Goodbye, UbuWeb
A farewell and an overdue hello again
On January 1, 2024, a notice appeared toward the bottom of the homepage of ubuweb.com, announcing the end of 27 years of operations. “As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active,” reads the seven-point Verdana text beneath a ladder of red hyperlinks, Samuel Beckett’s pixelated face gazing sternly from the top-bar. “The archive is preserved for perpetuity,” it continues, “in its entirety.”
Created by Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, UbuWeb began as a repository of concrete poetry in 1996, evolving with Goldsmith’s curatorial impulses to encompass all manner of avant-garde creations, disregarded ephemera, and outsider art. Think PDFs of defunct Dada magazines, bootlegged documentaries about Laurie Anderson, radio adverts for laxatives, a start-to-end reading of Finnegans Wake, and songs about cheese made by infants. Under the folder for the playwright Alfred Jarry, you can find a 1963 film production of the website’s namesake, Ubu Roi, a theatre piece so shocking that it provoked chair-throwing from audience members when first performed in 1896.
UbuWeb was significant for the fiercely idiosyncratic vision that guided its three-decade run, and its flagrant violation of copyright laws. The hundreds of thousands of listings were uploaded in almost every case without permission, free for anyone to download. The illegality, Goldsmith notes in his 2020 book about the website, Duchamp is My Lawyer, was largely the point. As the conceptual “back door” of the art world, UbuWeb necessarily defied all codified norms: it was “infinitely democratic, transferrable, and replicable... playful – even prankish – and deadly serious, the back door is perverse, embracing contradiction and impurity. It’s also wildly utopian.”
In aesthetic and ethos, the archive harks back to an Internet yet to be determined by business interests and government overreach. Complete with tiny letters and gray edges, the World Wide Web suggested something radical in its capacity for unprofitable, unfiltered mass dissemination. The era that brought us UbuWeb was also the era of Wikipedia, Napster, and “Two Girls, One Cup.” The site’s closure seems in some way to signify the conclusion of that age – gone with Twitter, and probably Reddit too, following its recent IPO. The Library of Congress listed UbuWeb in the historic collection of Internet materials in 2021, in a nod to both the archive’s influence and its status, even then, as a relic.
That UbuWeb’s end has gone so far unreported isn’t surprising. Though a regular user of the site, the miniature announcement only caught my eye ten weeks’ after being uploaded. And it feels fitting that the world forgets to write an obituary for the home of the neglected and the strange. In March last year I emailed Goldsmith regarding a podcast that was listed on the UbuWeb, for which the hyperlink led nowhere. He responded the next day: “I guess the podcasts are lost to the dusts of time. Another reason to remember that if you love something, it’s best to download it. Things don’t stay on the Internet forever, sadly.”
While the updates have stopped, the site lives on online, for now, and in our downloads folders. And UbuWeb won’t leave our minds. After that first and final showing of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, once the crowd settled and the immediate disgust had passed, the poet and critic Catulle Mendès went home to draft his review, due for publication in Paris's Le Journal the next day. Like it or not, he wrote of the show’s foul-mouthed protagonist, “Père Ubu exists. You will not be able to get rid of him; he will haunt you and perpetually force you to remember not only that he passed this way, but that he has arrived and is here.”
This was probably a surprise to some of you, coming more than two years after I left you in the lurch. My explanation is a lame one: I couldn’t find a home for the above piece, which I wrote in full and without commission, so I thought it could live in At Large.
If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, I recently-ish finished an MFA in Creative Writing, and I’ve published a few things. Here’s a piece of criticism one of my professors placed in his journal; here’s a link to a literary annual that a short story of mine is in; and here’s a link to some of my reportage for BBC Radio 4 (from 17 minutes in, if my memory serves me). I also have a small collection of short stories forthcoming with Staircase Books. Maybe you’ll be hearing more from me soon. Maybe not.
Until then, if then,
Louis
Jesus. Pere Ubu. I’m an idiot.