Q1 why do you go to art fairs and biennales?
taking a risk, something that an art fair does not want to do. I can't imagine being under surveillance for one's writing and curating of 'dangerous' words and works of art from within an art fair. Or can I? 'You may think you know what's going on, Mr. Giddes, but you don't says John Huston's evil character in Polanski's 'Chinatown'. Evil is part of the process of truth. 'This is Chinatown, Giddes, anything can happen.' The current interest in 'Arab' art and its biennalisation is acutely severing and concealing of truth. I take the view of the importance of intellectual life, not by trading logic with trade. At least the biennale 'takes you there', as a submission to thinking. It just never stops hurting. There is also in Europe a landscape of festivals [biennales] that does allow space for experiment, something the far more conservative countries of USA and UK do not permit, although they would claim to, in relativist terms, as liberal democracies. [Think of Mr. Deller's 'communitarian' conceits, [as doublethink] also his social work with American Puritans. “He’s one of us,” proclaims the Sovereign]. Saleable, pretty, and nasty, as David Batchelor writes in his book Chromophobia, with dubious intention, of the victory of the moral, grey men over those of colour. This is not a judgement, but a submission to a universal thought, of the powerlessness of thought as it circulates within all forms of ‘statist’ law. [Alain Badiou’s term]. Politics must be quickly and invisibly turned back to a state of convalescence or at least into a pumpkin.
Kerry Duggan Artist
To look at art.
Jeni Walwin Independent curator and writer
Art fairs I rarely visit art fairs. Biennales Biennales traditionally offer a good opportunity for a large quantity of work from artists around the world to be viewed in a short
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