In a surprise performance that critic Jerry Saltz described as "epic", former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton participated in Kenneth Goldsmith's Venice Biennale project HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails yesterday.
Goldsmith's previous found-text projects include a year of transcribed weather reports (The Weather, 2005), a single day of the New York Times (Day, 2003), and broadcast announcements of famous deaths and disasters, including John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, the Columbine shooting, September 11th, and the explosion of the Challenger Shuttle (Seven American deaths and disasters, 2013).
In 2013 he began a project called Printing Out The Internet, out of which his Venice project seems to have grown. He announced the work in March, calling it "the greatest poem of the 21st century". The work consists of all 30,000 of the emails Clinton sent from the "clintonemail.com" domain between 2009 and 2013, 62 000 pages worth.
Hillary Clinton, who was in the country to attend an economic forum, surprised visitors with her appearance at the Cinema Teatro Italia. Many assumed it was a lookalike, said Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, the show's curator. He himself assumed it was a prank when Clinton's team initially reached, asking if she could participate.
Clinton spent a full hour reading excerpts from the emails aloud, while sitting at a replica of the Oval Office's Resolute Desk. Interviewed after the fact she called the event "A personal pleasure for me".
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