I could have written two different posts, but I don’t think I want to discuss the two authors separately. I have some thoughts about Goldsmith’s Soliloquy and Traffic, but also on the narrative of race that the two artists have become a part of.

Soliloquy and Traffic: I found his execution of these projects very interesting. I think these works are meant to be contemplated from conception to final product. He said himself that his works are “unreadable” and that he does not have “readership” but “thinkership.” In relation to these two texts I think this is an interesting concept. His works did make me think about the amount of talking and language that is bouncing around us constantly. To have that meaningless? or useless? ordinary? language represented in physical form is startling. Those traffic reports will never be important again in relation to the information they give, but that is a lot of discourse and it was supremely important at its time of transmission. I think his works, both Soliloquy and Traffic, speak to the amount of “stuff” that is thrown at us each day. At least for me it reminded me of how tedious and grueling the process is of wading through media and language to find what is important to us.

This leads me to both Goldsmith and Place’s treatment of race in their works. I found it thought-provoking that we cannot really read any of Place’s works, only criticism (at least I am not willing, at this time, to venture into her book). I found that Place and Goldsmith had two very different ways of causing discussion, despite the fact that they both received similar reactions.

After reading a few of the articles about Place, I think I have decided that she was attacked because of what Natasha Stagg spoke of the “twitter mindset”

“Instead of acting as a warning, Place’s GWTW was being warned against, a trigger more traumatic, apparently, than the original text it parroted. It also seemed to say a lot about the snap judgments we’re all so used to now because of our chosen sharing habits. It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.”

We see something and decide if we like it or not. If we do we retweet, like, or share. However, if we do not it is quite obvious how severely others can act. I tend to agree with Place’s question of why people are questioning her actions and not the text’s meaning. The reaction is to lash out instead of reflect upon and discuss why something like this might make us angry. Why is it insulting to have the racist narrative is pointed out, but it does not seem to be insulting that the narrative exists?

As for Goldsmith, I have to agree with the various texts provided on his performance. While I see that both authors are appropriating, in this case, black suffering, I find Goldsmith a bit less forgivable. I think the piece opened up a discourse about the topic of race and police brutality, but it was tactless. I tried to even position it in the form of a biography, in that very often biographers talk about things that perhaps the subject would not have liked, but even from that perspective the idea of this reading makes me feel icky. I guess I could say the same about Place’s book.

I will defend their right to create whatever they wish as artistic pieces, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy them. I don’t like the idea of sanatizing the literary world or things that people don’t like. The would be a complete erasure of the literary world. I like that their are author’s that push the boundaries and make people squirm, but I am not sure that I want to participate in the squirming…