as I can. There. Virtual persona off for cocktails. Now, what gives in the sad bad world of so-called reality?
âEamon, I need your help.
âThen you must be in a fine old pickle, begob.
âIâm writing a big paper for the peer-group conference, a plenary paper, actually.
âYou? A plenary paper? Well fuck me sideways. Not on that shite KGB-funded poet you pushed for years, I assume?
âYes, actually, but thatâs the trouble: Iâve sort of, I donât know why, Iâve just started to, well, think about things. I mean, what if Iâve wasted my life, Eamon? What if the place I dedicated my life to studying was only ever a shithole run by the Red Army?
âSounds like a reasonable description.
âSo what if all my work just doesnât mean a bloody thing?
âOho! Got you in one.
âYou have?
âI see, my man, that you are suffering from an acute attack of losing trust in meaninglessness. You, hopeless fool, have backslid into wanting it all to mean something.
âMy God, Eamon, youâre right!
âJohnnyboy, I can see that we need to look at this again from first base. Allow me to demonstrate it by a concrete example, you hopeless Brit. I shall read to you from my blurb accompanying an exhibition hereabouts. This will, I think, make the importance of postmodern theory clear. Letâs see ⦠blah blah blah ⦠oh yes, this is where I start to hit the sweet spot:
OâLearyâs almost undetectable interventions in her (re)found objects, her Motherâs/Madonnaâs fetishes of unquestioned adoration, undercut the whole project of âWesternâ forays into so-called subjectivism and primitivism. Here the primitive is the known and the subjective gaze the conviction of Truth itself. With this subterranean dynamic, OâLeary structurally insists that the viewer question her engagement as viewer with the act of viewership, constructing an implicitly infinite (and hence perhaps by definition heavenly) range of meta-/physical subjects.
âBloody hell, Eamon.
âTalk about heavy slice, eh? Now, tell me what that means, Johnnyboy?
âWhat? Well, um, I suppose it sort of means that â¦
âIt means that if the right member of the curatocracy comes along to the gallery and I lay it on them with a trowel and they go away feeling that this could be a handy subject on which to base some of their own priceless spouting, a cokehead neurotic by the name of OâLeary makes a mint for strewing white rooms at random with her dead motherâs yellowed collection of sixties parish newspapers from the olâ County Clare. And I, as her discoverer, the man who made her fit for theorising about, get on to the panel of the Dublin Modern Art Biennial next year, hence able to make young peopleâs careers at will by the imprimatur of my bullshit, hence getting laid wherever I go despite being almost fifty and having European teeth, as happy as a cardinal in a home for orphaned boys, is what it fucking well means.
âRight. So, you mean, I should just think about how â¦
âWeaken not, Johnnyboy! Last millennium we had things called Right and Wrong. Guidebooks for life. You yours, I mine. The Pope and Charlie Marx. Until we were forced to realise that the Virgin Mary only works for illiterate farmers, that Lenin was a disaster for the twentieth century and that the Labour Theory of Value is right up there on the sanity chart next to the Holy Trinity.
âI suppose so.
âSo if we were wrong, does that mean the others were right? The boring, hard-working, election-voting, shop-keeping, job-holding, tax-paying, child-rearing, mortgage-servicing, acceptable-level-of-violence-maintaining middle-of-the-road fuckers? Right all along? Them? Admit that ?
âBut, Eamon, if we admitted that, weâd be saying, well, weâd be saying that â¦
âIndeed. We would be saying that spoiled priests and defrocked
âEamon, I need your help.
âThen you must be in a fine old pickle, begob.
âIâm writing a big paper for the peer-group conference, a plenary paper, actually.
âYou? A plenary paper? Well fuck me sideways. Not on that shite KGB-funded poet you pushed for years, I assume?
âYes, actually, but thatâs the trouble: Iâve sort of, I donât know why, Iâve just started to, well, think about things. I mean, what if Iâve wasted my life, Eamon? What if the place I dedicated my life to studying was only ever a shithole run by the Red Army?
âSounds like a reasonable description.
âSo what if all my work just doesnât mean a bloody thing?
âOho! Got you in one.
âYou have?
âI see, my man, that you are suffering from an acute attack of losing trust in meaninglessness. You, hopeless fool, have backslid into wanting it all to mean something.
âMy God, Eamon, youâre right!
âJohnnyboy, I can see that we need to look at this again from first base. Allow me to demonstrate it by a concrete example, you hopeless Brit. I shall read to you from my blurb accompanying an exhibition hereabouts. This will, I think, make the importance of postmodern theory clear. Letâs see ⦠blah blah blah ⦠oh yes, this is where I start to hit the sweet spot:
OâLearyâs almost undetectable interventions in her (re)found objects, her Motherâs/Madonnaâs fetishes of unquestioned adoration, undercut the whole project of âWesternâ forays into so-called subjectivism and primitivism. Here the primitive is the known and the subjective gaze the conviction of Truth itself. With this subterranean dynamic, OâLeary structurally insists that the viewer question her engagement as viewer with the act of viewership, constructing an implicitly infinite (and hence perhaps by definition heavenly) range of meta-/physical subjects.
âBloody hell, Eamon.
âTalk about heavy slice, eh? Now, tell me what that means, Johnnyboy?
âWhat? Well, um, I suppose it sort of means that â¦
âIt means that if the right member of the curatocracy comes along to the gallery and I lay it on them with a trowel and they go away feeling that this could be a handy subject on which to base some of their own priceless spouting, a cokehead neurotic by the name of OâLeary makes a mint for strewing white rooms at random with her dead motherâs yellowed collection of sixties parish newspapers from the olâ County Clare. And I, as her discoverer, the man who made her fit for theorising about, get on to the panel of the Dublin Modern Art Biennial next year, hence able to make young peopleâs careers at will by the imprimatur of my bullshit, hence getting laid wherever I go despite being almost fifty and having European teeth, as happy as a cardinal in a home for orphaned boys, is what it fucking well means.
âRight. So, you mean, I should just think about how â¦
âWeaken not, Johnnyboy! Last millennium we had things called Right and Wrong. Guidebooks for life. You yours, I mine. The Pope and Charlie Marx. Until we were forced to realise that the Virgin Mary only works for illiterate farmers, that Lenin was a disaster for the twentieth century and that the Labour Theory of Value is right up there on the sanity chart next to the Holy Trinity.
âI suppose so.
âSo if we were wrong, does that mean the others were right? The boring, hard-working, election-voting, shop-keeping, job-holding, tax-paying, child-rearing, mortgage-servicing, acceptable-level-of-violence-maintaining middle-of-the-road fuckers? Right all along? Them? Admit that ?
âBut, Eamon, if we admitted that, weâd be saying, well, weâd be saying that â¦
âIndeed. We would be saying that spoiled priests and defrocked
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