I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness

I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness
Kenneth Goldsmith in collaboration with Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana are happy to present I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, a lecture by the American contemporary poet Kenneth Goldsmith that is released online for the first time on this occasion. In dialogue with the curatorial team Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, the artist gives an insight into four of his most recent projects: Printing Out the Internet, Hillary. The Hillary Clinton Emails, I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness and Peels—the latter in collaboration with Cheryl Donegan.

During the talk, the artist and the curators explain how they made Hillary Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State perform in an art show during the latest Venice Biennale. The degree of relatedness between Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer of ready-made, will also be revealed.

Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961, New York City) is famous for having extended the dada ready-made and the surrealist collage to digital writing and for having founded UbuWeb, the most important online archive dedicated to the avant-garde of the 20th and 21st centuries.