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34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Teesside University
Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
'Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head' (GIJKH), is a performative retyping of Jack Kerouac’s beat classic, 'On the Road'. The work makes radical use of appropriation strategies and plays between the analogue and digital. It is an example of Conceptual Writing, a new movement fusing art and literature. An experiment in textual literary criticism, collapsing the traditional distinction between reader and writer. GIJKH proposes a new method of making art via conceptualist reading performances. This method grafts the aesthetic legacy of Conceptual Art on to various notions of writing (from literary composition to data management) in order to produce materially-specific poems as artworks that have in some way re-read a found object. This is an art of reading things differently. The work has received widespread international attention. In the USA, Darren Hudson Hick exclusively reviews GIJHK in his paper ‘Ontology and the Challenge of Literary Appropriation’ for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71:2, Spring 2013, suggesting it is a potential watershed work. GIJKH was in the first survey of conceptual writing, Against Expression. An entire chapter was dedicated to an examination of this book in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press. It was reviewed by Doug Nufer in the American Book Review, and by Paul Stephens, Columbia University for Digital Humanities Quarterly, and by Vanessa Place for Constant Critic. In NYC exhibitions GIJKH was included in We Are Grammar, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery and in HELP/LESS at Printed Matter Inc. In Germany, it was extensively examined by three authors in Dr. Annette Gilbert’s critical anthology: Re-edited. Strategies of Appropriation of Texts and Books. In Holland, Morris was invited to present GIJKH at the conference: Book Presence in the Digital Age, Utrecht University. In the UK, GIJKH featured in The Liverpool Biennale’s publication The Unexpected Guest, and was reviewed by Colin Herd for 3:AM Magazine.
