Table Of ContentDUCHAMP IS MY LAWYER
DUCHAMP
IS MY LAWYER
THE POLEMICS, PRAGMATICS, AND POETICS OF UBUWEB
KENNETH GOLDSMITH
Columbia University Press | New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54691-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldsmith, Kenneth, author.
Title: Duchamp is my lawyer : the polemics, pragmatics, and poetics of UbuWeb / Kenneth Goldsmith.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058881 (print) | LCCN 2019058882 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231186940 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780231186957 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: UbuWeb. | Arts—Experimental methods—Computer network resources.
Classification: LCC NX260 .G65 2020 (print) | LCC NX260 (ebook) | DDC 700.285—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058881
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058882
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
I often tell people that Duchamp is my lawyer. He’s the legal premise to
validate what I’m doing.
Virgil Abloh
For the Custodians
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Back Door
PART I: POLEMICS
PART II: PRAGMATICS
1 Folk Law
2 From Panorama to Postage Stamp: Avant-Garde Cinema and the Internet
3 The Work of Video Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
4 Shadow Libraries and Preserving the Memory of the World
PART III: POETICS
5 Dirty Concrete
6 From Ursonate to Re-Sonate
7 People Like Us
8 Aspen : A “Multimedia Magazine in a Box”
9 Street Poets and Visionaries
10 An Anthology of Anthologies
Coda: The Ghost in the Algorithm
Appendix: 101 Things on UbuWeb That You Don’t Know About but Should
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
THE BACK DOOR
T
here’s a back door to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City that
few know about. Invisible to the bustling crowds at the main entrance on Fifty-Third
Street, it’s desolate except for the occasional noisy school group or quiet academic
researcher entering and exiting. There’re no admission fees or snaking queues, only a lonely
intern sitting at a desk. If you sign in and take the elevator to the top floor, you’ll find the MoMA
Library. It was there in the late 1970s that a librarian named Clive Phillpot created a policy
unlike any other in the history of the museum. Without asking permission, he decreed that
anybody could mail anything to the MoMA Library, and it would be accepted and become part
of the official collection. There was no limit to what could be sent, nor were there specifications
of size, medium, or provenance. No judgments were made about quality either. The artist could
be world famous or completely unknown—it made no difference. Once something was sent, no
questions were ever asked. Whatever was received was accepted.
Phillpot estimates that between 1977 and 1994 he got anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000
artists into the MoMA collection this way.1 Bob Dylan once said, “I had gotten in the door when
no one was looking. I was in there now and, there was nothing anybody from then on could do
ever about it.”2 Similarly, Phillpot’s gesture was so under the radar that the front door—the
museum administration and curatorial wing—paid no attention to it. And once they did, it was
too late; nobody was going to return all those crates and boxes that had piled up over the
years, never mind remove hundreds of thousands of artists from the database. While some
artifacts from those acquisitions are quite valuable and are often on display in the galleries,
most of them languish in MoMA’s remote storage facility out in Queens, stacked up in the boxes
they were originally sent in. And they’re all still part of MoMA’s collection.
Sometimes the back door was used to get artworks into the museum. In 1991, Chuck Close
was asked to curate an Artist’s Choice exhibition. Close decided to choose a selection of
portraits from MoMA’s collection, and he wanted to include Ray Johnson, who at the time was
—unbelievably enough—still not actually in the MoMA collection. So to get himself in, Johnson
stuffed a funky photocopied cartoon of Willem de Kooning into an envelope and mailed it off to
Phillpot, courtesy of the library. Sure enough, the cartoon was entered into the MoMA collection
with the credit line “Gift of the artist. The Museum of Modern Art Library, Special Collections”—
therefore eligible to be included in Close’s show.
The back door is a powerful tool. While all eyes are elsewhere, magical things can happen in
the margins. Andy Warhol once said that if you want to collect something in New York, you have
to find out what it is that nobody else wants and collect that. Before long, everyone will want it.
He was right—once he began collecting ugly ceramic cookie jars, everyone started collecting
them. By the time he died, his cookie jar collection, which he paid pennies for, sold at auction
for a quarter of a million dollars. Warhol was a back-door collector. Out of the watchful eye of
the front door and free to write its own ticket, the back door plays by its own rules. Unburdened
by official policy, it can quietly reshuffle the deck according to intuition, whim, and desire. While
the front sparkles with glamour and sexy commodities, the back door favors that which is
economically worthless but historically priceless. Trading in ephemera and ideas, the back door
is unlocked and unguarded, for it’s assumed that there’s not much worth stealing inside that
rear door—often a correct hunch. Yet because the back door is always open, its ideas are
infinitely democratic, transferrable, and replicable as well as free to all. At once playful—even
prankish—and deadly serious, the back door is perverse, embracing contradiction and impurity.
It’s also wildly utopian, proposing to make the impossible possible. What begins as a hunch or
proposition over time becomes serious. If you do something wrong for long enough, it
eventually becomes right—paradoxically transforming the back door into the new front door.
Marcel Duchamp once made a door hinged between two frames that was always open and
always shut. The door closed one entrance when it opened the other, thereby contradicting the
French proverb “Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée [A door must be either open or
closed].” It is both and neither at the same time. Writing to André Breton, Duchamp said, “Pour
moi il y a autre chose que oui, non et indifferent—C’est par example l’absence
d’investigations de ce genre [For me there is something other than yes, no, and indifferent—
there is for example the absence of investigations of this kind].”3 Open and closed, pirate and
legitimate, serious and playful, UbuWeb has attempted to model itself on Phillpot’s back door
and Duchamp’s pendulous door, resulting in a decades-long investigation into the absence of an
investigation.
Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of
freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is illegal; we openly
violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is
pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never
even come close. UbuWeb functions on no money—we don’t take it, we don’t pay it, we don’t
touch it; you’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. We’ve never applied for a
grant or accepted a sponsorship; we remain happily unaffiliated, keeping us free and clean,
allowing us to do what we want to do, the way we want to do it. Most important, UbuWeb has
always been and will always be free and open to all: there are no memberships or passwords
required. All labor is volunteered; our server space and bandwidth are donated by a likeminded
group of intellectual custodians who believe in free access to knowledge. A gift economy of
plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education, UbuWeb is visited daily by tens of
thousands of people from every continent. We’re on numerous syllabuses, ranging from those
for kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to those for postgraduates listening to hours of
Jacques Lacan’s Séminaires. When the site goes down from time to time, as most sites do,
we’re inundated by emails from panicked faculty wondering how they are going to teach their
courses that week.
