Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | C: International Contemporary Art

Street Poets Visionaries: Selections from the Ubuweb Collection Kenneth Goldsmith.

Article Excerpt
STREET POETS VISIONARIES: SELECTIONS FROM THE UBUWEB COLLECTION KENNETH GOLDSMITH

Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto

One might want to attribute the work in Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection to the curator, Kenneth Goldsmith, and contextualize it by way of him. And some have. In his brief essay accompanying the Mercer Union show, Darren Wershler locates the found "street poetry" within Goldsmith's larger projects--which are ambitious in scale, including lengthy word-for-word transcriptions of mundane newscasts--and UbuWeb (www. ubuweb.com), "the world's largest archive of avant-garde sound recordings, concrete poetry, video, outsider art and related critical materials." (1) In the present show, Goldsmith covers three walls with found poetry and the fourth with the concrete poetry of David Daniels (1933-2008). But rather than examine the role of the curator here, and his art of appropriation, I've chosen to look at why the work itself---New York City street poetry and outsider-artist concrete poetry--is so fascinating to us.

For the past few decades, Goldsmith has been collecting postings, signs...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!