{"id":102,"date":"2012-05-17T10:44:15","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T10:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1051675528.test.prositehosting.co.uk\/?p=102"},"modified":"2012-05-29T13:54:35","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T13:54:35","slug":"style-guide-to-obfuscation-new-updated-edition-laura-gascoigne-investigates-the-continued-manglings-of-syntax-and-punctuation-by-those-with-space-to-fill-and-nothing-intelligible-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=102","title":{"rendered":"Style guide to obfuscation (new updated edition): Laura Gascoigne investigates the continued manglings of syntax and punctuation by those with space to fill and nothing intelligible to say"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nothing and no one ever heard so many stupidities as a picture,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d remarked Jules de Goncourt, and since he made his observation things have got worse. The insults to intelligence endured by 19th century pictures were as nothing to those routinely heaped on contemporary art. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Some things never change, however. Stupidity almost always originates in vanity, and art criticism is never more stupid than when it wants to sound clever. If the situation has deteriorated, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s partly because conceptual art offers endless opportunities for cleverness. But other factors have contributed. For one thing, critical faculties are now weakened in advance by heavy shelling with stupid press releases and wall texts. For another, in order to praise a work of conceptual art it is no longer enough to wax stupidly lyrical; a lot of the time, you have to lie. And lying, for some physiological reason yet to be scientifically researched, affects the part of the brain that deals with sentence construction, resulting in obfuscation, the mortal enemy of intelligence.<\/p>\n

For the liar, tautology and tortuous grammar are lifelines. Consider this sample from a wall text for the 2007 Turner Prize: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Enrico David\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s imagery has developed through his use of drawing and painting and also finds form in sculpture, painting and works on paper.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If a stress test is carried out on the meaning of this sentence it collapses into: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Enrico David draws, paints and sculpts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d So why the extra verbiage? Because, on the visual evidence available to anyone visiting the exhibition, he did none of those things. It beats me why the security services waste money on polygraph technology, when a simple, hands-free lie detector test is to listen for the strangulated syntax. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Serota in 2008 defending the Tate against criticism of the Turner Prize selection process: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re at the forefront of being as open as we possibly can\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Beep! If the convoluted phrasing sounds familiar, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because it comes straight out of Bliar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Grammar Primer.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHeavy on style and light on substance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is the obfuscator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mantra; once the tortured phraseology has been mastered, the only real obstacle in the way of success is words. If a word has a clear meaning, it must be excised and replaced with one that makes a significant-sounding noise without adding anything quantifiable to the sense. But the trouble with buzzwords, like bluebottles, is obsolescence \u00e2\u20ac\u201c when the buzz becomes annoying, people reach for the fly swat. Since we published our A-Z of Artbollocks in 2004, the language has moved on. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcInnovative\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 has lost its novelty and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrigorous\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 its stiffness. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNavigation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 has drifted off course and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnegotiation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is grinding to a halt. Even \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcinterrogation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 may soon be over. It would no longer be sufficient to say of 2005 Turner Prize nominee Gillian Carnegie that she \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcinterrogates painting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. The present climate calls for something tougher: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcrendition\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, perhaps.<\/p>\n

There are survivors from our earlier survey. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcInvestigations\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 are ongoing and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcexploration\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 continues; \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcidentity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, perforce, is ever with us. And there are newcomers. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcConversation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdiscourse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 are now widely practised \u00e2\u20ac\u201c witness Mima\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s circuitously titled 2007 exhibition Draw: Conversations around the Legacy of Drawing and Kettle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Yard\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 2008 offering Beyond Measure: conversations across art and space. Not to be left behind, in August the once fuddy-duddy Fine Art Society gave us Wit, Fear and Sarcasm, an exhibition featuring \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the work of five artists whose practice presents a discourse with historicity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

But the most notable stylistic advances have been in the formerly neglected field of punctuation. The past decade has seen a relentless rise in the use of the hyphen, in defiance of Keith Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sound advice in his immortal handbook On Newspaper Style: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hyphens should never be used when they have nothing to do,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he warns. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Before admitting one to the page, ask what it has come for. If it cannot say, or if its answer is vague\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 refuse it admission.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Waterhouse might have made a special case for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcludic-artistic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but I suspect he would have been less welcoming to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcvenue-based\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctext-based\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctime-based\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcprocess-based\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c though \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpizza-based\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 he might have allowed. And I doubt he would have given elbow room to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsite-specific\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsemi-site-specific\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or the now preferred locution \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclocation-specific\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not to mention \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnon-specific\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, an expression formerly only associated with STDs that now appears regularly in respectable \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnon-specific contexts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, such as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153non-specific sense of discord with the general state of things\u00e2\u20ac\u009d experienced by contributors to the Cafe Gallery\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s summer exhibition Personal Use. We know how they feel.<\/p>\n

A distinctive feature of the art hyphen is its decorative use, like a grace note, between a prefix and the stem of the word it qualifies. So we have \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpost-structural\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpost-minimal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122; if mail art was still in fashion, we might have \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpost-box\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. But the art hyphen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s partner of the moment is the prefix \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, sometimes italicised for added impact. In the endlessly repeating cycle of conceptual ideas, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no end to this little prefix\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usefulness. From \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-contextualising, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-configuring\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-investigation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcradical re-visioning\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-definition of space\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-investment in aesthetic language\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-assessment of the relationship between realism and spectacle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, re is in a prefixal class of its own. If we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re to believe the publicity for FACT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 2008 exhibition Sk-interfaces, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s even capable of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcre-virginisation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a felicitous coinage that, if it had any meaning, might absolve pious Muslims of the need for honour killing. Following the epidemic of art hyphens, we now seem to be experiencing an outbreak of art brackets. Originally introduced by abstract painters as a way of smuggling in a title behind the title Untitled, art brackets now perform a purely ornamental function, like emoticons emptied of emotion. The publicity for a 2010 exhibition organised by Romanian curator Mihnea Mircan for the David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia contained a couple of choice examples: one exhibit was described as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dca (counter-)manifesto etched in stone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 while another was titled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Remains (The Making of)\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Mircan must be an indexer manqu\u00c3\u00a9, since his whole exhibition was filed under the title \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHistory of Art, the\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. But the prize for prettiest confection in the bracket bracket goes to Flowers East for its reference, re Jerry Judah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 2009 exhibition Babylon, to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the redundancy of traditional hierarchies at the End of (art)-History\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

And so we come to subverted commas. Just as inverted commas are used by tabloid headline writers around words like \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMURDERER\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcRAPIST\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153typographical crossed fingers to ward off libel actions\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, as Waterhouse describes it, subverted commas allow art commentators to shrug off responsibility for apparently loaded, non-relativist statements \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or indeed any statements, full (old-fashioned-)stop. Thus the Arnolfini\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s current series of exhibitions The Apparatus is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153about the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmakings\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of artists, of artworks, of institutions, and of a cultural infrastructure,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while Sharon Lockhart\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s film-making, in the words of the Whitechapel, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153looks back to the pivotal interest in gesture and the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dceveryday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the late 1960s and examines contemporary manifestations of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwork\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

The ultimate syntactical shrug is, of course, the question mark. In this category Newlyn Society of Artists wins the pioneers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 prize for the trailblazing introduction of the Hispanic inverted question mark into the title of its 2005 exhibition \u00c2\u00bfDRAWING? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not making this up. \u00c2\u00bfWould I lie to you?<\/p>\n

The Jackdaw Nov-Dec 2011<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nothing and no one ever heard so many stupidities as a picture,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d remarked Jules de Goncourt, and since he made his observation things have got worse. The insults to intelligence endured by 19th century pictures were as nothing to those routinely heaped on contemporary art. Some things never change, however. Stupidity almost always originates in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}