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Seven American Deaths
and Disasters |
In
Seven American Deaths and Disasters, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith offers transcriptions of genuine, as-it-happened radio and television news coverage of seminal events in recent American history: the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the murder of John Lennon, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the death of "king of pop" Michael Jackson. Additionally, there is a chilling text taken from an FBI file of an emergency call made by a teacher cowering with her students in the Columbine High School library as prowling gunmen approach the library doors.
Goldsmith is a proponent of "uncreative writing" that retextualizes, reframes, and recycles existing material. He has added nothing to the content of
Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which was recently published by New York-based
powerHouse Books. His contribution is the concept itself plus careful selection and editing.
"What constitutes the act of writing is rapidly changing in the digital age," Goldsmith explained to
The Committee Room. "Skills that we used to consider outside of the scope of writing — word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, but to name a few — are now the ways we routinely construct literature."
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| Kenneth Goldsmith |
Goldsmith's earlier works include
Fidget (2000), a chronicle of every movement of his body over a thirteen hour period,
Day (2003), a transcription of a
New York Times issue from an ordinary day in 2000, and
Printing Out the Internet (2013), a crowdsourced project that invited the public to print out pages of the internet and send them to a Mexico City art gallery to be added to an installation. Ultimately, ten tons of paper was collected.
