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This Issue 11/18/2004

Also in this issue

• From the editor
• Behind the Mask
• How to eat like a rock star

Are you trying to undo your students' sense of ethics and intellectual property?

Art, and by extension the classroom, is a free space into which ethical queries can be conducted in a safe environment. By a consensual agreement, we've entered into a practice that questions conventional notions of ethics.

Copyright law only becomes pressing when that which is being transferred has economic value. In our practice -- the practice of experimental writing -- there is no commercial value to any of it. Hence it supplements perfectly our idea of the classroom as a safe space for ethical transgressions.

Wouldn't a copyright lawyer argue that one with you?

There's a whole century's worth of aesthetic arguments as to why this is art, ranging from Marcel Duchamp to popular music. Nobody expects Britney Spears to be singing in front of a great live band -- or, for that matter, to even be singing at all. Our entire culture is based on mechanical reproduction and sampling. Literature needs to catch up here.

What about your own work?

I retyped an entire copy of a day's New York Times, from cover to cover. It was published as a 900-page book. I sent a copy of it to The New York Times. They ignored it. You see, my gesture was economically non-threatening to them, hence it was easy for them to ignore.

What's wrong with creativity?

Creativity as we've come to know it is bankrupt. What passes for creativity in our culture is actually vastly uncreative. Think of the flood of worn-out narratives, passing for originality, be it novels, films or music, and you'll find that what we term creative is nothing more than repetitious formulas, spun over and over. Should something appear that's truly "creative" it doesn't stand a chance of selling and as such, is rendered culturally insignificant and marginalized to the point of invisibility. By opposing creativity as commonly accepted -- in a sense by constructing a negative notion of creativity -- perhaps we can breathe new life into this practice. Hence, my concept of the uncreative.

It's hard for a person to rid themselves of heart, creativity, individuality. No matter what we do, we fully express ourselves with every gesture. I want to propose that students do less to imbue a work with their own personality, because it's always going to be there regardless of how hard we try. Every choice is stamped with individuality; we needn't try so hard.

Do your students ever find themselves accidentally slipping into a creative mode? How hard is it to let go of conventional notions of artistic individuality?