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

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 and notes, from the poles and walls of New York streets, for their unsettling and wide-ranging American strangeness. They are pinned up in the gallery in an appropriately haphazard salon-style way, and, most importantly, moved into the context of art, they are elevated to the status of poems. Scrawled in pen and permanent marker, and made with typewriters and photocopiers, they read "WHAT AN ASSHOLE YOU ARE ED--ANYTHING FASCIST IS OKAY WITH YOU," "Suicidal? [sic] Suicidal? Depressed? Depressed?" "I learn Spanish! It's to easy and Funy [sic]" and "Your Glasses Broke on this corner. Call me" They seek sex in all its varieties, they rage against cops, they prophesize the end, they ask both for the absurdly specific and for the impossible.

And because they have been battered by the elements, they announce their materiality. They feel more like objects than poems in books do. (Dare I add that they carry the aura of an original?) And the words themselves (voiced with anguish, loneliness, incoherence, delusion, etc.) are directed unashamedly at the outside world. We are reminded of the Dionysian impulse of the Romantic poets: the authors break the boundary between private and public audience, strive for something beyond themselves ("ADOPT ME," "WANT TO TRY SOMETHING NEW? CALL....") and even entertain the possibility of apotheosis through creation as though, by way of these posters, they are mingling among higher powers. As the gallery audience, we feel that we have a view onto something that the poet might be unaware of: the truth of a person's desire, and perhaps the symptoms of some greater malady. More can be said of this by way of Daniels' work so let me recount the story, in a much reduced form, that Goldsmith told on January 9th to the crowd gathered for the artist talk.

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David Daniels, a young abstract expressionist painter, is banished from the 1950s California art scene for saying the wrong thing at a party. He moves to Boston and resolves to say "yes" to everything asked of him, thereby opening his door to street people, users and prostitutes. He and a prostitute have a child together, and they marry. This hub of counter-cultural activity unfolds for years until AIDS sweeps through. A number of his surviving associates move to Silicon Valley, do well in software and buy Daniels a place ...