Duchamp Is My Lawyer, a new book by the poet, critic and founder of UbuWeb Kenneth Goldsmith, is an avid treatise on perhaps the most famous Internet archive of the avant-garde, which combines memories, reflections, criticism and a description of the pragmatic aspects of the more than 20-year history of the legendary website. Goldsmith’s scope is wide – through UbuWeb, he discusses copyright, the shared economy and artistic fringes, and his book can be read as a more or less explicit call to return to the original promise of a free, democratic Internet.

Goldsmith moves on three levels in the book. The basic one is, of course, the existence of UbuWeb, where he outlines the origin of the site and its gradual expansion, philosophical background and issues that he regularly encounters. Goldsmith repeatedly compares UbuWeb to a library mainly on account of the principle of equivalence of individual works and their free sharing. He himself says that his approach to building the archive is not academic; he doesn’t create historical threads or relations between works or a hierarchy, but he encourages visitors to find their own ways and to create their own connections in an egalitarian way. This allows him to create “revisionist art history based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, hyped, or market-based centre.” (p. 5) This applies to the avant-garde itself – the scope and breadth of UbuWeb’s archive “necessarily alters what is meant by avant-garde, a term saddled with the legacies of patriarchy, hegemony, imperialism, colonisation, and militarisation.” 

The library also means a non-market economy. The works are freely available to everyone, regardless of their means, and art thus also becomes available to those who would not be able to afford to buy it. In addition, the age of the Internet eliminates the need for physical proximity, and UbuWeb is also open to people who do not live in cultural hotspots. These principles are, for example, the reason why the entire UbuWeb is stored on a server and does not use torrents or other peer-to-peer sharing systems, which are based on the popularity of shared files.

UbuWeb also serves as an archive. “Piracy is preservation. Unpopular culture is preserved by people who love and cherish obscure artifacts. Left to market forces, the kinds of things on UbuWeb would essentially vanish and be lost forever.” (p. 39) UbuWeb stores a number of works that are not available in any (legal) form, whether they are sold-out rare editions, or works in private collections; it archives items that have appeared elsewhere on the Internet and subsequently disappeared. As Goldsmith writes, UbuWeb is also a “backup for the commercial Internet.” (p. 41) In a whole chapter, Goldsmith then deals with similar shadow library projects (including the Monoskop page) and the specific ways in which they store and make knowledge accessible. At the same time, he asks us to freely download individual works from UbuWeb and do whatever we want with them, distribute and transform them.

The operation of UbuWeb itself also reflects several of the aforementioned principles, and at the same time expresses a certain rebellious spirit. Goldsmith openly admits that the selection of works that appear on the website is entirely up to him – it is subjective and has never aspired to be complete. UbuWeb has never received or given money to anyone. The site is still built on a simple HTML code, which allows Goldsmith to manage it, never working with more modern systems (including the cloud) that come and go. The site blocks Internet search engines and, as the only social network, only occasionally uses Twitter – it relies more on word of mouth like in the pre-Internet period. Finally, Goldsmith is aware of the finiteness of his project and is reconciled with this fact; he does not aspire to permanence.

The second layer of the book consists of Goldsmith’s reflections on topics related to the operation of UbuWeb. One of those to which he regularly returns is copyright. Goldsmith claims that he’s never asked for permission to publish any content in advance, and decided that it would be easier to deal with the possible consequences. In the book, he then (a little monotonously) describes various cases in which he received requests to take down works, his reactions ranging from acceptance to persuasion to ignorance. At the same time, he has so far managed to avoid getting sued.

Goldsmith points out how unclear copyright is and, above all, the principle of fair use, which is a part of the equation in the US. He complements his experience with statements from lawyers and academics to point out that what is and isn’t covered by fair use is not decided by the courts, but more often by publishers, producers and editors, and their fear of potential lawsuits. At the same time, rights holders are not interested in suing because courts would begin to define fair use by precedents in more detail, which would potentially mean more freedom to exercise this right – so they prefer threats and out-of-court settlements. Goldsmith thus favours “using common sense to take a reasonably relaxed attitude about the law”. (p. 57)

The principle of fair use is also related to reflections on what is actually on the pages of UbuWeb – and it is basically reflections on the nature of the art work and its transformation. Goldsmith, for example, argues that low-quality video is not really a copy of the original, but rather a recording that no one would mistake for the original and that has no real value in the art market. Elsewhere, he emphasises the transformation of the work (which is an important point in fair use): “What if a bootleg isn’t a copy but instead a new artifact? What if the identical artifact that once functioned in one context now functions differently in another contest?” (p. 69) So it is a different work – just as Duchamp’s Fountain was. It is the work of art that can be the best defence of fair use, to which the title of the book also refers (by the way, also borrowed). Or simply the fact that a number of works are gathered in one place in such a way that it is possible to compare them and to create relationships between them is something we can consider as a form of transformation, therefore falling into the category of fair use. “UbuWeb can be considered one enormous appropriative artwork, a giant collage, which appropriates not a single object but rather the entire history of the avant-garde.” (p. 74)

Goldsmith also focuses on the question of whether rights holders are losing profit because of UbuWeb and sharing in general, and whether their works are losing value due to their easy availability on the Internet. He discusses shared economy primarily through the moving image market. He briefly outlines how the distribution of experimental films has transformed under the influence of home video, digital discs and the Internet over the last four decades to show that ignoring new ways of distributing films leads to greater losses than their adoption. Goldsmith then argues that the three basic ways of distributing moving images (“file sharing, cinema/museum distribution, and commercial galleries”, p. 101) can work in parallel without contradicting each other; they can even help each other: “these various distributive systems didn’t have to conflict with one another, but that each served a unique purpose and audience” (p. 101)

Thus, UbuWeb does not replace the commercial distribution of films and does not prevent the sale of moving images to collections, but it complements them. It usually offers low-resolution videos of low technical quality, a kind of “preview” that does not replace the experience of watching a movie in a cinema. On the contrary, it helps to promote the work and to build awareness about its author – which can then, in the best case, be reflected in increased profit in commercial distribution or sales. In the worst case, you have to accept that it’s impossible to earn a living with avant-garde films, which means that UbuWeb does not take anything from you. As Dominic Angerame, an avant-garde filmmaker and director of the important experimental film distribution company Canyon Cinema from 1980 to 2012, who fought against UbuWeb for a long time, says: “UbuWeb is a service to me. I might as well have people know my work rather than hiding them in a closet.” (p. 67)

However, the last part of the book, which makes up almost half of the text, is dedicated to individual works and artists that UbuWeb hosts on its website. Relatively extensive chapters on the history of visual poetry or the Aspen magazine, stories of various anthologies or fringe artists are interesting in themselves, but only very loosely related to UbuWeb. Although UbuWeb began as a collection of visual poetry, referring to the philosophy of the Aspen magazine and essentially being an extensive anthology of fringe artists, Goldsmith goes too far in these parts and UbuWeb ceases to be in the spotlight.

In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith assumes the role of a rebel who ignores the system. The romantic ideal of the rebel has a strong place in pop culture and can be inspiring, but at the same time tends to simplify the complexity of the world and runs up against the limits, especially when it comes to systemic changes – Goldsmith, for example, will never change rigid copyright through UbuWeb (we certainly do not claim that it is his duty or aspiration), he will only ignore it. On the other hand, if he hadn’t been a rebel, he probably would have never built something as unique as UbuWeb. UbuWeb is full of DIY ethos, which, in a sense, is raised above professional culture (… “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.” p. 4) and the book, on its third level, becomes almost a manifesto for this ethos.

In the book, UbuWeb is portrayed as a small utopia in the middle of the commercial Internet, built on the principles of freedom, equality and cultural progress, but also subversiveness. With his passionate tone, Goldsmith tells us that there could be many similar projects – he even gives us instructions on how to do this from time to time. And, between the lines, he persuades us to create other such utopian places online, to try to transform the Internet and reclaim its vision of the future.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp Is My Lawyer. Columbia University Press, 2020. 

TRANSLATION Lucia Udvardyová