text published in LOG#32 Fall 2014
Hand in hand walk, decadence
The garden ironic[3]
Of lighted obedience
Along their way they meet
The puppet and the slave
They talk of their conceit
Doorknobs[4], Crimea’s grave[5]
Come closer little prick
See through the pink disguise
The devil shows its trick
Pretending its demise[6]
Each one tragicomic[7]
USA romantic
France goes for the cosmic
Israel dramatic
Fair play’s no resistance[8]
All embrace surety[9]
Entertain the audience[10]
Flatter authority
[1] Hypothesis of a counter-discourse within the master’s discourse… pseudo-deviance in fact… s(t)inking together, irremediably and symmetrically. Fair Enough, the Russian Pavilion, is designed as a fake commercial fair, an ironic response to …
[2] Rem Koolhaas’s Elements of Crime
[3] Irony is a rhetorical device of which incongruity must reveal some aspect of human vanity or folly. It has its roots in the Greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog who, by his sheer wit, repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character Alazon. Originally a means of resistance and knowledge, irony is here rendered purely formal, entertaining, inoffensive, and unproductive…
[4] The Giardini’s Central Pavilion exhibit as the odorless dissection of a cadaver that never was…
[5] No reason or no destination to beam me up, Scotty… the cruelty of the play stutters between the enterprise of moralism served on a plate of “cash flow” and, on the other side, the flatulence of testosterone teens spitting in the soup with AK49 and Buk Rocket. As this poem is written, Ukraine is under siege by Russian soldiers and a passenger “bird” has been shot down …
[6] “The Devil’s best trick is to persuade you that it does not exist.” Charles Baudelaire, The Generous Gambler, 1864.
[7] If the Russian Pavilion uses Verbal Irony, the French, abusing Tati and Prouvé as national products (when they were hardly supported during their lifetime), calls for Situational or Cosmic Irony, the Israel Pavilion, drawing & erasing (border)lines with its machines, shamelessly displays Dramatic Irony. We hope for OfficeUS to fit in the category of Self-Irony (sometimes called Romantic Irony)… swallowing its own supersized stomach…
[8] I walked into the Russian Pavilion in search of the motherland of Pussy Riot… I exited under the tingle of a cheap nightclub pill…
[9] All pavilions proved to be good students in response to the master’s exercise, with perhaps the exception of the German Pavilion, where doubt and uneasiness are in the air…
[10] “The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967