extreme
reading
a telephone conversation between Simon Morris and Pavel Büchler, 08.03.01
Hi
Pavel…I, I thought I’d start with an introduction to our process.
Um, we are using the form of a conversation to explore Kenneth
Goldsmith’s work ‘Soliloquy’, from 1997. We do this
consciously, utilising, Jacques Derrida’s methodology to unsettle the
usual relations between the literary work and the critical text. Derrida
didn’t just respond to James Joyce’s Ulysses in his text from 1987,
his writing was partly like it. His analysis was a creative work, which shared
in Joyce’s project and borrowed its literary devices. We are not just
responding to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, our process is partly like
it. Our analysis is a creative work, which shares Goldsmith’s project and
borrows its terms of construction. I’m interested in the idea of creating
work through conversation. As the artist Terry Atkinson said when reflecting
upon the early work of Art & Language “The communal studios, the refectories,
the seminar rooms, the vestibules, the corridors, the libraries of the art
schools was where the work got made and it was generally made in conversation
and writing – but mostly in
conversation.” So we’re constructing a text, um, through
conversation. I’m on the phone in York and you’re on the phone in
Manchester. Both us are videotaping ourselves on the telephone. The intention
being to transpose each person’s conversation and to position it at
either end of Goldsmith’s ‘Soliloquy’ so that the reader can
only ever read one half of the dialogue between us. Definitely…um, I mean
I-I come to a quote later that talks about a few people, um, that are referring to Kenny’s
work have the chutzpah they say to actually expose themselves to such an
unedited state of undress…and I kind of felt, um…I suddenly
realised that obviously I don’t have the chutzpah to expose myself to
that sort of unedited state of undress but I’m asking you to provide
uh…t-t-t, to play that role with us. Yeah. Right, o.k. well, um, uh-uh,
I’ve got an argument that I wanted to run past you and see if I can gauge
your responses to this argument that I’ve put forward…there’s
three parts to the argument. So if I run through part one and then-then-then
see what you say, yeah? Um…through my research into Goldsmith’s
practice I’ve come up with three parts to an argument which I’d
like to run past you. I’m going to suggest that Goldsmith’s work
disrupts the classic binary oppositions: speech and writing; absence and
presence; and order and chance. The first subversion occurs in relation to
speech and writing. From Plato to Saussure speech was seen to be privileged
over writing. The privileging of speech over writing was initially premised on
the idea of a hierarchical chain from thought to speech to writing. The two
forms of communication were posited in a classic binary opposition to one
another. Derrida and others working around theories of deconstruction have
disrupted the rigidity of binary oppositions. Derrida talks about how speech is
connected to presence and I’ve got a quote on that, um…He says that
“when I speak, I am conscious of being present for what I think, but also
of keeping as close possible to my thought a signifying substance, a sound
carried by my breath…I hear this as soon as I emit it. It seems to depend
only on my pure and free spontaneity, requiring the use of no instrument, no
accessory, no force taken from the world. This signifying substance, this
sound, seems to unite with my thought…so that the sound (seem) seems to
erase itself, become transparent…allowing the concept to present itself
as what it is, referring to nothing other than its presence.” He then
goes on to discuss, um writing - how it operates on absence: “The written
marks are abandoned, cut off from the writer, yet they continue to produce
effects beyond their presence and beyond the present actuality of their
meaning, i.e., beyond their life itself. To write is to produce a mark which
will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive…The
writer’s disappearance will not prevent it functioning.” But I,
I’m proposing that Goldsmith’s 183,685 word text Soliloquy is
neither speech nor writing but is what Derrida would term an undecidable. I
would call it, ah…WRITTEN SPEECH, something in between speech and
writing. In Lacanian terms, there are two levels of language, announced which
has been written and is dead and announcing which incorporates the process of
speech. The WRITTEN SPEECH in Goldsmith’s work is being written through
the process of announcing. The writing is the process. Gordon Tapper said in
his review of Goldsmith’s ‘Soliloquy’: “Every
writer’s guilty fantasy may be to write as effortlessly as one speaks,
but few have the chutzpah to actually expose themselves in such an unedited
state of (of) undress.” And this is not written from experience, I-I think his text is written
experience. Written speech as an undecidable allows the play of possibilities,
the movement back and forth, into and out of the opposites. Its not like
reported speech which may be taken out of one context and framed in a totally
separate context, in a text or in an essay which will suggest further meanings.
Goldsmith’s speech is extracted from the context of the dialogue (the
voice of the other has been erased) but remains in the original context of his
speech, in time and sequence - in a continuous unedited stream from Monday
morning through to Sunday night. His speech is the context and the context is
his speech. So, that’s kind of part one…um. Yes. Well, this is um,
yeah, this is, this is, this is another part, it’s part two…it
comes on nicely from what you’ve been saying it-it’s the idea that
Goldsmith is both present and absent in his work, um there’s another
undecidable that occurs in relation to the binary opposition of presence and
absence. Um, it can be seen as a haunting speech. Writing is usually the death
of presence and the possibility of absence but Goldsmith appears to have
exchanged his memory for the mechanical recording device. Instead of more
artificial exercises in stream of consciousness writing, the very rigour of his
method must mean that he can’t retain critical distance from his speech
throughout the entire week and those moments of slippage are what gives the
writing it’s live currency. I-I discussed this…Kenny’s
Soliloquy with two friends of mine, both of whom work with the ideas of the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The Lacanians (as I shall refer to them from now)
suggested that Goldsmith is absent from his own text, that Goldsmith’s
text circumscribes his own absence as a subject of the signifier – by
mapping himself on the level of the signifier (or language) he draws the rim of
what is specific to his own lack so that the object a becomes a logical (but
missing) deduction from the text. The text represents the lack/ the absence
specific to his subjectivity. However, there may be moments of vacillation
where the unconscious through slippages, parapraxis etc indicates a hole in the
symbolic/a dynamic unconscious - the subject emerges at the very moment of his
extinction. Um, they also suggested that his soliloquy is similar to an
analytical session to the extent that the logic that produces it is formed by a
subjective structure – nothing is edited out, it has no purpose. However,
it is not an analytical session as there is no analyst and hence no
punctuation. By recording for such a long period of time, Goldsmith is almost
operating a scientific methodology, capturing everything he can say, so that he
can circumscribe the missing bit, the bit that cannot be said. The unconscious
emerges in Goldsmith’s written speech as something behind the slip of the
tongue, something that comes out when the slip of the tongue occurs. The
dialogue of others being left out of the work could be seen as a metaphor for
Goldsmith’s own division in the hands of the signifier. So Goldsmith
himself is absent but becomes present through the repeated holes in language,
um, the slippages that present an eruption of the real. The slippages include
all the fumbled bits, the spaces that cur – that occur on the edge of
language. And I guess that’s um, my second question or maybe my second
statement or second part…Well, it’s not really a question, yeah,
I’d–I’d agree. Yep. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Yeah. I
mean. Yes. That, that’s very interesting so-so your feeling…so you
actually feel the absence left by the person he was originally having the
dialogue with that was obviously erased. Yeah. Yes. Yes, definitely, yeah.
It’s definitely located in the everyday, yeah. Yeah. Right, and you get
to know different characters. Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah, yeah. Right. Right. Yes. But,
I - I think you actually configure it mentally, which is-which is why, I-I
actually, I actually think there is this part where the other is both present
and absent as well…well, yeah…Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes, so it is
this combination of, it-it is both present and absent – I mean I-I-I I
located it with something, um, ah fairly – fairly similar…n-n-n-not
a film but I could say Goldsmith is both present and absent and the voices of
the other people he spoke to during his one week recording are both present and
absent. The voice of the other
remains strongly present through its supposed absence. Their dialogue has been
erased and so is absent formally in the text but present in relation to the construction
of his speech where their absence makes their presence stronger. And-and I like
the way you said you could almost fit yourself in-in-in the place of the people
he was talking to…Yeah. Oh yes, yeah. Yes. Right. Yes. Well,
I…Yeah. Right. Yes. Oh, this, this links to…yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
well that links to exactly what I was thinking, the analogy I had was this
operates in much the same way as the British artist, Rachael Whiteread’s
‘House’ from 1993 in which the interior negative space of an ordinary
Victorian, terraced East London house was filled with liquid
concrete…right…o.k. Right. Oh, right…yeah. Well-well I-I
think you’ve picked up on something that is very , very good is-is that he’s, um, he’s very
much…it’s a very strong idea that he was trained as a
sculptor…I mean he said about, um...Goldsmith registered this shift from
the invisible to the visible in relation to his own art practice in an
interview with Erik Belgum where he says: “I wanted to see how much one
week of my speech weighed. I’m interested in concretizing the ephemeral;
and there’s nothing both more concrete, yet ephemeral, than
language.” Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Right. I-I-I was yeah. Right. Yeah. I-I like
very much what you said about the group in Zagreb who wanted to concrete the
inside of their heads, I’ve just taken a book…What, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Right. Right. Yes, yes. Yes, I-I-I-I’m totally with you
there… I I’m going to claw myself back to – back to, b-b-back
to this thing you said about the group in Zagreb…because I’ve just
taken a book off my shelf so – so I’m going away from my
structure. But I’ve - I
found this quote that I find particularly interesting – I’ll just
read this little section out to you…um, it’s from William H.
Ewing’s…the book’s called ‘The Body’…he
said in the introduction: “Extravagant claims were made of
photomicrography when it was invented. Just as in the seventeenth century, when
mechanistically minded observers ‘saw’ minute machine-like
structures through the microscope, so certain photography enthusiasts
‘saw’ structures that they were predisposed to see. A particularly
outlandish discovery was reported in Photographic News in 1888 by George R.
Rockwood of New York, under the rubric, ‘a photo-physiological
theory’. Examining photomicrographs of brain tissues, he was astonished
to find markings which seemed to him to be suspiciously like Chinese characters
(note the lure of the exotic East) or hieroglyphs. Amazed by this monumental
find of ‘pictures in the brain’, Rockwood speculated that
‘future literary executors shall be able to extract from the
distinguished dead posthumous poems, suppressed opinions, the contents of
‘burned’ letters, family secrets, or the mysteries of life that are
buried.” Which I thought was quite a, quite a nice idea. Right. Well,
th-this-this relates to…what he says about John Cage. He said: “ If
something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then
eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not
boring at all.” And that-that was one of the quotes that Kenny likes to
reference…yeah…yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, he, I
mean he…yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, I mean…the-the, the-the,
the third part of my argument I had was, was that structure and chance are
also…which I think we’ve been talking about in the process of this
actual conversation itself, um, that structure and chance are supposed to
co-exist within Soliloquy or what the dadaists called chance and anti-chance,
and saying like the yes and the no - they belong together. Um, it-it, it also
reminded me of another art work - one of Hans Arp’s working processes
when he would take an unsuccessful drawing, tear it up and let the pieces
flutter to the floor. Um, he would then dis-discover new meanings through the
chance juxtapositions, the surprising configurations – and I see those
fluttering pieces very much like, er, you were talking about Kenny’s
snowflakes or-or Kenny’s words as snowflakes. Um-Golds…Oh yes, yeah
from-from the back cover, yeah, yeah, no, uh…Goldsmith is sculpting with
words and acknowledges the co-presence of contradictory elements like
deliberation and randomness in his practice. In conversation with A.S. Bessa he
refers to the process in no.111 as:
“both an aleatory and a highly structured process.” And the
same could be said for Soliloquy. Certain appointments had been fixed in the
week Soliloquy was recorded such as Goldsmith’s meeting with the literary
critic Marjorie Perloff in the members lounge of the Museum of Modern Art and
certain routines structure the process of daily living and will be repeated
through habit. Um, these represent an established order but the conversations
themselves afford the element of chance. Dialogues are fluid and you
can’t completely control or anticipate the direction they are going to
take. In the same way our text here, our dialogue on the phone is a process
that incorporates both structure and chance. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So
he’s almost like, he’s almost like a genre for a movie, like as we
anticipate it’s going to be
a horror film – so we expect certain things to happen in a horror film
where we anticipate a period drama we expect…as we go in the cinema yeah.
Yes, yeah. And-and the fact he’s in New York as well. Right. Right. Um.
Yeah. Yeah, I-I, uh, yeah. Yeah, I very much see that, and I also like what you
were saying earlier about, um, about-about the fact that the other person,
the-the missing people…you can almost like in a cinematic way, you can
exercise sort of various fantasies of the self, you can almost imagine yourself
as his wife or you can imagine yourself…or as his friend. Well, I
don’t mean actually as his wife…I mean as, as the dialogue of his
wife so you can sort of fit yourself into all the different positions in the
text…just like you might in the cinema, when you see Titanic or
something, you might actually be able to identify with more than one character
and both male and female, you can move between hero and villain, you can move
between lots of different people, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yes, yes,
yes. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. But there is
something…yeah…there is something interesting about-about-about the
process that we are going through…you know, going back to the fact
that-that, that our dialogue is-is this mixture of-of myself having prepared
it… I feel whilst I’m actually talking to you now that-that having
researched his work carefully and presenting careful, structured arguments,
which are…a lot of which I’m actually reading out, um…it’s
interesting that I’m actually starting to feel more distanced from the
text and you sound like, having just read and engaged with the actual book
itself, rather than actually doing it as a research procedure sound like
you’re actually much more involved with the text so I feel like I’ve
almost created a distance for myself from the actual text as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yes. Um. Yeah. Yeah. It-it, it might actually further distance myself
from it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes, yes. Right, right. Yeah. Well, well. Yeah. Could
you, could you feel - what I’m really suggesting is that it is actually
it could be seen as a work of deconstruction, in the sense that it-it, it is
not one thing or the other - it is always caught in this kind of space
inbetween, I mean Marj…Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Um. Right, yes. Yeah.
Right. Well, I mean, yeah I mean , yeah. Yeah, it-it, yeah. Oh, I definitely
think so, the-the literary critic Marjorie Perloff when she was describing his
work she said it’s “on the borders between ‘poetry’ and
‘prose’ and, more courageously, between poetry and ‘not
poetry’, not to mention the borders between ‘literature’ and
‘art’.” So, it always seems to be in between these
two…in between these two spaces, between - I like what you just said,
between nothing or something. Um, uh-uh-uh…if you follow my suggestion as
a work of deconstruction, that subverts, challenges and questions traditional
positions, um, Kenny’s work which he terms EXTREME WRITING, I like that,
he’s taken it from you know, extreme sports…he calls it extreme
writing opens up new possibilities
for language. As Goldsmith said himself in conversation with A.S. Bessa:
“The less transparent language becomes on a regular basis, the more
sensitized we become to its formal and physical qualities. We start to pay
attention to the concreteness of language, instead of taking it for granted as
a commodity, a unique medium for exchange. Through this process, language
becomes more curious and valuable in and of itself.” Which I think is,
uhh…Yeah, yeah. Ha, ha, that’s o.k. Mm, Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah. Yes.
Yes. Right, right. Well, I-I, I’ll tell you something else I-I did
because I think this connects with what you’re saying of those multiple
voices that we’re kind of picking on here as well and-and-and and drawing from I mean Kenny, Kenny
talks about it being, ummm…talks about sampling, I mean he’s very
much into the sort of contemporary culture that we sample from all sorts of
places - he talks about appropriation, and um, particularly people like Duchamp
and, and he-he, he can’t believe that Sherrie Levine style appropriation
strategies haven’t been mapped onto language as-as, as much or everyday language as much as he
would hope. What I did, when I went through all these reviews from all these
different people talking, um I actually sampled um, a lot of the phrases that
caught my attention, I’ve got a little paragraph here – I-I-I hope
I won’t send you to sleep with this one but its uh, these are some of the
words I picked out, he said: textual landscapes, extreme process writing, the
originating concept may be simple, but the end result is a complex provocation
on language and visuality, the weight of language, 341 sheets of ordinary
paper, refers to speech as the second most ephemeral human product - the first
being thought, enormously entertaining piece of writing, inhabited by the
crackling, shameless,
free-wheeling voice of Kenny Goldsmith, the spatialization of words, a
week of talk, he wants us to see that language occupies space and lots of it,
self-imposed systems, blather, visual voices, a sculptor’s feel for the
materiality of words, he makes the everyday glow with transcendence, a
description of masturbation that verges on classic, disarmingly
straightforward, it’s not
meant to be read linearly—none of my work is, defamialirizes the
everyday, and as it said in the original press release for the exhibition of
Soliloquy that was held at the Bravin Post Lee gallery in New York City,
February 8 to March 7 1997: “By turns humiliating, enthralling, boring,
tedious, absurd, absorbing, and yet always overwhelming.” Well,
that’s just about it. That is Kenneth Goldsmith’s soliloquy. Right.
Yes. Yes. No well that, that was from, that was from all the reviews that I
read and some of those, some of those were his words and some of those were the
critics words – I-I, I Just nicked from wherever I felt that was
interesting…yeah. Yes, yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um. Yes. Hmm.
Hm-hm. Right. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And divide it up into seven
acts and for seven days. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Which reminds us that we’re
all constructed…But makes us think, makes us think about, but makes us
think about, what constructs us or
how we’re constructed or how we relate to others or to how we look at
language, umm, it takes it back to language itself…I mean but we, we, we
very rarely ever put language under the microscope to the extent he
does…I mean he has said it actually has changed his way of hearing
himself talk…and hearing other people talk, um and certainly I mean - you
can’t help but do that if
you subject yourself to a week of that sort of intensity…So where are we
going to end this Pavel? O.K…that’s fine, yeah. Well, it’s
been very good talking to you…o.k. Brilliant…have a good trip to
Vienna. Take care Pavel and thank you very much. Cheers, bye. (Thanks
to the Lacanians: Dr. Howard Britton, a psychoanalyst working within a Lacanian
orientation, & Jo Sessions, a Lacanian theoretician) extreme
reading
a telephone conversation between Pavel Büchler and
Simon Morris, 08.03.01
Hello.
Oh, hi…uh-huh. That sounds brilliant. I wonder if, uh Kenneth Goldsmith
also kind of practiced and prepared himself so well, you know. You’re
kind of reversing the tables aren’t you? I’m becoming a, a sort of
instrument in a kind of attempt to divert or water down a written text here.
Well sure, I’m very happy to do, you know. Do you want to throw me a
question…you are supposed to be interviewing me. Um-hm. Um-hm. Um-hm.
Um-hm. Um-hm. Um-hm. Um-hm. Um. Now that’s-that’s a long question
if I have ever heard one. Uh, I think, what is sort of…not quite missing
from your point but what kind of effects, ah, the argument is when you actually
look at it from the receiving end, that is from my end. I have now listened for
a good five minutes to a prepared text being read to me. Ahhh, I have somewhere
near me the copy of, of Kenneth Goldsmith’s book, ahh, which I have read
bits of, or which I can read. There is a difference between the way speech and
writing operate at the receiving end. The, if you, if you see, ah, this work as
a written speech, how do you then kind of see the reading of the book - as
listening? Now, that’s an interesting point. You know, there was a time,
ah, according to Marshall McCluhan at least and I’m sure
others…where silent reading was an unheard of thing and he describes if I
remember correctly, in Guttenberg Galaxy…ah, a monk who was reading
silently, ah and er, crowds were kind of coming from, from far and away to see
that kind of strange phenomenon of a man sort of reading in silence and
watching how, according…that’s what, what Marshall McCluhan quotes
in the book…how his lips were moving as though he was, uh, uh, ruminating
the, the-the holy word or whatever it was that he was reading, you know and the
idea of the separation of reading from listening, from speech, yeah, from the
transmission of, of-of speech really needs to be somehow made part of that
argument. The-the, yeah, you go…Umm, a question you call it,
ah…yeah…it’s not really a question, I mean it’s a sort
of…you know, uh, uh,…to comment on this, there is –
it’s a difficult, uh, uh, position to agree or disagree with or even sort
of add to because basically, uh, what is happening there - you are sort of
reversing, ah, in some ways a kind
of a performance which is, which is registered in the book or in the work. What
happens in the book, is that a guy has an idea and decides to do it. It fits
within what he, ah normally does, both conceptually and technologically. You
know, he is used to the idea of say, e-mail – he seems to be, you
know…I hardly know how to spell e-mail…but-but but he seems to be
obsessed almost with it - its one of the kind of core activities that he does
– he does websites and so on which are, which are, are technologies of absence, if you like, you know, ah,
e-mail - we, we talk about actually talking to someone or visiting a website
yeah we don’t go anywhere we don’t visit anything, we sit on our
bums - ah, do something with the computer which kind of completely passes me
by, I’ve never seen a web site – I don’t know what they look
like and then, you know, suddenly
we are visiting something, you know…something is actually visiting us but
that’s a kind of difficult thing to grasp…so the metaphors around
that technology are constructed, in a kind of, they kind of refer to a kind of lower order of
things – or more basic, more experiential, more everyday, more physical,
ah, more kind of universal order of things, you know, speaking, talking, visiting, yeah, going
somewhere, you go to such and such a website. Now, so, so he, uh, uh, decides
to make a work which fits what he does and decides not to do anything else than
what he does that is to just normally live, then, ah, uh the trick is that he
will leave the world sort of – if you like out of it, ah, put his part of
it, code his part of it in writing
which is the kind of higher order of things, you know - the abstraction, remove
it from the, uh, from the reality of things, of the world and pass it onto
someone like you or me you know to bring it into our world of things - it is
just an object, it is just a book, which is going to sit on my shelf next to
other books and so on and uh, and uh, ah, ah and leaves us, kind of, to, to put
in the kind of missing bits in a way he is, when I read it, he is kind of, in
the - in the kind of sense of the e-mail technology for instance, he is talking
to me, you know…I am the one who is in those, sort of, empty spaces, in
those empty gaps…he is
always talking to me or he is talking to someone, someone just next to me, you
know…Yeah, which you would, which you would, which you would never, for
instance conventionally find, ah in a novel but in some sense every novel,
every dialogue in a novel, you know. Barbara Cartland always speaks to the reader,
you know and every artist, ah,
even when the artist may not be using, ah, the kind of form of-of, well
ostensibly it is really the form of a novel or something close to it, ah, every
artist is a storyteller - so every artist anticipates, every artwork
anticipates a kind of listener, you know, a recipient who is there as you
speak, who is there as you write or who is at least there as he or she reads,
or looks, yeah…what I find kind of strange here is that whilst, you know,
the whole kind of methodology, the whole process that he, that, that Goldsmith
uses is really in some ways pretty conventional, and pretty kind of, you know,
basic and simple, unembellished maybe,
unsophisticated maybe in some ways, located in the everyday if you like
ah, ah, there is a strange sense that there is something kind of missing from,
from those conventions of the reception at the receiving end so for instance I
can kind of, and I caught myself doing it while I read it, ah -I can kind of
imagine the people he is talking to and you know, sooner or later, I’ve
not read the whole thing through, but-but sooner or later you come across
certain kind of traits and traces of people and you kind of get to know them as
you would in a novel, yeah, in a well constructed novel or, or, or in a movie, but, but they are never really
completely quite there, you know. Its like if you were sort of blindfolded or
something you can’t really quite see what happened to them from one
sentence to the next. You can’t really guess exactly where they are.
It’s a little bit like, I saw on telly this amazing thing which I’m
basically intrigued by, ah, a film called, something with Robert Redford, a
film called…uh..uh…Legal Eagles I think, a few days ago. And
I’m very much into the way Hollywood represents modernist art on screen
and so I sat down and watched it and much of the film is-is taking place in a
gallery and it’s all to do with fraud and murder and passion and all
these kinds of things and the kind of absent protagonist of the movie is an
artist who dies right at the beginning of the movie and whose work is the, sort of, bone of
contention between, sort of various parties involved in some kind of legal
argument and so on. And, and, ah, as the film progresses, you kind of get to
know a lot about the artist, you get to know the, sort of, importance and
position of the work, of the work, ah, ah - on the market and it must be a
bloody important, marvelous work
because at one point they actually use, what looks like Brancusi to
smash to pieces a piece of plaster
- just to get the work, you know, that they are after, so you know, so if it is
worth damaging Brancusi for – it must be bloody good. But it, through out
the film at no time do you ever see the work…you see people looking at
it, you see the back of the canvas several times, or different canvases - you
see people unrolling canvases that
have been sort of, you know, ah, ah, ah, in a container, wrapped away,
stored away and so on but you never ever see the work itself and it’s a
kind of similar thing that is happening here, you know. Well exactly, and
because you configure it mentally, you know what happens there in the film, you
have a fictitious artist and the director was bloody smart not to do the thing
that the rest of them do and that is to get the props technician to paint
something like a, you know like a Pollock, you know, ah, ah, just to have, you
know, an artist, ah…but, you know, use devices where you don’t
really need to see the work but make it very, sort of, intriguing so here, ah,
you are kind of getting something similar in reverse…there is kind of
real life is being used so that through the conventions, of the, of the
novel-like thing…text that you get at the end, you know, the
chronological, sort of, developing
novel like text made of, made of words and chapters, ah, you get kind of a
fiction, you know, out of the, out of the, ah, sort of, real life story that is sort of, you know,
definitely behind there. I mean, in that, that absence, is an absence of the
real and yet the whole thing is trying to be nothing but the real. Um-hm. WeIl
in a way you have to, because you have no one else to fit in there, you know,
in a way you have to…I wonder what would happen if you read that text,
sort of, out loud to a listener, you know, to an audience, you know, I wonder
what would happen then. Ah, I don’t quite know, but, but, ah, really,
the, the…when you are, sort of, on your own with the text, trying to
negotiate it, the way you negociate…ah, you know, not even the way you
negotiate fiction, even the way you negotiate a document. Say, I’ve never
seen such a thing but say, you know, a, a transcript of legal proceedings or
something, of court proceedings so even if you try to negotiate it that way you
still have only yourself to fit in there, you know, and its kind of the
insignificance of it, maybe - that makes it possible I imagine that, that, ah,
you know, its something of relevance to you, true relevance to you, just like
it maybe the case if you do read through legal proceedings somewhere, you know,
ah, ah, ah – what’s referred to in the text that you would be, sort
of in a different position and the text would be if you like, unmasked,
I’m using this word incredibly carefully, unmasked as a kind of, only
half of a thing, you know – its, it’s a way of kind of, I, I
understand from the context that he trained as a sculptor, it’s a way of
making a piece of sculpture by taking something away like in carving, you know,
you have a block of stone and you carve bits away and you are left with a, with
a sculpture. So you have a tape, which presumably, ah, had a lot on it, of
other people’s words. They were all taken away and you get a piece of
sort of text, sculpture, a piece of text/sculpture. But, uh. No, I give you a
better one, I give you a much better one. Lets, lets get the history correct
here. Lets sort the history out. Ah, Rachael Whiteread works in a kind of idiom
which is a long history and to my knowledge, apart from Bruce Nauman, ah, ah
the, the kind of, you know, pioneers of this idea are to be found in Croatia, a
group called Gorgona in Zagreb in
1963 who proposed to cast the inside of their own heads, that is what he is
doing, he cast the inside of his own head, you know. Umm, well he actually
saying something there in the text, I like that very, very much, where, where,
talking to someone, ah, he is talking about, oh I can’t, I forgot the word that he is using
there, but about reducing the text to the smallest type size, that, that, you can reduce things to and kind of,
seeing what happens. I actually like that idea very, very much, I kind of like the image of it, and, but, but I
like it for another reason you know, I like the idea of making it, sort of,
more complicated by not allowing, really any form of, of, of meaningful access to
it. Because once you reduce it to a size which is below the threshold of what
an eye can read. You know, we are presuming that people don’t use
microscopes to, to examine works of art unless they are conservators or
something. And so when you reduce it to that size, and kind of just do exactly
what he suggests: see what it, see what it does; see what it amounts to; see
what happens. You know, you move from reading to looking and you move back
through that kind of whole process of what is art practice using techniques of,
you know, sound recording and literary practice and writing - all those things
that sort of traditionally are sort of
marginal aspects of it or, or indeed in some peoples books, completely
excluded of it. Ending up again with something which is basically like a kind
of, I imagine, like a minimalist drawing or something which is like a Malevich,
kind of, black square except it is
grey on white, on white, white paper and I like that idea very very much but
I’m also, I’m also quite happy that he didn’t do it , you
know, its kind of a bit too clever, but, but I like the idea. Not concrete,
cast them, cast them. Like Rachael Whiteread cast the house or like Bruce
Nauman cast the underside of his stool and the space between two boxes. And
they, in fact, its in a manifesto that they, that they issued in 1963 and they
continued by sort of proposing to cast the inside of cars and everything and in
the end they say, every relevant empty space in our city…you know, now,
the, the, the, ah, ah, ah, the idea is kind of what is the relevant space sort
of in your city? That’s a sort of, that’s what kind of gives it
that edge and that’s obviously where the metaphor runs up against,
against Goldsmith’s methodology because of course, he does not really,
ah, ah, at least appear to be consciously seeking, kind of, relevant
conversations, relevant situations, you know, what is, what is relevant? The
relevant empty space is the accidental, sort of empty space that he comes
across. I mean, you know it’s interesting, because he’s always
responding, or mostly responding, he’s not kind of leading the way. It
almost like, like the, this kind of interview we are doing right now, rather
than being a respondent to your questions, I’m the misleader, you know,
I’m supposed to kind of mislead you, take you and divert you, take you
away and uh, and uh, uh he’s kind of doing something, something kind of
similar. He’s not leading anything, you know, he’s responding but
for me at the receiving end, he’s obviously leading me because I
can’t go there alone and I have no one else to lead me. That’s it.
That’s it, that’s it, that’s what it is. Mmm, no
that’s, that’s, that’s what he refers to yeah, it’s the
idea that when you get below the threshold of perception, you know, you see
something that kind of, you know, ah, is not there, even in the first place the
same thing happens, obviously the other way around. I used to re-photograph
other people’s photographs from kind of printed images, from news images,
blowing it up twenty-five thousand times, you know, until, until you really
were getting something that was not there in the first place and of course
there’s nothing that was not there in the first place. Its blow up, its
Antonioni. Yeah. Um. It’s a kind of, you know, it’s an enthusiast
speaking there. I wouldn’t quite kind of…beautiful as it is. I
wouldn’t quite, experientially, kind of, confirm, confirm that it really
is so. But, you know, if someone is boring, sort of, after eight minutes, they
are probably boring forever. But depends what you call boredom, call boredom.
But what is, but what is, what is really happening there. If you take
Antonioni’s blow up. You never really know whether a murder really was
committed and even if the murder was committed you never really know, ah, the
details of the victim, of all these kind of things. All these things have to be
filled in, on the basis, of what is not photographic evidence but a kind of
photographic suspect, yeah? The photograph which is libidinous is turned into
the photograph that is kind of metaphorically speaking, the suspect here on
trial, yeah? And this is a similar kind of a thing, sort of, happening there.
In a way, maybe, that the, the idea of using the micrographic principle and
reducing it down to god knows what, ah, ah, maybe it is redundant, maybe that
what he did in the book has already done it. Because, it is a kind of a
different scale, you know, there is some kind of a different way of measuring
in big inverted commas time and volume, you know a number of pages or whatever,
you know. Is this a week of text? I mean, I like the thing on the back cover
where he says that, that, ah, you know, if there was a kind of, snowflake for
every word uttered in New York every day, there would be a snowstorm. You know,
its kind of nice, it’s sort of like a zen thing…almost. Anyway, so,
so there is a way of measuring these things somehow, you know, comparing them,
you know. Is this the right kind of equivalent, is this the right kind of
amount of words or volume of paper, or whatever for a week? And er, and er, ah,
it seems to me that he has already kind of performed that kind of reduction,
you know, or, or enlargement. I don’t know…but it’s somehow
to me. I don’t know if it’s right. It’s up to every reader to
decide. And maybe it is in that change of scale, you know, that there is
already something of that happening, of that effect happening, something that
was not there in the first place is already appearing, you know, because of the
change of scale. Just as in the bit you read about the, the micrography, the
Chinese characters is appearing there because of the change of scale or just as
in my example of the blow up, you know, a, a pistol seems to be appearing in
the bloody sort of shots there of a photograph, whether or not it was there in
the first place. Something of that sort is happening here. Can I have some more
coffee? He was, he’s talking, he’s talking about that, it’s
not me. I can’t be credited for that. Um-hm. Um. Um. But, but, you can,
sorry to interrupt, but you can anticipate. I mean, what is so weird about the
experience of reading it is actually how predictable, if you like, the story
becomes after a while. And that’s not because routines, because there are
actually little accidents happens to it. He walks a dog and someone makes a
racist remark and he, kind of is thrown back by that and so on, yeah. And so,
there are kind of, there are kind of glimpses of real life. Obviously, you
discover that the whole thing is kind of worked out in advance because even the
most hardworking or busiest of artists does not quite get that much of art into
your daily chores. Ah, but it becomes very predictable, not through the
structure but through the response because we are so well trained to respond in
one way and not another and the fact that it is the same person always
responding to, to whatever the kind of a situation is. You know, one type of a
person…Well, more than that, more than that, more than that, because we
are getting here, we are getting here…life, a real life type of response.
You know, I presume that he does not suspend for instance, the kind of career
enhancement considerations that we all have to have in the back of our minds
when he meets a literary critic, so, you know, he is, sort of, promoting his
work at the same time as he is actually making it, yeah? And, er, and, and, and
all these things are kind of, you know, learnt, sort of, patterns of, of, of
action and behaviour. And somehow the, the diversity, absolutely, and the whole
sort of culture…he, he several times kind of emphasizes or he actually
mentions his Jewish upbringing, and, and, the political orientation of his
parents and things like that and so, ah, you are getting a kind of, an image of
a person with a kind of, like all of us, a limited range of responses to
situations which are probably more diverse than what his responses allow us to
kind of appreciate. In so far as we can imagine the stimuli, those situations,
those kind of, voices he is responding to. Ah, we, ah, can, you know, imagine a
different kind of a response, or a different kind of a pattern but equally
restricted only because it’s what I would say in a situation like that.
Now the kind of real life doesn’t give you these big sort of, dramatic
moments, real life is unedited, just like the text is unedited, yeah? So, a
horror movie – you can construct a kind of a logic of a, of a narrative
which will provide certain stimulis, stimuli at certain moments. You will still
get predictable response to them, scream to attack and so on, you know, ah, but,
but, er, er in real life the diversity which is probably greater than in any
movie ever attempted…is obviously much more subtle and only surfaces
through a kind of multitude of responses: through speaking; as well as hearing
and listening (or overhearing); through reacting as well as seeing others
reacting and so on. You know and by, by constraining the, the, the presentation
or the record to one voice, you are constraining it to one pattern of
behaviour, yeah? No, I can’t imagine myself as his wife, frankly. Yeah,
you have to, yeah. Um, well that is true, yes, yeah. I mean, it is interesting
that, that you have to kind of, enter it if you like, you know, but the space
that is left there for you to enter and for you to activate, maybe…or for
you to kind of resonate, if there is such a word, ah, ah, or for you to
resonate in, for you to kind of, breathe the speech back in to, the voice back
in, for you to give voice to. Ah, it’s a space which seems to have been
already somehow kind of constrained already a priori, by, by what appears to
be, inevitably, a kind of, or what becomes, through, you know, the process of
reading a kind of, predictable pattern of, pattern of behaviour, yeah? And, ah,
and ah, ah, ah, it does something to me, that, that a fiction necessarily
wouldn’t. Ah, it puts me in a position where, I, where I, become as you
would call it, his wife’s voice or, or his dog’s voice or whatever.
It’s quite, actually, interesting where he has, where you have
situations, maybe that’s an exception from the rule, where you have
situations where he is talking, ah, to a dog, presuming that his dog
doesn’t really speak back. You know, where you kind of…it’s
funny, do you have that space there, do you have that gap, is there anything
really missing? You know, it’s interesting. Dog owners would claim that
their pets speak. I used to have a speaking cat who did speak, actually. You
know, like a parrot…yeah, he was like a parrot. He would just sort
of…if you repeated a phrase long enough within a register that he could
imitate, he would start, sort of, imitating that, that sound…it’s
interesting. Anyway, so, so, ah, ah, but, I’m not, I’m not one of
those who would actually really believe that the dog speaks for me as a reader,
ah, you know, I don’t really know if there is a gap, if there is a space,
if there is something missing from the record. Let me go back. Yeah. Well,
that’s inevitable. That’s the sort of, you know…I mean,
that’s the sort of condition of interpretation, isn’t it?. There
are various modes of interpretation. Your mode of interpretation is different
than mine, I mean or your, your, the whole process is different than mine. And,
you know, you know, in classical semiological analysis, you, or semioligists
distinguish between three different intentions which are all, ah, all part, all
part of an analysis of a piece of text. The first one would be the intention of
the author, which kind of, sounds obvious enough, ah, the, ah, the second one
would be the intention of the reader who, ah, which sounds also reasonably
clear and then you have the intention of the text itself which is the kind of
problematic bit, you know and without wanting to sort of, do an impromtu
lecture on the rudiments of semiological analysis, ah, what strikes me here is
that the intention of the text, is, the kind of, you know, is…is, in some
kind of, you know, in some kind of way different from what you are accustomed
to in any other type of a text, you know and it’s not because the
intention of the writer is any different. The writer is creating an
experimental, for want of a better term, an experimental art work as distinct
from a novel or a record or a document, you know an objective document or a
kind of neutral, you know, supposedly neutral document and the reader obviously
approaches it as such, maybe, but, but somewhere else within the actual text
itself, there is something else that kind of wants to happen. You know, a
different intention in the text itself. Now, I’m not sure if I understand
how that is built in but I’m sure that the, the, the different intention
on my part and different intention on your part as readers and, and the
different instruments which we use to understand whatever it is that the text
wants is actually part of it. I’m not actually asking what the text wants
to do…you know, you are. But you are doing it by using means which, which
may not actually, ever lead you to it. Because, because in some ways its sort
of unprecedented, it’s a kind of what if text, you know? It is,
it’s not unprecedented necessarily in terms of, of its position in kind
of the contemporary history of experimental art or conceptual art or something
like that but it is unprecedented in terms of textual analysis. You
wouldn’t come across situations where you would analyse half of a dialogue,
you know? And, is it really half of a dialogue or is it a complete text with
nothing missing? Yeah, and if…or does it want to be, let’s,
let’s say, does it want to be a complete text with nothing missing or
does it want to be a half of a dialogue, or, or, one half of many dialogues or,
or is it just a kind of link that connects different voices which have been
left out technically speaking, but which are there, or are supposed to resonate
there. Or what is it? Is it a whole, or is it a half or is it nothing? It could
even be nothing in some ways. Yeah, I mean if you, if you, if one wanted to use
that kind of language. I’m not terribly kind of good at that particular
language but it’s a little bit like, as you know, I collect found gloves,
yeah? What I like about it is that, when you find one glove, you have found
nothing because the pair is still missing. Gloves come in pairs. I like the
idea that I have found something, ostensibly, I mean I have the thing here - I
can show you, I can put it in front of you, I can put it on my hand or whatever
and yet I’ve found nothing, yeah? And, in fact, the lost thing, which is
the pair of gloves, yeah, ah, ah, is even, in some ways, more lost than before
I found it. Because no one will ever get back, you know, unless you kind of, go
and sort of, you torture me, I’m not going to give it back to you. So, in
some ways, it’s even more lost than it ever was. Or I might find it in
Tokyo and take it with me to Manchester, you know, it doesn’t matter but
it’s kind of more lost. Now, this is it, I mean, you know, is it, you
know it is something, it is a text, but maybe it is kind of in some ways is
nothing. As part of a dialogue, it’s no longer, or dialogues, you know,
it’s no longer what it is. It’s really beautiful in that respect,
isn’t it? Um-hm. Hm. Um-hm. Um-hm. Hm. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah. I
thought of something else actually. Sorry, I wasn’t probably, kind of
listening attentively enough to what you were saying. But, you know, what is
interesting, you are quoting me people who are quoting other people. You have
just read now, a passage from someone who quotes Goldsmith, you know. We are
actually four people speaking here, yeah, four people speaking here. Or, or,
ah, even more, we are three people speaking, me, you and Goldsmith via the
recorded interview, ah, and two people on top of that writing, you are hearing
a double because you also write, you have written what you just read, you know,
and you have, written is quoting a writing of the person who interviewed
Goldsmith so it’s kind of maybe six or seven people even, sort of,
involved here some write-some, some speak-some talk. And, ah, ah, at the end of
the day, if you do it the way you want to do it, ah, you know, separating our
kind of little exchange, here again into its components, yeah, ah. We will have
basically have performed the same trick that, that, ur, Goldsmith performs and
the extremity of it, the extreme in it, you are talking about extreme writing
now is not, I think, so much in the kind of, you know, in the, in the way you
push the language at the point of writing but at the point of reading, you
know? Which was my starting point really. But, but I think it is at the reading
end that it becomes, sort of,
extreme. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. I wouldn’t quite know it’s
always overwhelming, but, or in what way, but, er, er…yeah. What I find a
little bit funny on what you just performed there, ah, is that, is that you
performed, you performed a piece of his text basically. Now it’s a piece
of his text, or was it his, was it quoting from him? Oh, that’s alright.
O.k. O.k. O.k. You performed, you performed, performed a little sort of eulogy
constructed out of other people’s sort of, ah, ah, ah, remarks about the,
about the enterprise. The text, as you present it, doesn’t matter who the
ultimate author is, ah, ah, is the kind of text which really tries hard.
It’s very kind of written, it’s very kind of written text and in a
way, when the whole thing becomes a book, it becomes that kind of text that is
trying hard. But, it’s trying hard, ah, ah, it’s trying hard to
overwhelm, if you like or, you know, or, to, to, to assert itself maybe. Now,
I’m not sure what those means are. I’m not sure if it’s the
clever idea of it, I’m not sure if it’s the extremity of it. Yeah.
Ah, I…feel that where the sort of, wherever the trying hard resides,
I’m becoming part of it as the reader, yeah? It’s sort of, you
know, my inability maybe, or my unwillingness to dismiss it, my curiosity, my
own habits, my kind of, you know, not knowing exactly what to think or do, or
where to find what I’m looking for, or even what it is that I’m
looking for. You know, that becomes the part of the trying hard. But in some
ways, at the end of the day, what you get is a text which is a, sort of constructed
thing, yeah, a construction made of language on paper which allows you to talk
about, about, sort of, text as sculpture or whatever it was that you quoted
there. Yeah. Text sculpture. And like the written text, the text written with
the intention to be read and taken seriously, to overwhelm, to impress, to, to,
to, you know, to provoke thought or whatever. It is as text trying hard. At the
same time, if I detect any trying hard in my sort of, attempt to imagine the,
the, ur, the origination of the text, which is the kind of, which is the voice,
recorded in a situation, ah, ah, on the tape. The only trying hard I can detect
there is trying hard not to try hard, you know. It is trying hard not to do
exactly what, what the piece of text, you just read is doing and what, at my
receiving end, ah, ah, Kenneth Goldsmith’s text is doing as a text, as a,
as a book, as a kind of piece of
reading. That’s kind of an interesting, that’s kind of an
interesting condition maybe there. That, ah, at the end of the day, when you do
get a text as literature, and it is literature because it cannot really be
anything else, you know. Ah, ah, there’s no escape, from this sort of
idea. The thing does not just sort of happen, does not just sort of come out
of, you know, of, sprout, sort of, sprout, sort of somehow almost by itself
from the speaker’s subconscious but is constructed and even if the
process of construction is very, ah, unorthodox, that kind of sense of the
thing being sort of, carved out, as I said before, ah, for me as a reader is
still there. It may simply be that i’m so kind of limited that I cannot
really, quite breathe freely, facing the authority of a book. It may actually
have something to do with the format of the book. It’s quite sort of
interesting that the, that the format of the book is really conservative,
scientific journal like type of layout of the text. I wouldn’t quite call
it classic. But really, very kind of, on the one hand really neutral, in
quotes, and on the other hand a very sort of loaded presentation. And that sort
of maybe, just for me, gives it some form of authority that I’m unable to
completely ignore, you know. But, even allowing for that I do feel that there
is a, sort of, kind of evidence in it for me, or sort of reminder, not
evidence, cross out that word when you are transcribing the tape, ah, ah, there
is a sort of reminder that, ah, ah the text cannot be anything but a
construction, but a thing that is actually, sort of, consciously constructed.
Well, in a sense…yeah. In a. Um. Um. Um. No, it would, yeah. Um. Um. Um.
Well, you can end it right here. Yeah. Alright, well, I’ll put the tape
in the post to you. Yeah, it’s been good. O.k. and I’ll get in
touch or you’ll get in touch when I’m back. I will. O.k. O.k. Bye now.
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