocably vanished world has much to do with Day's pre-9/11 content. Often, what originally would have been fairly innocuous items take on a chilling cast. In the B section, for instance, there's a short news story about a half-dozen companies submitting bids to take over the World Trade Center lease. A letter to the editor in response to a previous op-ed piece about fear on airplanes carries this sentence: "I would bet that the naked and very vocal terror inside that cabin is far from uncommon when helpless passengers are surprised by a confrontation with eternity." These are among the most striking presages of the World Trade Center attack, but the entire book can be read as a kind of textual vanitas, a picture of an ordinary day in a city whose inhabitants don't guess what we now know: that New York was one year and 10 days away from the worst morning in its history.

There is also no shortage of stories that look different in light of later events. On the Times's page A22 (page 104 of Day), we can read of Dick Cheney, then merely a candidate for vice president, calling for the withdrawal of American ground troops from Kosovo and Bosina--sharp contrast with his more recent stance on Afghanistan and Iraq. (Day includes the Times's original pagination, as well as its own; each original newspaper page translates to about six Goldsmith pages.) There are numerous stories (including one on Ralph Nader) that carry the byline of the source-fabricating reporter Jayson Blair, and figuring on the masthead in 2000 was Howell Raines, the editor who lost his job when Blair's misdeeds were discovered.