Textbook Uncreative Writing

Art has inarguably been refreshed and strengthened by the rise of conceptualism and its challenge to the stronghold of retinal perception, but art no longer need follow the anti-gesturalism of a readymade, or be executed by written instructions (as in Sol LeWitt’s drawings, which are mere after-effects of the ideas that govern their making), or explicitly reference semiotics (as in Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs [1965], in which the dictionary definition of a chair is displayed with any chair and a photograph of that chair in that place). Instead, conceptualism is marked by incompletion, continuous relocation, and the sort of “non-sight” that Smithson created, an awareness of blindness. The readymade, for instance, is not located in place and time but is instead an interiorization, as Price points out; it’s not a position but a reading process. “Perhaps one always reads in the dark,” Marguerite Duras wrote. “Reading depends on the obscurity of night. Even if one reads in broad daylight, outside, darkness gathers around the book.” Darkness likewise gathers around the idea of conceptualism in writing, which is about as slippery as in art—but shares with art an overt awareness of the history of art. When Kenneth Goldsmith writes the introduction to his book Uncreative Writing, it is essentially a manifesto that adapts to literary practice many of the dominant beliefs in art of the last forty years. When he writes “Context is the new content,” an art historian hears echoes of Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 theory of the expanded field of art. He writes, Age-old bouts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and hoaxes still scandalize the literary world in ways that would make, say, the art, music, computing, or science worlds chuckle with disbelief. It’s hard to imagine the James Frey or J. T. LeRoy scandals upsetting anybody familiar with the sophisticated, purposely fraudulent provocations of Jeff Koons or the rephotographing of advertisements by Richard Prince, who was awarded with a Guggenheim Museum retrospective for his plagiaristic tendencies. Nearly a century ago, the art world put to rest conventional notions of originality and replication with the gestures of Marcel Duchamp.