The Sheila Variations

Can't forget "paradigm" (and/or "paradigmatic"). Perhaps even "paradigm shift."

"Christo's animism is at the heart of his challenge to the verity of truth, insofar as it rectifies the humanism of our spatial modality. 'Gates' purports to effect a nouveau realisme in which the actual is unrealized into a cathartic emanence of the whole."

Oh and Curly? Don't even THINK that I won't put the word "pinata" in my review!!

Okay, you people are already cracking me up. This is awesome stuff.

Carry on.

Ooh. Good one, DaveJ.

Also throw in "hermeneutical" and "heuristic." I don't remember what they mean (if I ever knew, which I think I might have), but they're definitely great pompous jargon words.

And one can't forget "epistemology" (and/or "epistemological").

There was this guy - Kenneth Clark (not the British politician) - who wrote a book about Leonardo Da Vinci that I had to read in college. I swear to gawd he did not use ONE BLOODY ADJECTIVE that wasn't in French. I wish I had the book handy. It's probably rempli avec les exemples.

My stab at pretention: I would equate the experience of walking through the exhibit with passing through the birth canal and suggest that those who hate The Gates do so because they despise their own existence.

Kenneth not-the-Tory-politician Clark wrote a book that became a TV series with the brilliantly self-important title Civilization: A Personal View.

"Christo's Gates are a physical representation of the artist's inner dialectic, juxtaposing saffron spirituality and utilitarian steel in a compromised landscape."

I am in love with each and every one of you.

I must add the word "ontological" into the mix.

you need to throw "qua" in there to. As in "the gates qua gateway." I have no idea what "qua" means or exactly how to use it, but it makes you sound deep.

(you already took my two "obvious" choices, vis a vis and ontological).

Other good words:

didactic
eidetic
semiotic
(-ic words just seem to cry out for this kind of writing)

Love this idea. I am in a hurry, but here are a few--didactic, oeuvre, polemic, evanescent, perturbation, fertile esthetic, recherche. I can't wait to read the review. My only request is that you use some quintessential, self-absorbed French word(or words)that I will have to research for the meaning.

Gotta include Gestalt, Angst and Foucaultian.

And the phrase "...[another idea] is suspect on its face" is mandatory.

ricki:

qua!!! hahahahahahahaha

These are all SO FUNNY to read. "self-absorbed French word". I can't wait. There are so many to choose from!

I also will definitely need a Thesaurus nearby.

And DBW: recherche! haha!!

Mitch:

Foucaultian. EXCELLENT.

How 'bout:

raison d'être for a foreign phrase
contextualize for a deconstructionist word

transformative
self-referential
Weltanschauung
Gesamtkunstwerk
remplissage

Holy crap, sporkadelic.

Gesamtkunstwerk?? Okay, fine. I take the challenge!

Don't forget weltanschauung, which is de rigeur for a post which will, as it were, tap the Amontillado cask and spill out the emperor's new dregs for all to taste.

The Gates: a simple recherche into the lost écarts de jeunesse, a Dumbo's feather that lets the viewer soar back to the lost folly of youth? Or a sine qua non of postmodern folly?

And remember: although "Foucaultian" is spelled with a "t," it's pronounced as a "d," i.e., as if it were "Foucauldian." For no discernible reason. And you can't have one French deconstructionist without the other, so add in Derridean as well.

Oops, someone hit "weltanschauung" while I was composing. I present you, then, with "frisson" and "brio."

I had originally vowed NEVER to have the "D" word on my blog.

I suppose it won't hurt just this once.

Oh, and you gotta use that device where you put part of a word in parentheses so it changes the meaning slightly depending on whether you read the part in the parentheses or not:

The heuristic dialectic of Christo's "Gates" is a relflection of the post-9/11 zeigeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of "now-more-than-ever." The semiotics of the Buddhist-saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being - the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata.

the key is the more words you use, the less you actually say.

frickin close-italic tag.

ricki, you are a goddess. That is absolute genius.

I closed the tag, ricki, so people can get the full humorous effect.

I had originally vowed NEVER to have the "D" word on my blog.

Wassamatter with "Dumbo"...? 8>

I can't believe I forgot:

je ne sais quoi

i don't know red, the thought of the saffron-clothed gates hemming in the pathways like the digital brownshirts that are boring in on emily imbues my soul with such ennui that i need a ringding

OMG, I wish I had thought of "ennui."

If you're using Weltanschauung, you have to use Weltschmerz.

And you should include references not only to birth, but to eating (usually a "sumptuous feast"), excretion, death and decomposition.

Not to mention "Paternalistic", "Patriarchical", and "Mother".

Oh, yeah - there's gotta be an enfant terrible.

i'm kinda shocked that after 28 posts no one had, dave. whew! saved me a lot of work!

I'll just have to add "alienation" rather than "ennui," then. And "materialism." And "Marxian" rather than "Marxist," because apparently there's a difference.

Something - it doesn't matter what - must take place "...in John Ashcroft's America".

It's become a cliche.

Oh, yeah - and something, somewhere in the exhibition must be "phallic", somehow or other.

I imbue ennui? That friggin' hurts, man.

I think that may still better than ingesting it, Emily.

nonono. you don't imbue ennui, m'dear; it's the thought of those digital brownshirts that the chimphitlermonkey is sending after you that does it.

and i think dave's right...but it may be okay with a little ketchup.

Condiments do tend to make things better, Mr. B. I acquired the habit of putting mayonnaise on fries when I was in Belgium, and vinegar on them in England, and now do either about as often as ketchup (but not simultaneously). My father also once told me that bleu cheese dressing can improve practically anything, and over time I've come to agree.

Ontological is good. I knew a coupla guys in college that wanted to start a band called "Ontology." I think one of them went on to teach college, so in his own way I guess he made it.

The other guy wanted to go work for the FBI, so I don't know what that says about the weltanschaung.

Ontological is good. I knew a coupla guys in college that wanted to start a band called "Ontology." I think one of them went on to teach college, so in his own way I guess he made it.

The other guy wanted to go work for the FBI, so I don't know what that says about the weltanschaung.

Frappin' double posts. The second one's really not as funny as the first.

yeah, of late i've become a blue cheese convert as well.

Extra blue cheese on buffalo chicken po-boy sandwiches made Tallahassee ever so slightly more tolerable.

damn-sam that sounds awfully good.

"I knew a coupla guys in college that wanted to start a band called 'Ontology.'"

I knew a coupla guys at work in Tallahassee who started a band the name of which was so utterly boring and forgettable that I don't remmeber it, even though I must've gone to their gigs at least three or four times (they weren't bad, but I admit I was there partly because the bar had good beer cheap and unlimited free oysters on Saturdays). I do remember two proposed names that were unfortunately rejected: Alien Mind Wave and Diminished Expectations.

Sprinkle plenty of 'neo-' prefixes throughout the piece too, Sheila.. there are few pretentious words that fail to be made more pretentious by the addition of a 'neo-'.

I absolutely love the "in John Ashcroft's America" suggestion. Fabulous. I might open my review with that.

This is gonna be fun.

I love the word "ontology". I know it can be used pretentiously - but still. I love the meaning of the word, and I so rarely get a chance to use it in conversation.

"In an ontological sense..."

I mean, you would just sound like an ass.

But still. Love the word.

Holy Moly, these comments should have a disclaimer! I've soiled myself beyond repair. Funny, freaking shit. You people should all be making tons of money writing for some big show!

I do think one must, however, refer to the gates metaphorically. Somehow comparing them with Sisyphus and his boulder.

I cannot wait to get to work on my review ... Possible sentences are already floating through my mind from all of your wonderful ideas qua ideas ...

But I'll wait - I'm sure there are more suggestions to come.

In John Ashcroft's America, I have found it helpful to imbue ennui.

WHAT???

hahaha

shouldn't that be "...Ashkkkroft's Amerikkka..."?

A few more if you've got room:

stochastic
normative
autarky

I'm jealous again: autarky and particularly "normative" just go naturally with "paradigm."

And maybe for good measure:

Apparatchik (extra points for "bourgeois apparatchik")

To "apparatchik," add also "intelligentsia."

What a fun idea!

You might want to consider working in ethnocentrism.

And just to make it even more multilingually pretentious, throw in nekulturny.

And samizdat.

"The effect is homiletic, rather than narrative."

"In Ashcroft's America, the Gestalt bespeaks a Foucaultian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst.

It's in this context that "The Gates" covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise".

Oh, you do it.

"the panels wavering in the zephyrous breeze like so much samizdat from the mind of Sakharov..."

dammit dave

You guys, I will totally steal your sentences word for word. Get ready for it.

Mitch, your latest contribution is SCARY good.

i like 'dollop' especially (known as "big spoonfull" west of the rockies...)

Better: "As rendered in 'Gates', the effect is homiletic rather than narrative--especially the goose shit on the sidewalks, which provides a whimsical counterpoint as well as a sobering reminder of John Ashkkkroft's Amerikkka, where all true art is of necessity samizdat, and thus destined to languish in obscurity, ignored by the nekulturny hordes of bourgeois apparatchiks intent only upon getting home in time to nurse at the paps of American Idol."

Better than my last, not Mitch's. Mitch's is brilliant, irreproachable. ;-)

I don't know, Ken ... You all are kind of blowing me away. I haven't even heard of half of these words.

And of course I'm assuming the goose shit part--here near the shores of Lake Erie, just about every public park or sizable green space is an air-delivered Canadian minefield.

i like it ken; the goose shit adds a pucky yet didactic counter-pount to the relentless ebullience of the Fox News evervescence.

but i can't vouch for my spelling

The really frightening thing is that this stuff practically writes itself once you get going....

hahahahahaha

Ken - your comment says ALL that needs to be said about art criticism and its boringness.

Beautiful!!

Dammit, now I'm hooked.

"The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie, as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature - the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint - the "Gates" welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material, smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The "Gates" are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age."

And now I'm done! Go to it!

ur-mensch

hahahahahahahahahahahaha

I am stunned. STUNNED. I can't stop laughing.

they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas

HAHAHAHA

Mitch, your latest kind of reads like a Mad Lib, actually.

This is one of the funniest things I have ever read here--it is absolutely killing me. This crap may "write itself," but it takes a smart sense of humor to make it this funny.

Mitch, are you a god?

(And remember the proper response to that from Ghostbusters.)

hahahahahahaha

"Mitch, your latest contribution is SCARY good."

Thanks! I need to go gargle with the AP Stylebook now.

but why...why do we contrast textiled peach with the theobromatic brown of the unsnowed fecund soil? we do it for the children.

hahahaha

Art critics ignore Strunk & White's most simple lesson:

OMIT. NEEDLESS. WORDS.

still laughing about "ur-mensch"

"brio-cum-angst"

All of these are just getting funnier and funnier.

Aw, I won't be able to get my head out the door tonight!

"Brio-cum-angst and "ur-mensch" - I figure if tossing in foreign words is pretentious, mixing languages within a hyphenated word's gotta be TWICE the fun...

Oh, and you definitely need "morphology" (whatever the hell that is).

you could also refer to the post i wrote back when i was in college and drowning in pretentious commie tripe every day:

evil corporations blah blah blah blah culture diversity blah blah blah global culture yakkity yak cultural identities yadda yadda Western dominance of the global marketplace through diversionary business tactics blah. cross-cultural transnational multigenerational marketing and management blabbity blah. finding voice and negotiating antiagrarian socialist precapitalist space through IMF protests WTO etc., anti-globalizationism exploiting labor and resources in developing nations through neocolonialism yackity schmackity etc., etc. core periphery phenomenon imperialist progressive political cultural Marxist Freudian philosophical feminist reclamation of feminine identificational spatial hegemony. The Edge of Belief. Blah. jargon jargon jargon religious oppressional academicians and so on. products, corporations, networks, cultural messages, advertising libelhood, photographical imagistic parenthetical marginalization n shit. transgendered Latina African-Caribbean pan-Asian Cape Verdean Pacific Islander Eskimo cultural preservationist literature. in the 18th century. menstrual-central lunar-measured cyclically temporal Wiccan interpretive dance as politicized polarizing gender resistance. physical solar powered nonrenewable resources being brought from the periphery to the historically revisionist manufacturing core center node displacement area. save the spotted horny whale owl. etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

...or not. up to you.

Oh, man, Mitch, you're killing me. Neo-literary criticism runs smack into my Lawn Guyland neighbors. Something like Linda Richman merges with Dieter from Sprockets.

"Look, Bubbaleh, you're completely misinterpreting the essential solipsism of the non-linear presentation! I know, sweetie, it's all supposed to be about the cultural fatigue of the Gen-Xers and their diminished capacity for societal reinterventionism, but really it's just a fershluggener neocon aspiration. The postnormative operands have no place in our objectified coexistence.

You know, your brother would never be so placated by the phallocentric tripe that is modern significance."

"Now is the time at Sheila's when we dance."

beth - hahahahahaha!!!

schmackity is particularly good.

I'm menstrual-central as we speak. But I'm not experiencing any node displacement because of it.

Beth, I take it you were an IR major like me? Because if not, that's an awfully good job of sounding like one, or at least someone else from yet another very fuzzy "social science."

i was IR too.

sad, ain't it?

IR and history double-major, admittedly, Mr. B, and I take as many history courses that could count for crossover IR credit as possible. Or all the fluffy jargon might have made my brain explode.

Following September 11, 2001, the American government and corporate media have promoted “novelty” as a topos by which citizens should understand current events: America’s New War arises to meet the challenge of a political situation in which “things will never be the same.” This paper examines this claim of historical discontinuity through the application of both Douglas Kellner’s critical approach of “diagnostic media critique” and Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s “propaganda model,” and thereby finds that the American corporate media’s representation of the war legitimates specific national interests through the lack of proper context. Drawing upon Herbert Marcuse’s notion of war as an inhuman activity that seeks to annihilate the very context that would allow for human understanding to emerge, an analysis is undertaken that reveals that the ideology behind America’s New War is itself anti-contextual, and so, inhuman. Countering this ideology, a theory of human practice, as necessarily embedded in a process of socio-political contextualization, is promoted. Further, it is noted that this quality of “embeddedness” means that the process of contextualization is itself an “ecological” practice. Therefore, to complete the paper’s diagnostic critique, America’s New War is contextualized by the current global ecological crisis, referred to by Richard Leakey as the “Sixth Extinction.” The war, it is found, is typical of a capitalist ideology that not only fails to accurately report the ongoing ecological catastrophe, but is in fact its primary cause. Finally, the role of the Internet, as a globalizing-contextualizing media, is examined and promoted as a possible sphere for housing the future of progressive politics.

oops! sorry; the asshole was serious

nope, i was english. i just went to a VERY hippie-commie school and often had to venture out into genpop for graduation requirements.

"cyclically temporal Wiccan interpretive dance as politicized polarizing gender resistance"

That is good gooooood stuff, beth.

Any common word you know can seem smarter by adding "ness" to it.

Frankly I find the entire color scheme exposes the true Gate-ness of Christo's intent.

hahahaha

hahahahaha.

Someone brought up the necessary use of "phallic"

"As for the sexualized nature-of-being within the context of the exposure: the gates cannot be phallic; by their very nature they must be...(damn, what's the female version of phallic? vaginic?) thus rendering the observer as a sort of unintended symbol of penetration qua probing. It mitigates the very phallocentric nature of neo-culture in John As(kKk)croft's aMeRIkkkA, where every wardrobe malfunction becomes a gesture of the feminine violent against a landscape of testicular domination. The flowing robes of the gates are by necessity, feminine; they recall the flowing garments of kindergarten teachers, of wash on the line, and the color - an ochre, rather than a true red - dimly recalls menstruation. What Christo has done here is nothing short of genius; the observer-as-penis concept writ large."

('writ large' is another one of the key phrases)

"observer-as-penis concept".

I did my dissertation on that.

Mr. B, "topos"? It's all Greek to me.

(insert obligatory groan)

HA!!

Phenomenological! You gotta put in phenomenological! Like: "If we know anything, we know this: Art is neither object nor subject, but the phenomenological intertwining of both so that 'appreciation' (in all its varied and multi- meanings) is born from the simple realization of perception. This recongnition allows for art that is neither here nor there, but everywhere. And nowhere."

Not, of course, to be confused with "phrenomenological," that is, related to the bumps on your head.

Just to illustrate the point, here's a little gem of an actual journal sentence that I found with a one minute google search:

In light of the apparent fragmentation of contemporary societies and the increasing erosion of nation-state through globalisation, glocalisation, techno-sociopolitical transmutations of power relations and the advents of so-called postmodernity, concerns with the notion of community are rising again to the forefront, unexpectedly (Rose, 1999: 167), ‘more [intensely] than in any previous era’ (Little, 2002: 7), and in ways that challenge conventional and ideological conceptualisation of what community is or what it ought to be – including those extolling community as the antidote to individualism, or those sceptically regarding community as a threat to individual freedom.

Taken from this site.

That reminds me that you have to use the phrase "so-called" all over the place.

I've popped something in my gut from laughing so hard.

"The meaning of these 'Gates' might have been comprehensible had we discovered them rising against the warm backdrop of avant-garde Seattle, underwritten by Microsoft--but arising as they have, here, in the gritty cold heart of NYC, and funded by so-called 'artists' whose creative progeny are all indubitably strange, we find nonsense in the idea that meaning means anything 'sensible' and one rather suspects a joke being played and we, the viewers, don't yet quite get it."

Hilarious stuff, kids!

How about the gates as an army of orifices (orifi?) through which one comes to contemplate the very isness of is. The installation breaks all the palpable rules but it works -- hums -- with insouciant malaise.

Maybe I should've scare-quoted 'get' too?

Neo-Marxian mayonnaise?

Okay, that's just too good not to rip off.

What? No 'frissons' or 'nodes'?

And you have to include 'existential angst' while ending with an inappropriate historical allusion: "I gladly entered the Gates, feeling in them a life-affirming force, but couldn't help leaving with existential angst on my face, remembering Auschwitz."

Or somesuch.

And can you work in diaspora? We want to be inclusive.

I think all of you should start writing wine reviews. You know, like "a brisk wine, naive but insouciant, with a corrugated finish."