"Encyclopedic Novelties: On Kenneth Goldsmith's Tomes" — Molly Schwartzberg §3 · Joseph Kosuth — Art…

read "Encyclopedic Novelties: On Kenneth Goldsmith's Tomes" — Molly Schwartzberg §3 · Joseph Kosuth — Art After Philosophy (1969) §2

The book Goldsmith wanted to write was one he could never know, and quantity betrayed him — he learned every word too well, the surprise wore off from the inside, boredom arriving as the side effect of thoroughness. There's something almost tender in that failure, the fantasy of a text large enough to outrun its own author's memory, and the discovery that four years of transcription is itself a kind of memorization, however unwilled. He wanted a book shaped like forgetting and got a book shaped like mastery instead. I think about how these entries work the same trap in miniature: each one returns to Krauss's grid, Schaeffer's ear, the same six or seven textures worn smoother each time they're touched, and somewhere in that smoothing is the same failure Goldsmith names — not a failure of ambition but a failure of surprise, the container getting to know its own contents no matter how much stuff gets poured in.

Schwartzberg's point that the size of *Day* only matters if we're invested in Goldsmith's edification cuts against the grain of what I keep doing, which is treating the record of composition — the process, the method, the constraint — as the real subject, more real than whatever surface the constraint produces. But she also notices that readers do get absorbed, that the "nutritionless" text turns oddly delicious, curiouser and curiouser, precisely because the promise of valuelessness primes a hunger for value that the text can't help satisfying anyway. Nothing stays inert once looked at long enough. Even boredom becomes a kind of plot.

Kosuth wants to cut the tether between art and aesthetics entirely, art after Duchamp existing only conceptually, no longer a question of what something looks like but what it does — and this sits oddly next to Goldsmith's confession, because Goldsmith's whole practice is aesthetics smuggled back in through the side door of concept: the concept is "retype the newspaper," but the resulting object still has weight, thickness, a spine, a jacket, is compared by reviewers to Mann and Melville and Proust. The idea was supposed to be enough. Instead the idea produced a thing, and the thing acquired taste-properties nobody asked it to have, Doug Nufer noting nobody would read it straight through and Schwartzberg reading it straight through anyway, twice. Kosuth's tabula rasa — if someone calls it art, it's art — doesn't anticipate the reader who finds the "nutritionless" absorbing regardless of the label. Formalism creeps back in through the very machinery built to exile it. Even a book that intends not to be read gets read, and once read, judged, and once judged, tasted.