In his recent book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith identified “a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.” For Goldsmith, who also teaches a college course in plagiarism, that negotiation becomes both an elegy for originality and an obstinate habit of inventive reiteration.
His next book is Seven American Deaths and Disasters, a transcript-intensive compendium of national traumas, public mediations of which have become familiar to us whether we like it or not. To see Goldsmith rework, say, a real-time radio report on the Kennedy assassination, first as a literary object, then as a spoken-word performance piece, is to behold a peculiar subversion: against long odds, the distancing device becomes inviting.
Of course the language of the digital age isn’t limited to writing, and as the San Francisco Film Society’s KinoTek program of cross-platform creative collaborations reminds us, Goldsmith has conceptual kindred spirits in many other forms. One is the San Francisco-based visual artist Kota Ezawa, who joins him this Wednesday evening for a promising local show.
Kota Ezawa, Take Off.
Among other notable American deaths and disasters, Ezawa, too, has assayed the Kennedy killing — by animating, or reanimating, that doleful mainstay of obsessive cinematic rumination, the Zapruder film. And even if you weren’t yet alive when it happened, or you’ve seen it all those other times, that terrible moment is worth watching again from Ezawa’s alternate view, if only because the dilution of rote remembrance gives way to something else, something improbably new.
