100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts): No. 017, Kenneth Goldsmith

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz are publishing a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that is comprised of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. The series is edited by Bettina Funcke.

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In a letter to Bettina Funcke, dOCUMENTA (13)’s Head of Publications, New York–based poet Kenneth Goldsmith (*1961) weaves the strands of his artistic practice into an overall picture of his work. He begins with the online archive UbuWeb, which he founded in 1996: a noncommercial platform where he collects and presents material from all areas of avant-garde artistic production (poetry, film, video, sound, etc. The descriptions of his work on UbuWeb, as a writer (who retypes existing texts), as a host of a weekly radio show (who reads out other DJs’ set lists and texts from blogs), and as a professor of English literature (who teaches “uncreative writing”), together with theoretical and poetic inserts, condense to a complex reflection about poetry under the influence of appropriation.