Visual voices - the use of writing in the works of artists Sean Landers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Grigely

Art in America, April, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

The work I am concentrating on here is a 600-page manuscript titled "No. 111 2.7.93--7.22.95" (the numbers of the title tell us that it's the 111th work Goldsmith made and that he worked on it from Feb. 7, '93 to July 22, '95). The book originated in Goldsmith's disappointment at the negative response to a 1994 show at Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York where he exhibited a single large text piece titled No. 109 2.7.93--12.15.93. Collectors and supporters who had enthused over his earlier drawings and smaller text works found the number of words in the eight 96-by-48-inch panels of silkscreened text simply too much to take in. Goldsmith was bothered by the art world's limited capacity to handle language.

At the same time that he was pondering the negative response to his show, Goldsmith wondered what to do with the text he had accumulated but not put into the piece--he'd edited out the phrases he thought would be uninteresting to others. He also realized how dissatisfied he had grown with the laborious, expensive process of rendering language material. He was deeply interested in words, much less so in the act of turning them into drawings and silkscreened panels. Goldsmith's solution was to dispense with that sort of object-making: he would create his next work in a computer, he would write a book. Starting with the text that had gone into the panels of No. 109 2.7.93--12.15.93 and the unused material, he began accumulating words and phrases that caught his attention. His ambition was to turn himself into a passive receiver of the language circulating around him.

Rather than attempting the impossible task of funneling absolutely everything that struck him into a book, Goldsmith limited his selection to words and phrases ending in various off-rhymes of the "r" sound. These include "er," "ar," "ir," "ah," "a," "air," "ear" and "uh." At the start, it seemed as if 130 pages would suffice, but the project kept growing. Goldsmith began thinking of his manuscript as a kind of reference book and wanted the finished volume to have a dictionarylike heft. Looking at the reference books on his shelves, he noticed that they tended to be at least 600 pages long.

Although it can be maddening and not a little hallucinatory to read, "No. 111 2.7.93--7.22.95" has a rather straightforward structure which relies on alphabetical order and the number of syllables in a word or phrase. Each chapter is composed of words or phrases of a certain syllabic length which are arranged, within the chapter, in alphabetical order. Thus, the first chapter begins with "A" and ends with "Zsa," the second begins "A woah!" and ends "zuder," the third runs from "A is for" to "Zozima." While the computer facilitated the process of collecting and filing phrases, there was no software that could count syllables. Goldsmith was compelled to manually count them, tapping out the words with his fingers in increasingly time-consuming increments. As the number of syllables grows, the sources become more recognizable: Goldsmith cannibalizes newspaper headlines, TV schedules, pop songs, dirty jokes, liner notes, colloquial phrases, advertisements, Shakespeare, Joyce, book titles and his own diaries. Other material is drawn from the Internet and the tape recorder the artist carried around with him while he was composing the book.