Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith Andrew S. Taylor (bio) duchamp is my lawyer: the polemics, pragmatics, and poetics of ubuweb Kenneth Goldsmith Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/duchamp-is-my-lawyer/9780231186957 328 pages; Print, $26.00 It can be difficult to remember that the internet was once an exciting place. If you were extant and had access to a computer back in the 1990s you may [End Page 79] remember that feeling of excitement and anxiety provoked by the breathy squawk of a dial-up modem, at once futuristic and retrograde, like a little submarine pinging the lower contours of a deep, unexplored ocean. For a brief period of history, the online world seemed to promise a new social order, something libertarian or syndicalist that could finally break us out of our post-feudal gilded cage. Now, the internet is a colonized space, its open-source architecture occluded by the corporate world’s one-way mirrors. Barely legible text is swarmed by pop-up videos, calculated scandals, and crass titillation, all collapsed into a cubist billboard presenting an infinitely thin slice of the instant moment. Opening a web page sometimes feels like an assault. UbuWeb, whose motto is “All avant-garde. All the time,” was created in 1996 by experimental poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith, who funds and maintains it to this day. Aesthetically and conceptually, UbuWeb is an artifact of the Vintage Web, and serves as an escape from the internet’s endless sales pitch, an oasis where the human imagination can repair itself. Built on clean and uncomplicated HTML code, it hosts a vast archive of experimental art, music, poetry, filmmaking, and various other cross-media amalgamations. Now operating in its third decade, UbuWeb collects more than a century of work by video artists and filmmakers, visual and aural poets, musicians and composers, running the gamut from famous modernists to obscure eccentrics. If you are looking for easy access to work of Stan Brakhage, Yayoi Kusama, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, John Zorn, or any others among thousands, this is the place for you. The free collection also includes long-out-of-print anthologies, treatises, and how-to guides covering a century of making and creating. With a civilized and navigable design, it achieves in hypertext form the same gold standard sought after in library architecture—it encourages the visitor to explore. Goldsmith’s book, subtitled The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, in reflection of its triptych structure, presents much more than the history and founding intent behind UbuWeb. Goldsmith invites the reader to reclaim the internet as a free and open territory where we can preserve the past and build new things without relying on ephemeral commercialization. If this seems fanciful to us now in this age of YouTube monetization and endless “app” creation, that is the fault of habit and inculcation. The tools and the freedom are still there for the taking. [End Page 80] The first and shortest section, “Polemics,” is in the author’s own word a “manifesto” justifying and explicating UbuWeb’s existence. The need for such a manifesto arises in part from the fact that a substantial portion of UbuWeb’s archive is made available without permission—“Don’t Ask for Permission” is in fact one of Goldsmith’s dictums. While many artists freely contribute to UbuWeb, many others have arrived there simply because they were found somewhere else—for instance, from university collections of analog sources that were later digitized by Goldsmith and others. However, as Goldsmith reminds the reader, UbuWeb makes no money and is maintained at the personal expense of its creator. When UbuWeb does receive a take-down request personally sent by an aggrieved artist, Goldsmith respects their wishes. Most, however, seem happy for the exposure. Why do it? “The Problem Is Obscurity” heads another polemic. For those artists whose work has societal value that cannot be monetized, “piracy is preservation.” As Goldsmith writes, “If your work is well regarded enough to be pirated, that means you have achieved some level of success that most artists will never have.” He further elaborates that...