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From the Author:
"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." With these words, Kenneth Goldsmith
embarked upon a project which he termed "uncreative writing",
that is: uncreativity as a constraint-based process; uncreativity as a
creative practice. By typing page upon page, making no distinction between
article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and
graphical treatments, Goldsmith levels the daily newspaper. DAY is a monument
to the ephemeral, comprised of yesterday's news, a fleeting moment concretized,
captured, then reframed into the discourse of literature. "When I
reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity."
--Kenneth Goldsmith
Review:
(Publishers
Weekly, July 21, 2003)
Over the last 10 years, Goldsmith has gone further in exploring language-as-found-object
that any other artist or writer, creating often impossibly long, but very
simply conceived books that turn out to be very beautiful. For two years,
he "collected" all of the phrases he encountered ending in the
sound "r" and then arranged them by syllable count (No. 111);
spent an entire Bloomsday dictating his every body movement into a tape
recorder and transcribed it hour-by-hour (Fidget); and recorded every
word he spoke for a week, with the transcription resulting in the grand
seven days of Soliloquy. Day doesn't reneg on Goldsmith's practice of
extreme transcription. It consists of the New York Times for Friday, September
1, 2000, retyped-page by page, column by column, line by line-reducing
multiple font sizes to 9-point Bookman Old Style and ignoring instructions
to turn where stories continue. The book taps into the deepest strains
of Pop Art's leveling of artistic and social hierarchies: Andre Agassi's
third round loss to Arnauld Clement in the 2000 French Open runs up against
Wall Street's still zoomy numbers (by far the most pages here), Ecstasy
use at the Nile Night Club in New Jersey, ads for children's clothes,
strike planning by workers at Bridgestone/Firestone factories in Illinois
and Tennessee, "wireless LAN products with direct-sequence systems,"
"GARDEN CINEMA NORWALK ISAAC STREET 838-4504" and many other
narratives and notices. This book is the grinning slacker brother to Chaucer's
cross-class ventriloquy in The Canterbury Tales, one that, in essence,
arrives hot off the press every day. This full-frontal act of appropriation
makes the paper weigh over five pounds, and one wonders whether the Times's
lawyers will see it as an attack or a Warholian Brillo Box-like opportunity.
Meanwhile, Goldsmith's work continues (as one article notes of the University
of Maine Museum) "performing its functions of acquiring, conserving
and exhibiting in very positive ways.
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