Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith

Author:Kenneth Goldsmith [Goldsmith, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/American/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-13T05:00:00+00:00

The draftsman may make errors in following the plan without compromising the plan. All wall drawings contain errors. They are part of the work.19

Yet although LeWitt claimed that the artist and draftsman are collaborators, all of his collaborators went—and continue to go—unnamed, as compared with the very generous method of Scottish concrete poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay who never released a work of art without the fabricator’s name given in the title of the work: A Rock Rose (with Richard Demarco) or Kite Estuary Mode (with Ian Gardner).

LeWitt held a remarkably lax and forward-looking concept of copyright, permitting, up until the mid-eighties, anyone to freely copy his works as long as they strictly adhered to the recipe, something he viewed as a compliment. In this way, he presages the 2006 sentiments of the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who makes his books freely available on the Internet as well as in print. Doctorow says: “Being well-enough known to be pirated is a crowning achievement. I’d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.”20 Unlike digital material, which can be replicated infinitely without any quality loss, LeWitt eventually reneged on his stance due to the sheer number of bad copies that unskilled draftsmen made, in spite of his utopian notion that “anyone with a pencil, a hand, and clear verbal directions” could make copies of his drawings.21 By doing this, LeWitt reminds us of just how difficult it is to make good conceptual art; for him, the solution was to strike a delicate balance between keen thought and precise execution. For other artists, the mix might be different.

He put his foot down and turned the tide: the later works became better. There is evidence that, as time has gone on, “the quality of the LeWitt drawings have improved as many of LeWitt’s draftsmen have specialized in particular techniques, becoming ‘samurai warriors’ in their crafts. A LeWitt skillfully executed today dwarfs the quality of what the artist himself regularly produced.”22 In the early eighties LeWitt left New York and moved to Italy. While there, living among Italian Renaissance frescos, his work went through enormous changes: suddenly it became wildly sensual, organic, and playful. Gone were the austere lines and measurements and in its place came colorful and whimsical works that seemed to owe more to the 1970s pattern and decoration movement than it did to recipebased procedural conceptual art. Yet these works were created through methods identical to the early works, it’s just that he swapped out different ingredients. So while the early works might only permit the four primary colors, adhering to strict geometry, the new works could be psychedelic with day-glo apple greens alternating with fluorescent oranges in wavy patterns. Oftentimes, they were garish in taste, looking out of place in the white box of a museum. “When he was asked about the switch he

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