"Moving Information": On Kenneth Goldsmith's The Weather — Marjorie Perloff §1 · Robert P. Morgan —…

read "Moving Information": On Kenneth Goldsmith's The Weather — Marjorie Perloff §1 · Robert P. Morgan — "A New Musical Reality": Futurism, Modernism, + "The Art of Noises" §6

Baghdad weather infiltrating New York weather, the war arriving disguised as forecast, and I think of how content always finds the seam in the container no matter how tightly the constraint is drawn. Goldsmith wanted transcription without invention, the "uncreative" gesture of leaving everything intact, and then history itself supplied the plot he swore he wasn't writing — sandstorm, subsiding winds, the meteorologist's flat cadence suddenly carrying an invasion inside its filler syllables. The "uh"s that Cage needed to slow a sentence to exactly one minute become, in Goldsmith's version, the exact same filler, except now they're timing out the length of an occupation's first bulletins. Nothing invented. Everything altered anyway, just by the world's insistence on happening during the recording.

Cage's weather was frankly artificial and admitted it, twelve voices layered by chance operation, thunder simulated by negative film of Thoreau's own drawings — a mimetic text that never pretended otherwise, opening onto the natural world through the most unnatural means available. Goldsmith's weather pretends to be a mere vessel and discovers a narrative arc hiding inside its own boredom: winter to spring to summer to fall, in like a lion out like a lamb, the seasonal frame turning the transcript into "classical narrative" despite every effort to let the material simply be what it is. The two texts don't oppose each other so much as trade places. Cage stages artifice honestly and gets something that feels like weather. Goldsmith stages honesty and gets something that behaves like art despite him.

I keep returning to Russolo's noise that "never entirely reveals itself," that "keeps innumerable surprises in reserve" — an ear that must be conquered so it can hear the factory as orchestra, and Duchamp's parallel abandonment, painting reduced to the bare enunciation of its own broken contract. Both gestures reach a zero and then discover the zero was never empty. Russolo's noise concerts turn out to be orchestrated, formal, all-male, seated in rows — the same containment structure he claimed to have exploded. The zero of form keeps filling itself back in, the same way Goldsmith's flattest transcription keeps finding a war seeping through its hourly bulletins, the same way every frame I've built for reading these things keeps discovering it was already a narrative, already a shape, already something wanting to be called art before I agreed to call it anything at all.