Kenneth Goldsmith at John Post Lee - New York, New York

Kenneth Goldsmith is to words what Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man was to numbers. He's an eccentric, slightly outlandish orator. Born in 1961 a year after Jean-Michel Basquiat, he has a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of in common with that artist's obsessive penchant for making lengthy lists of words which fall phonetically--if inexplicably--together. For several years he has at handed only inventories of words (no images) upon paper. Sometimes the words are drawn in of the nature of smoke graphite onto rag paper, and other times they are puffed up up and silk-screened onto paper drawn out scroll-like columns. The words are arranged in repeating rhyming schemes and by means of number of syllables--"authorship, backward flip, Barney's zip, bite your lip, bummer trip"--or in a succesion of related and unrelated words, phrases or names drawn to overlap single another as if sung in an endles round: "brain drain, chow mein, John Wayne, acid rain."

In its wordiness, Goldsmith's work bears a certain resemblance to Conceptual art or the Information art of the late 1960 and this may be its eventual downside. The fact that there is in the way that little visual tooth to the work makes it easy to ignore, and who wants to do more reading in forehead of an artwork? What saves Goldsmith from the at any time mounting scrap heap of latter-day Conceptualism is the mad, invocational vernacularist's twist (remember Jim Roche's 'Cadillac Chant'?) he sets on this old approach. He not sole uses popular quotes and advertising jingles on the other hand heats up the information and make hastes up the feed. It's as if he were large casked into 100 televisions and radios at the same time.

Goldsmith revolves the mantralike syncopated progressions of Philip Glass--whose work he probably tend hitherwards closest to in his use of repetition and progression--into a droning torrent of contemporary scat-singing. Indeed, Goldsmith may be as abundant a librettist as he is a visual artist. For this smallish exhibition he not absented five variations on his trademark theme that display him refining his sense of mode of building and timing. Had the exhibit consisted only of these five works, it would have been a little disappointing--a holding pattern for an interesting artist--but there was more.

Included, as well, was a framed three-panel piece that stood nearly 8 feet tall and more than 12 feet wide, leaning against a wall. In it Goldsmith takes a giant pace forward. Tilted No. 105 52392-62192 (like a fugue) it contains six round pillars of silkscreened typeset words (two rounded pillars per panel): names, phrases, names TV and song titles, gallery names, freshs bits car names and phone numbers, fragments of poesy arranged in a complex (but decipherable) pattern according to the number of syllables in each word or phrase. Each syllable, word or phrase extreme points in the rhyming sound "ee" The progression begins with single-syllable rhymes: B b be, Bea, bee, bree--and it builds in complexity from there, adding syllables and then words and then phrases. It reads like a list from hell, like all sorts of things, on the other hand most of all it reads like James Joyce (albeit hopp up upon late 20th-century pop culture). Indeed, in the twelfth line of the work Goldsmith inserts an invented 231-letter one-syllable word ("wh" followed by means of 229 e's) that mimics individual of the ten 100-letter words that Joyce uses (to signify reverberating report claps) in Finnegan's Wake. Goldsmith's work lurches from individual to two to three up end 24-syllable units until the last 100 syllable entrance It can't be coincidental that this entrance consists of the last words of Finnegan's Wake.

This guy's got a gift of gab, and this virtually one-work exhibition displays him taking the next necessary paces to realize the full potential of his abilities to oilstone what Carl Sandberg called "a synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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