Keynote Speech At The Inaugural International Art Party Convention
This four-page keynote is Williams at full rhetorical blast: a drunken, obscene, mock-populist stump speech recast as avant-garde performance. The repeated chants, birthday shout-outs, fake movement language, and "fart revolution" turn political convention theater into an art-world exorcism. Beneath the profanity is a sharp formal parody of collective enthusiasm, in which the crowd's participation becomes both proof of vitality and evidence of stupidity. Williams uses the speech to attack Artforum readers, the Whitney Biennial, Swedish conceptualists, critics, pollsters, and the managerial pieties of contemporary art, while also implicating himself as paid performer and willing fraud. The result is less a manifesto than a weaponized burlesque of manifestos, a comic demolition of the idea that art politics can still speak with moral seriousness.
- DATE:
- April 25, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Interview / Statement
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Mark Twain; Ronald Reagan; Federico Fellini; Mara McCarthy; Lisa Spellman; Martin Amis; Harold Bloom; Wallace Stevens; Roberta Smith; Lolita
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- FUCKTHATGALLERY; American Art Rhetoric; Artforum; Whitney Biennial; USC; Amazon.com; International Art Party Convention
- KEYWORDS:
- drunken stump speech as avant-garde; fart revolution as political form; collective enthusiasm parodied; art-world exorcism; mock-populist keynote; political convention as performance; formal parody of enthusiasm