The Tyranny of Language

THE TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE (PT. 1)

1. 1. I'm feeling the fever of feeling, but I'm not sure why ____________ is forbidden in an academic context. Chris Kraus separates ____________ from nostalgia in Video Green.

2. 2. Academia gives me hardcore ____________ syndrome.

3. 3. I feel a bit bad about calling her work, ____________ a word deriving from the American term for someone in their second year of university, in front of all of our classmates at senior critique; I was bitter at the thought of yet another white girl taking unironic black and white glamor selfies with vases of roses as their fine art practice, and riding off into the sunset with a freshly-minted and unchallenged BFA.

4. 4. I spent all of the first semester of my Masters program feeling incredibly drunk and ____________.

5. 5. Those who ask me if the humor in my work, performances, and antics is "generative" haven't yet come to see that I will do almost anything in hopes of a ____________.

6. 6. There were times when he'd give helpful advice. But on that chilly morning, after I'd just finished explaining to him the trauma of loss of language, and my relationship with my mother and its influence on my practice, he just had one thing to say: "____________ politics is just a trend".

7. 7. No piece of theory has ever fucked me up as bad as Jacques Rancière's Emancipated. ____________ I read that shit in my third year of undergrad and found myself in an ethical dilemma surrounding power dynamics and relational art, and legit couldn't make performance or participatory art for the following eight months.

8. 8. "____________ has a financial or sociological meaning, and all I need to know about you depends on which meaning you think of first." –Jenn Chan

9. 9. God, this word sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me. The dispersion of people, in separate geographic locales from their homelands. If we look at its historical origins, isn't its current frivolous, buzzword usage mildly appropriative? Can we rethink what we mean when we say this word? Can we make up a new one? I hate this word so much LOL.

10. 10. Wet, moist and tactile, feeling it slowly with your fingers and noticing it responding to you, pushing and pulling, and then hard, and fiery hot—never before had I thought it was possible to use so much sexual innuendo when talking about ____________.

11. 11. Apparently, allegations of racist and sexually inappropriate behavior (the man took photos of us while we slept in our studios, which we immediately told staff and admin, for crying out loud) were not enough to draw the line, but how did you land a job chairing SVA's MFA Art Practice program after being quietly dismissed for committing ____________ during your run as Director at the Whitney? (Cat's out of the bag with this one, huh!)

12. 12. I had to look up what this term meant last semester; it's a sort of broad term for a system of dominance and influence, and I'll be damned if I go a single day of class without hearing it.

13. 13. Lauren Fournier's Autotheory class was the first time I'd seen a syllabus with so many writers who don't identify as white ____________.

THE TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE (PT. 2)

TOP TERMS USED DURING MY STUDIO ONE-ON-ONES:

• GENERATIVE

• GESTURAL

• PLACEMAKING

• SUBVERSIVE

• GAZE

• ABJECT

• HUMOR

• FIGURATIVE

• OPACITY

• CORPOREAL

• RESEARCH

• BASED

• PRACTICE

• PERFORM

• CYNICAL

• DEFENSIVE

• EXHAUSTED

THE TYRANNY OF LANGUAGE (PT. 3)

1. 1. "Won't you please be my lover? We could indulge each others' cynicisms and worship Mallarmé together. You would feed me poetry with the tip of your tongue and the mussels and clams would dance around our toes. I would tickle your teeth and you would talk type to me under the brightest green of palm trees." It's too bad I wrote you this...