I have a friend who worries about cancel culture. I assure him there’s no such thing; no one, as far as I can tell, has ever been successfully canceled—unfortunately, because there are various people one would really like to see the back of. However, at the risk of refuting my own thesis, I can tell you this story: that an editor at one of the more prominent academic quarterlies asked me to review Duchamp is My Lawyer, Kenneth Goldsmith’s account of his adventures with UbuWeb, the internet archive of all things avant-garde that he started twenty-five years ago. The next day, the editor wrote back to me chagrinned: He’d met overwhelming resistance from the junior faculty affiliated with his journal to the idea of a book by Goldsmith being mentioned in their pages. “By publishing a review,” he was told, “you’re exposing the staff to what I’m certain will be countless hours of damage control.” In other words, the cancelation, if that’s what this was, was not on grounds of principle, but of self-protection. “I’m unhappy about the squelching but need to be mindful about those more exposed than I am,” the editor told me. Let’s hope no one is too exposed by my writing about it more briefly here instead. In any case, despite the fate of the review I was to write, I still don’t consider Goldsmith canceled—after all, he’s being published by one the country’s leading university presses. And he’s got his own platform. UbuWeb—in case you don’t already know—is what Goldsmith calls “a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts,” and it is a cornucopia that would take multiple lifetimes to exhaust for anyone who’s enamored of, or even just curious about such things as, for instance, Gilles Deleuze lecturing on Michel Foucault, Valie Export’s 1985 feature film Die Praxis der Liebe, Paul Celan reading his poetry, or 8mm film footage of Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett experiencing his first mushroom trip (all currently listed on UbuWeb’s “recent additions” page). Duchamp is My Lawyer is a sort of extended infomercial for the site. But since UbuWeb is, Goldsmith says, “mostly just me” and therefore “a vast and diverse enterprise…riddled with my subjectivity,” the book is also an indirect self-portrait of Goldsmith as an indefatigable collector, a collector of collections for whom repletion is unthinkable. Although his treasure chest contains any number of pristine digital items sourced directly from their makers, he seems particularly fascinated by those that, like unearthed fragments of Greek sculpture without the colors that once adorned them, exist in a partial or damaged state. “In terms of quality,” he concedes, “UbuWeb’s films are truly a disaster,” but he quotes film curator Andrew Lampert in his defense: Seeing a work of structural cinema, “a film that’s all about sprocket holes…online is a diminished experience. But access is another thing—now somebody in Kansas or Korea can have access,” and this expanded access “has actually increased the value of the cinematic experience.” It’s an argument, which I find convincing, against Walter Benjamin’s idea that availability decreases aura. Goldsmith cites a film Henri Michaux made in 1964 to show the effect of mescaline on perception but then disowned; UbuWeb was given an illicit bootleg. “The copy we have is good except for one full minute when an update window from some Mac operating system program pops up out of nowhere, completely obscuring the film,” Goldsmith explains. “It’s a lovely error, a bootleg watermark, and a reminder that you’re not actually seeing the ‘real’ thing.” Clearly, the Benjamin essay that provides the key to understanding UbuWeb is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” but rather “Unpacking My Library.” What counts for the collector, according to Benjamin, is not the history of the book as a reproducible text, but rather the history of a given copy of the book, the vicissitudes of its passage through time (or time’s passage through it) and above all of its passage into the collection, “the locking of individual items within a magic circle.” Is the circle broken or its form skewed and imperfect? Never mind, says Goldsmith. Your turn: “Use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection.”
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Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, is published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.