A slightly and intentionally rhizomatic response to Brian
Prugh’s article, can an artist be Wrong?
I
would first like to state that Kenneth’s Goldsmiths, NYC project, “Capital”, is
a contribution to knowledge. Goldsmith is researching New York City’s history,
gleaning texts and arranging them according to a similar structure of Walter
Benjamin’s Arcades project, arguably one of the first post-structuralists
works, and I appreciate this ironic twist.
He
may not be contributing to logo-centric knowledge, as per ideas of truth,
falsity and factual accountability of such, however he is working with directly
gleaned information that holds an amount of truth in itself. The way that he is
presenting holds a great amount of truth that mimics the way we move through
information in this age, gleaning and trying to organize and understand it the
best we can. Goldsmith’s approach
is capable and certainly in dialogue with a paraliteral inquiry and knowledge of
ones experience, seemingly presented in an effort of aesthetic pedagogy, juxtaposing
vernaculars of current times and places, and times lost, exposing the rift
between. Is this exposure in the spirit of post-structuralism literary theory
not a contribution to thought? Whether one agrees with this methodology is an
entirely different issue.
How
can an artist make a claim of truth? Should an artist make a claim of truth? I
don’t believe an artist can make a claim of truth and offer it up as so,
without being didactic in a way that is imposing on the public. It becomes
rather an authoritative action that is counter-productive to the efforts of
dislodging people from falsity or dogma. Goldsmith may be attempting to give
the public an aesthetic education, but where history and his activity are the
authority in lieu of him.
When
theory turns praxis we are in a bit of a dilemma. Goldsmith is offering a theory;
he is pointing out perhaps what we already know that history is not, and cannot
be passed down in a truly objective manner, that our sense of a historical
continuity if false and problematic. Any criticism, valid
or not, that Kenneth Goldsmith is not up to anything new, would probably not
phase or please Goldsmith, who defines himself as an uncreative writer and
doesn’t think anyone needs to write anything new. Goldsmith is in the spirit
rather of first priming the public with this liberating action, revealing the
discontinuity of our history and knowledge of such. This is an effort, in the
same effort of Walter Benjamin, to free us from one of the last remaining gestalts
of our time, capitalism, one that has yet to be eclipsed since Benjamin’s time.
“The
public can only achieve enlightenment slowly” - Kant
The
ethical via politics is aimed at the public; its target first and foremost is
the masses, the aesthetic on the other hand aimed at the individual. How can we
make, or more importantly make a public claim about the truth of our subjective
endeavors? We can only move
forward in hopes of tilling the soil.
He
is revealing a striving for freedom, a striving for his own understanding of
history, asking us to question ours.
Goldsmith is engaged with the flux, engaged with the flux as one who
might consider themselves as agnostics to be, as one who believes that truth
isn’t something that can be neatly packaged and presented as such, as one who
believes in multiple truths, at least in that there are truths that cannot be
objectively resolved. The artist can lay the pieces out but it is not the job
of the artist to put the pieces together. It may take juxtaposing all sorts of
‘weirdness’ before anything fruitful will emerge and when it does it most
likely won’t be something that one can point to and label as “truth”. Internalized truth can be found, but it
is an internalization that will and should remain in the sovereignty of
subjectivity because the last thing we can hope to find is an accurate judgment
of another’s subjective experience. What Brian seems to be calling for is a
more activist approach to art, actively speaking. I would rather have faith that the truth will reveal itself,
and any attempt to force a truth, is outside of artistic endeavor, this may be
the goal the horizon of ethics, ethics through political action, of which such
starts have failed. Kenneth Goldsmith not offering us a teleological model
rather calling us to reconsider our own connection to the continuity of the
capitalist system, while landing us in the present moment, which is neither
fixed nor static.
“Enlightenment
can only happen by self-liberation of individuals “who are capable of thinking
for themselves despite established authorities”
Kant “What is enlightenment” New York Modern Library 1977,
p.55
