UbuWeb, a repository of scads of avant-garde films, poems, songs, and cultural-intellectual whatnot, is as difficult to classify as its contents. It’s not a public service, though it behaves that way: all of its material is available for free, though sometimes to the chagrin or grudging acceptance of the artists whose works are posted there without permission. It’s not a museum, because museums are curated, and though UbuWeb groups its holdings into categories — “Film & Video,” “Sound,” “Dance,” etc. — whatever organizing aesthetic principles it adheres to have only loosened over time. On the first page of his book Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, founder Kenneth Goldsmith analogizes the site to the back door of the Museum of Modern Art, which has a little-publicized policy to accept any artwork sent to it. UbuWeb, he writes, demonstrates that “the back door is a powerful tool. While all eyes are elsewhere, magical things can happen in the margins.”
But nearly all the material MoMA gets through the back door never makes it to its walls. So a better analogy might be a stable door — UbuWeb has unfettered a century’s worth of serious art from any commercial restraints. It’s now all free to roam about, and we’re free to roam among it. If you care about anything that might loosely be called avant-garde in the 20th century, the site is essential. Beckett, Brakhage, Banksy, Burroughs, Bunuel — UbuWeb is the keeper of many of their important works at a time when many of them are inaccessible, out of print, and/or prohibitively expensive. As I write this, if I wish to listen to John Giorno’s out-of-print 1967 LP containing his sound-poems “Raspberry” and “Pornographic Poem,” I can go to discogs.com and pay either $450 or $800 for one of the two copies available. Or I can go to UbuWeb and get the LP — and dozens of other Giorno works besides — for free.
The choice is easy from my bank account’s perspective. It’s easier still, Goldsmith argues, from the perspective of the artist. Forced between complete obscurity and a nominal presence in the online ether, he writes, UbuWeb isn’t just the lesser of two evils, it’s a net positive. After all, he says, “artists who are not visible are forgotten.” Moreover, he argues, the site transforms many of its contents into promotion for the artists, driving people to the commercial institutions (galleries, film-rental organizations) that adhere to copyright law and provide financial support to those artists. One such institution tells Goldsmith that “although Ubu was causing them to lose business, an equal amount of traffic was also coming to them because institutions could preview their works on UbuWeb, which ultimately converted into sales and rentals for them.”
Any writer, designer, or artist who’s been asked to work “for exposure” will rightly side-eye the kind of economy Goldsmith is promoting. UbuWeb doesn’t touch money, as Goldsmith notes repeatedly to defend his position, which is just another way of saying nobody’s making money, or much of it. But Duchamp isn’t meant to be so much a book about the economics of UbuWeb as an explanation of its aesthetic and working principles. These boil down to simplicity and independence. By using simple HTML and hard drives, it avoids IT expenses, technological breakdowns, and beholdenness to the cloud. By avoiding partnerships, grant money, or even donations, it avoids any patina of professionalism that might open it to copyright claims against the material it posts without permission. Most such claims, Goldsmith claims, are opportunistic and invalid anyhow.
Although Goldsmith gets fairly deep into the matter of the legality of UbuWeb, his argument is essentially this: the whole of the site exemplifies fair use. As one lawyer puts it, “The decision to assemble related material in a way that makes possible kinds of inquiry and comparison and consumption and appreciation that were not formerly possible is itself a kind of repurposing.” I’m not sure I buy it — if I post the contents of Duchamp Is My Lawyer and the rest of Columbia University Press’ 2020 publication list for free on a website, I doubt its lawyers will hear my claim that I’ve opened its works to all sorts of inquiry, comparison, consumption, and appreciation. It is more honest to say that, financially speaking, this category of art is hardly worth the trouble. Goldsmith’s refusal to touch money is noble, but also effectively serves as an insurance policy on that point.
And yet, and yet. I love UbuWeb, love it in the way that broke-teenage me relied on libraries and cassette dubs for culture I was curious about, and I like to think that over time I’ve repaid some of that debt with actual money. Complaining about UbuWeb is somewhat analogous to complaining about home taping in the 70s, or about the used CD stores that Garth Brooks attempted to eliminate in the 90s. Information wants to be free; walled gardens like iTunes, galleries, and film distributors can create an economy around this information, but culture is often created through the cracks in those walls. (Goldsmith provides snapshots of a few Ubu-like “shadow libraries” in his book, including Memory of the World, Monoskop, and PennSound.) Culture survives both on the backs of compensated creators and the desire to share; figuring out that balance has been a challenge for arts and publishing for ages, though it’s become a more acute one in recent years.
It’s not Goldsmith’s problem to solve: for all the breadth of its borrowings, UbuWeb is largely a reflection of his own particular tastes. In Duchamp, if he’s not writing about UbuWeb proper he’s paying homage to much of his favorite contents: concrete poems, Dadaist sound artists like Kurt Schwitters, Patti Smith’s poetry readings, and so on. An appendix to the book lists 101 of the site’s quirkier contents, like Mary Ellen Bute’s mid-60s film adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Banksy’s culture-jamming of a Paris Hilton CD, Anna Akhmatova reading her work, and the complete run of Aspen, a culture journal that lasted from 1965 to 1971 and packaged each issue in a bespoke box that could contain flexidiscs and Super-8 films alongside its print essays by critics, scholars, and artists. It is a place, at best, to be inspired; at worst, it’s a place to never be bored.
UbuWeb makes some gestures toward including more contemporary artists, but the site is inescapably archival. It represents the glory of a time when there was enough slack in the culture financially — via grants, patronage, universities, simple free time — that these thousand flowers bloomed. The clearest evidence of this in Duchamp comes in a chapter titled “An Anthology of Anthologies,” where Goldsmith writes about how, early on, UbuWeb effectively borrowed its authority by posting the contents of past anthologies of works it wanted to include. For instance, it uploaded the contents of Tellus, a subscription-based series of sound-art cassettes started in 1983; PhotoStatic, which did much the same for video art at the same time; and Music Before Revolution, a 1972 Nonesuch box set of experimental music. “We figured if someone went through all the trouble of sorting out obscure and esoteric types of culture and building an anthology, then it was probably worth absorbing that anthology into UbuWeb’s collection,” Goldsmith writes. True. But curation is labor, and when the reward is “exposure,” the instinct to curate with depth and authority is harder to come by. What website can you make when a threadbare economy means there’s less of an impetus to anthologize art, or less art to anthologize? UbuWeb unquestionably represents part of a model for a future artistic economy. But it forever risks being a tomb for a bygone one.
[Published July 28, 2020 by Columbia University Press. 328 pages, $26 softcover]