‘It Almost Felt Like Meaning’: Hillary Clinton Reads Her Emails at the Venice Biennale There is a place for evidentiary art – but not for Kenneth Goldsmith’s print-out of 62,000 pages of the former US Secretary of State’s correspondence
Manifesting Clinton’s emails, however, sorely misunderstands their importance. The major affect of HILLARY is the futility of printing out emails: this is the act of a person who only conceives of emails in terms of paper letters. It is a paranoid act driven by fear the email will disappear (as if paper is somehow more permanent). That Clinton sat down and played along, and that the work was no more profound for it, proves its redundancy (again). ‘The idea was hard to pitch in the US,’ the curators of the Venice exhibit have said. ‘Nobody wanted to show these documents.’
Well, the emails are boring – an assessment that Clinton herself echoed when she flipped through them, insisting to the Italian press: ‘Anyone can go in, they can look at them, there’snothing there.’
