This dialogue is a textual collaboration between The Lacanian Review, and Cheryl Donegan and Kenny Goldsmith, American artist and poet, respectfully, together a couple. There are four speakers and in sum: three artists, two psychoanalysts and one poet. The conversation follows a metonymical drift in between the dream of art, making and the nightmare of art in the world. The reader will find topics ranging from drawing with sticks, stone houses in Croatia, broken bones of autopsy reports, how words sometimes hurt, and the depth of the black mirror. Yugoslavian modernist furniture found at the dump, data dumps, Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton's emails and the problem of authorship also make their way into this conversation on the nature of poetry, the document and interpretation. But most importantly, we encounter the pleasure of the text, which evaporates from this dialogue, like water splashed on the pavement, the royal road to writing.

[California is burning.]

KG: I've had to evacuate, so yeah. That's happening there.

RB: It's surprising to me how quickly dinner conversation can turn to that scenario. And what–– [Speakers present: Cheryl Donegan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Buck, Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff]

KG: Well, you know what. It's either going to be this or Trump. It's either nightmare scenario. It's going to be the environment or it's going to be Trump. No conversation happens without those two poles of the nightmare.

[Audio recorded October 28th 2019]

CD: It's not even the nightmare that's put off, like I'm afraid to go into my room and go to sleep because I'll have a nightmare. Everything's happening right now. It's not deferred. It's all happening. The models are all unfolding right now. If you told someone in Europe in an occupied territory during World War II, "Oh, it's going to turn out okay. Just you wait and see." Why would they believe you? And we want that same guarantee that it's just going to turn out okay. And sometimes it does. But sometimes it doesn't. So, okay, I think we're done here.

[The interview is over.]

RB: How do you answer some of those questions in your work?

KG: I don't at all. It's implicit in the choice of material that I'm dealing with. So if I care to write an apocalyptic book, I'll just reuse an apocalyptic text. So then I become an apocalyptic writer.

RB: Specific to that particular writing?

KG: Specific to somebody else's thoughts on that writing, not being particularly my own.

RB: In other words, with another writing project you would be another writer?

KG: Yeah. Well, it would be a book about paradise. But that's just simply selecting a paradisical text. It’s always very fluid, depending on what one chooses as a source. And you?

CD: I don't think it's as evident right away. I wouldn’t say, "Oh, well, I do this because this is my comment on it." But I wonder why sometimes in my work I want to create “impossible.” I give myself impossible tasks. Like the idea of creating an illusion of depth with no means of physically layering. I'm thinking about painting in reverse, like painting with absences. A lot of the work I do right now is with dyes and resists, so with everything I'm doing, I always think about it like it's a backwards mirror. I wrote down a note the other day, "What do I want to preserve?" Because it's all about thinking about the remainder. If I mask something, and then I anticipate dyeing it, what's going to resist and what's going to absorb? So I always have to think of it almost in a black mirror. So it is real––

KG: What's a black mirror?

CD: Not the TV show, but the black mirror of a negative of a film.

KG: What is the definition of black mirror? I'm really curious, anyway.

CD: I think of a black mirror as being like a negative.

KG: Something that absorbs rather than reflects?

CStAP: Can you see yourself in a black mirror?

KG: What is a black mirror? Do you know?

CStAP: No, I don't know.

CD: I think of a black mirror as when you look in the plate glass that reflects you when you walk by a building. You see yourself. It's that clear. It's in the negative. It's like an outline or something.

CStAP: Because there's something behind it? Because there's a depth behind it that's not just the reflective plane?

CD: I think it's both. I don't exactly know the technology of mirrors, but it's in the mirror, there's a difference in reflection because it's sealed off. It's sealed off, so it reflects back, whereas, with the black glass of the iphone gorilla glass, there is no space behind it, like a plate glass which is just a barrier. So in that case, it would just be a reflective barrier, essentially.

[KG googles “black mirror”]

KG: I've got it. The definition is any TV, LCD, phone or iPad: something that if you stare at, it looks like a black mirror. There's something cold and horrifying about that. That comes from Charlie Brooker, who wrote––

CStAP: Black Mirror.

KG: So this, in fact, is a black mirror. Look. One, two, three black mirrors on the table in front of us. And yes, in fact, I can see myself, but only an outline.

CD: A friend of mine, the painter Patricia Tribe, told me that one of the most beautiful exercises she ever experienced was in art school where a teaching assistant brought them all out onto a hot blacktop near the school with buckets of water and said, “Make your ideal painting.”

KG: What does that mean?

CD: Just with your bucket of water and your brush on a blacktop pavement surface, I want to see a reverse kind of sumi ink painting. Just splash out, without inhibition of material, of permanence, but definitely of mark. “Show me something. Show me. Do it. You want me to do it?” I couldn't think of anything more beautiful than that.

[Beauty is the last defense against the real] or better a quote from Laurent’s NLS argument

RB: Impossible and remainder. It reminds me of your moving image work. Can you talk about the work you did titled, Make Dream. Or let me restate it: did the impossible and the remainder come from the video work through painting or the other way around?

CD: It’s always been both, reciprocally, because I had a lot of questions about painting, but I approached painting very canonically in terms of its materials. I wasn't able to break through it because I thought you had to make the mark as a positive on a field. It was so difficult to accomplish that and have it feel like it really stuck. So the video became the channel where it could stick. It's interesting that you talk about the residue as sticky. The remainder as sticky. So where is it going to stick? It didn't really stick in the painting. Maybe because I was going at it with the stick. With my brush.

KG: But wait, Cheryl. You were painting with a stick this summer and with black ink.

CD: That was a total release. Talk about the dream, right? It was almost like Matisse: “Freedom, luxury, and voluptuousness.” For no reason at all, for that month, in this really simple and beautiful and so direct environment, I went back to an old student technique. I started doing life drawing by dipping a stick from the ground, just a little twig, into black ink; doing drawings of landscapes, local people and portraits of Kenny on paper. The most straightforward, observational, participatory and direct sort of drawing. I don't even think it needs to hook up to any other practice.

RB: This was in Croatia?

CD: I think the art student story of painting an ephemeral painting, only to be seen by you for a short time in a parking lot, is so beautiful. That's one paradise. The other paradise is doing a Van Gogh redux and a portrait with a little stick of a farmer with gnarly hands. Both poles are maybe where art is located.

KG: You're doing both. The last four years almost everything you’ve ever made was on display in your retrospective that was traveling. And then what happens now? It goes back into the dark. It goes back into storage. It may not be seen again for years, who knows? What was visible as is not. It's visible temporarily. I find it remarkable that artists make all this stuff and most of it is never seen. If a collector buys it, it's shipped off to some Freeport warehouse, where it's never visited, where it's never seen. Museums are full of basements that are full of stuff that nobody ever sees. And then once in a while, artists show one thing for a month in New York, and then the work vanishes, like all the Kodaks of yours, Robert. I got to see them one night, and I don't know if I'm ever going to see them again. I don't know where they went. I don't know where they are. They came, and they went. So I think the parking lot thing is very much about your whole production as a visual artist. It's kind of a metaphor. CD: Or anybody's production.

[The unconscious is production of a body.]

KG: No, no, no, not mine. Books stay on the shelves. They are always visible. No, you never throw out a book. [Poubellication]

RB: Speaking of books, what about your recent collaboration, the edition, Peels? How did that unfold?

CD: I had done an artist's book that was an independent project. And Christophe found his way to the studio through other artists, friends of ours.

RB: Three Star Books?

CD: Yes. He came to the studio. I had done a book that was a unique collection of over thirty individual paintings that were bound together like a giant cloth book, like a child's cloth book, or a wallpaper sample book, where each page is kind of its own scene. The publisher said, “Well, wouldn't it be great if Kenny somehow intervened on that?”

KG: They wanted a collaboration, which is really unusual. They don't normally do collaborations, and we don't normally do collaborations. We've only collaborated once in a magazine and once in a live performance. That was it in thirty-five years.

CD: My work was essentially done. This was to be a reproduction of the piece. The publisher made some choices about materials and scale and this and that. There were some copyrighted logos in the work that I'd done. And they said, “Well, we can't use the logo. So we'll choose works in the series that don’t have logos.”

KG: Like the Fila tracksuit. They're really uptight about copyright. I have a whole story about that too because I got stuck with copyright issues as well.

CD: I'm getting a book of my book.

KG: And there was a second book in Iceland.

CD: I just kept going with these iterations again, iterations, iterations. I felt like this was all easy for me, but was it so easy for you? There was a series of events where Kenny almost walked away from the project three different times.

KG: I questioned the value of twenty-five copies of a book that sells for $6,000 each. What the fuck? Why is that good? I believe in a democratic availability of work, and the more there is of it, the more powerful it is. This kind of exclusivity rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn't so into this project. I pulled out because that metric of distribution didn’t agree with me. I still don't like it. Nobody ever sees the book. In order to see the book, you've got to buy it. In order to buy, you've got to have a lot of money. So institutions buy it, and then it gets locked up again in a vault. And we are back to the black pavement. We splashed on the black pavement, it evaporated, the black mirror. It's gone.

CD: I made the one unique one, and now I'm actually getting copies.

[Can one interview without a metalanguage?]

KG: Yeah, you actually get twenty. I deal in metrics of tens of thousands with what I do. This reeked of kind of art world exclusivity, which I've worked very much against.


RB: So what's your recent “tens of thousands”?

KG: The Hillary emails that I showed in Venice got worldwide attention. [Kenneth Goldsmith printed all of Hillary Clinton’s emails and exhibited them at the 2019 Venice Biennial. Hillary attended and was interviewed by The New York Times about her experience of the installation.] I'm used to getting worldwide attention for my work, for better or worse. So my metric is enormous. And everybody can have it. Everybody can experience it. Even if you don't experience it, you get the idea of it through refraction. Back to the mirror. My mirror is a metric of multiplicity and reflectivity infinity. That's a kind of power, but also like the pavement, it evaporates instantly. Once Hillary Clinton went and sat with those emails and had her picture taken with them, it went absolutely huge, viral. And within a week, it was as if it never existed. And then the water evaporated from the pavement.

CStAP: Can things evaporate from the internet?

KG: No, but they get drowned. It's just a drop, really. And sometimes that drop feels like a lot and then it ultimately just becomes a small drop in the ocean. What is frustrating about the web metric is that you can never stay on top of it. Except for Donald Trump. That’s why he is sort of a master of the internet, because it's an attention economy, and the guy manages to actually use enamel paint on that blacktop where the rest of us are using water.

RB: Have you been able to print out the entire internet yet?

KG: I did in 2013, in a gallery in Mexico City. It filled up this room. We got the whole thing.

RB: Is the American Subject project in the pipeline?

KG: If I ever wanted to do it, I could, but it's not a nightmare that I care to touch again.

RB: When––

KG: After the Michael Brown situation.

[On March 13, 2015, Goldsmith read his poem “The Body of Michael Brown” at Brown University. The poem was a reading of the autopsy report issued by the St. Louis County Coroner's Office, which Goldsmith edited, on the shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager who was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, setting off local protests that spread to many cities nationwide].

KG: As positive as the Hillary Clinton thing was globally, that's how negative the Michael Brown piece was for me. It was equally impactful, and those are two poles. When you play on that scale it's bound to go haywire. The Hillary thing went absolutely haywire and the Michael Brown thing went absolutely haywire. I'm drawn to that kind of excitement, but sometimes once is enough.

CStAP: Dream, a nightmare.

KG: The Hillary thing was a dream and the Michael Brown thing was a nightmare. I was dealing with nightmare subject matter with Michael Brown. It came back to smack me on the side of the head. Whereas with the Hillary installation, people said, “Well, he's obviously playing in a safe territory now after that Michael Brown controversy.” Brown was a lot riskier; Hillary was a lot safer. How much can you bear? With the Brown poem, we went right to the edge. Hillary was huge, but super pleasant. However, Donald Trump Jr. began tweeting about it. And then the nightmare was that Donald Trump himself would pick up his son's tweet and start tweeting about Hillary reading her emails in Venice in some art installation. That would have turned into a nightmare!

CStAP: It seems like the edge is so thin between nightmare and dream in that way. All it takes is one deviation of the algorithm, or how it gets picked up, and it could go in an entirely different direction.

KG: I think it's a great point. When I announced I was printing out the Hillary emails, the Right tried to take it and claim it like, “Aha, we got her.” The Right went out, and I had to make a very strong, uncharacteristically strong, statement that this was a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump thing, which I don't like doing because I refused to do that with the Michael Brown piece, and I got into a lot of trouble. I didn't frame that at all. I just put it out there, and it was something. I prefer that — 


CStAP: You prefer to work without the frame.

CD: Just because you prefer to work without the frame, doesn't mean the frame does not find you. I think that with Michael Brown, the frame found you because people questioned how you, or any white person, participates in white supremacism, where you don't admit or you don't realize how you participate in it, and so that became the frame. Whereas what made Michael Brown's death a nightmare was partially the way his body was treated. But there was so much more about the way his body was treated in terms of the nightmare; it was allowed to lay in the street for four hours. It’s a matter of what that signified in terms of other black deaths in this country. With Hillary, I’ve always noticed that even on the nightly news, people laugh about how fun the disinformation is. So the nightmare of Hillary, which didn't get you in trouble per se, is getting us all in trouble, because everyone still thinks it's a joke when it's really disinformation. And here is Trump, he is running some scam now as if the fucking emails are all in a server, like the servers of Frigidaire that got taken to Ukraine and are in the basement someplace. Whereas the actual truth is that your assistant is really adept at IT. You spent a month finding all of the emails because they were reflected on hundreds of servers all over the globe, and you could grab three hundred here, one thousand there.

KG: Actually, they were on US government servers. They were on Wikileaks, and they were fairly easy to get, but nobody ever got them. The Mueller report had legibility and an optical quality. It was also small enough that you could actually print a book. You could look at it and say, “This is what it is.” And you would see some blacked-out stuff. When you're dealing with sixty-two thousand pages of email, which is the metric that we're talking about, there is no optic on it at all. There is no iconicity, therefore it never got read at all.

CD: It's all about size, isn't it? Not to reuse an overused metaphor, but it’s like the nesting dolls. The sixty-two thousand emails, no one can read them, but the visual on a book, four hundred pages, no one can read that either. And so down and down and down we go, until the tweet. That's when someone can read.

KG: I think that's true. I wanted to make something physical, because until it was physical, it could be anything you said it was. When something is dematerialized, then the tweet becomes the frame, and the tweeter and the framer is the president. I made a library set and I presented it on a model of the Resolute desk. You can sit down at the table and actually page through them. People spent hours paging through them, because they never saw them before. They were all hidden away on the internet. Who the hell is really going to read that? But when we bound one hundred-something volumes of the emails, you could actually see there was nothing in them. But that takes a lot of work. If you could actually see them, you would find that she’s talking about lunch. She’s telling John Podesto to put socks on before he goes to bed to keep his feet warm. “Lock her up.” I mean it’s absolutely insane. Materiality is a way of dispelling.

RB: W wake up. But only then to continue dreaming.

KG: That's why we make art. We don't want to touch the ground. I think it is to continue that state of dreaming.

CStAP: I like that you said, “It took all this work to show that there was really nothing.” That's the biggest task to show that there's actually nothing there.

KG: But that's what all the artists do, they work for absolutely nothing. It's a life that is dedicated to the absence of an investigation. I don't recommend it, unless it's something you really have to do. It's not a choice.

CStAP: You're producing the nothing, and that takes a lot of work.

KG: The power of capital is to produce something. The power of art is to produce nothing. When you ascribe agency to that production, you betray it. The beauty of poetry, as W.H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Now, you can say, “Oh, that's too bad.” But actually, that is its beauty. That is its resistance as there is a place in culture for nothingness to happen. When you ascribe agency to that nothingness, then you betray its essential quality. Poetry is an extreme example, but I think it's a very good example because there is no potential for market.

[KG gets up from the table to make an ice cream for his son.]

CD: There's the market, and then there's all the rest of our ambitions. And so they said if the pharmaceutical development around the polio vaccine was put in today's terms, we wouldn't have a vaccination for polio, we would have iron lungs in ten colors with apps. Because the art world is like a fucking iron lung with an app, as opposed to imagining “Can we live without the disease?” The first thing I thought of is vaping. It didn't even take them twenty years to figure out it was a nightmare. It was right away. It went from panacea to industrial accident in eighteen months. That's where we are right now. Oh, this is going to be so good for you, the alternative to smoking. It's going to help everybody. And now, all of a sudden: industrial lung burns, eighteen-year-olds are dying. The thing that you thought was the tool of liberation becomes just more superglue squeezed into the locks.

CStAP: What is the disease? [Fifteen seconds of silence.]

CD: The drive.

CStAP: Sure. I’ll take it.

CD: Kenny's dad is involved with this alternative healer who claims to not only understand quantum mechanics, but also to direct quantum mechanics. Once you get down to a small particle level, nothing can be controlled and predicted. That was the discovery: as much as you unlock and unlock, bringing it down to the particle that you understand, when you get to the particle, the particle gives you the middle finger, and says, "You can't control me, or understand me." Everything does the opposite of what you would think at this level. But here's a guy who claims to "understand" the quantum level, but only in order to control it. An absolute oxymoron.

CStAP: it's a fantasy that shows itself as a fantasy.

CD: Trump says, "I'm a stable genius."

[Nothing stable about thea tom.]

KG: what Lucretius talked about what is the falling and swerving of atoms, which he called the clinamen. He attributed that swerve to all of the randomness in the universe. If atoms were able to fall straight, there would be no randomness. And my father, who has never seen an atom before, there's nothing about Adams, says, "You're right," and keeps giving that healer the check.This is happening on many levels.

[Psychical reality is forced to bend to unconscious desire.]

RB: there's Atom, and then there's Eve… But let's go back to the frame...But let's go back to the frame. I'm thinking of the way in which you edited the Michael Brown autopsy report. That seemed to be where some of the controversy and the nightmare started.

KG: In phase two of my appropriative strategies, I learned that not every text is poetic. Although I said that originally, I began to question that. The autopsy report was data-dump. It was raw material, and if it could be narrativized, then it could become poetic.

RB: How would you define poetry?


KG: I used to say that poetry was anything that you decided to call poetry. Over time, I became dissatisfied with that definition. In my poetic, you can turn the dial to be low affect, or you can turn it way up to be high affect. After a decade of working at low affect, I wanted to turn the dial up and see what happened. I don't really want to defend my choices, but at the time I was trying something that made sense, in an artist's trajectory. You follow where the investigation leads, even if it leads to painful places, and then you learn. I needed to find out where that went, and so I went there.

CStAP: In analysis, we say that interventions are only measured by their effects. You don't know what you're going to produce until it's done and then, only retroactively, you understand what's happened.

KG: I never have specific interpretations for my work anyway. It's just a text. I accept all of the painful interpretations as being perfectly valid.

CStAP: But were they your interpretations?

KG: I've never spoken about my interpretation, which was probably part of the problem.

CStAP: That was your discretion.

[Interpretation in reverse.]

RB: Do you dream?

KG: I do dream.

CD: In all the years we've been together, we've never talked about dreams.

KG: I found them untranslatable. The minute you try to put them into words, they evaporate. John Ashbery kept a notepad of hotel stationary on his nightstand, and when he would wake up in the middle of the night from a dream or from a nightmare, he would scribble down lines, which found their way into his poems. They never really had to quite make sense or line up. We did a collaboration. I was given a stack of those things to go through.

RB: What was the collaboration?

KG: We did rugs together. I designed rugs for John. I used those scribbled dream lines, and I put them up against Joan Miro paintings. We called them “Jean Morrow” paintings because I was pairing up John’s dreams with Joan Miro. John was very old and he misheard. He thought I said “Jean Morrow”. And so we called them the Jean Morrow Series.

RB: Cheryl, do you dream?

CD: I had some really scary nightmares.

KG: I think we've spent something close to twelve or thirteen thousand nights together, you and I.

CD: You counting?

KG: And we've never spoken about our dreams.

CStAP: Well, thank God we set this up.

RB: What about the dream in relation to the text?

KG: People feel that textuality is sacred. And I say absolutely not. If you want to go into it, if you want to change it, there's no text that's inviolable at all. It would be your lock, that you cannot make that text different or make it work. To me, it's the pleasure of the text, so to speak. And I find students are absolutely frightened to violate a text, particularly a canonical text. I respond, “Well, it really is not going to hurt T. S. Eliot for you to violate that poem in any way that you choose, believe me.” I mean, it's a tribute. There is something about the logocentric nature of language that people feel that it is impossible to alter because of the fragility of language. It is very different than visuality because language is what makes up culture entirely. So there is a lot of fear around altering language or intervening with it because you could collapse everything. This is why writing ends up being so “far behind painting” at some level. It's a much more conservative art.

CStAP: And it shows that there is a connection between language and the body. So when you touch the language, you also touch the body. That is where there is tremendous risk. It's like a cadaver. By rewriting the autopsies, you did another autopsy.

[Second Death]

KG: Absolutely. Autopsies are also the language of the State. But who's the author of that text? Who's the author of an autopsy? Usually, an autopsy is written—first, it is spoken into an audio recorder by a doctor who is making the text, conducting the autopsy. Then, that audio is given to somebody to transcribe, to textually interpret. And therefore, it has a second layer of subjectivity, a huge layer of subjectivity. The transcriptive norms in which one brings their subjectivity to transcribing something, like an autopsy report, changes the entire thing. So who is the author of that text? Is it the doctor or is it the secretary? Then you throw it out into the medical-judicial-legal-military-industrial complexes, and all of those interpretations go into that text. What you have is a multi-authored text, and that's called the document.

CStAP: That is the document.

KG: The document is non-authored. So, to me, the artist must intervene there. The artist must go in and intervene into the document and claim that text.

RB: Describe here the difference between the written document and an artist’s writing as intervention. The document does not stop being written.

KG: The document is always in progress. It's like a dance remix, it never ends. What is the definitive version of the dance song? There really is no definitive version. Whoever picks it up and remixes it, it becomes a different spin. And then that spin comes out and somebody else picks it up and takes it. Every time a document is shared, every time a document is read, it is read and shared differently, interpreted differently. There is no singularity. The call to claim any singularity of authorship on a document that is made public is absurd to me. I think it is an open-source, open-ended situation. But my take on this is unusual. To me, the cleave is very clear. To Cheryl, it's a lot more. I think there is an essential difference between the two of us, and we are never going to resolve that one. To me, it's a clean cleave. To her, it's all happening at the same time. RB: Adam and Eve.

CStAP: Now, we really have to stop.

Recorded Audio: [1:21:56 including silences] Transcription results: [63,740 characters including spaces]

Robert Buck © 2019

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