BURNT TOASTMASTERS

The bridge chair and the conference room are bound together by an arranged marriage brokered by an accountant. It's a loveless relationship that owes its endurance to simple self-evident utility.

The conference room is typically too cold and redundantly illuminated by a crisp metallic sheen of humming fluorescents. The bridge chair speaks for itself, evoking the provisional informality of a card game and the necessary link between buttock and floor.

Together with the podium, the clip-lamp and the Powerpoint, the academic symposium is a bloodless anti-aesthetic crucible that can lull even the most ardent insomniac into a growling torpor. 

I've attended my fair share of these snooze-fests, most recently the annual Albuquerque Conference on the Ontological/Phenomenolgical Aspects of Modern Art History. Speaker after speaker presented conclusive evidence to the truth of Karl Kraus' observation that "stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match." My colleague, Currado Malaspina calls it "the passionate restatement of the obvious ... albeit with footnotes."

I was there to deliver a paper of my own: Faun Roberts and the Kierkegaard Revival and I can assure you I was the sharpest knife in that dull southwestern drawer. 

It's not that my paper was terribly interesting or original - I basically wrote it on the plane from Cambridge to New Mexico -it was simply the clever way in which I delivered it. So much has to do with facial expression and body language. I practice by staring into the mirror, deadpan with folded arms and then parsimoniously dispense a few well-timed smiles just to keep it human.

When I speak I project, almost barking at times. It never really matters what one says so long as it's said loudly. Sometimes I practice by reading the owner's manual of my parents 1982 Volvo station wagon.

It's all about projecting authority and conviction, everything else is gilding the lily.

The Master Class, Faun Roberts, 1931

The proof of it all is that I focused my talk on Faun Roberts' relatively weak 1931 painting The Master Class. I argued that the work was influenced by Roberts' friendship with the poet Georg Trakl and their collaborative Gedanken Gedichte that was published in the literary journal Der Brenner. People came up to me afterwards and gushed about how inspiring I was, how fluidly my argument was reasoned and how I turned a dissonant conclusion into a brilliantly inevitable denouement.

The only problem with the whole thing was that I found out later (through Wikipedia) that Georg Trakl died of a cocaine overdose on in 1914 ... the year Faun Roberts turned 15!

Oops!