Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Technically, the building is just one more presidential library, maintained by the National Archives and Records Service like its far more modest counterparts, the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kans. Actually it is a reductio ad absurdum of the presidential library system. No doubt historians will in time sift its unwieldy contents and make some pattern of them. Meanwhile, the building itself exists to tell history what to think. This is one of the traditional functions of monuments, but rarely has it been so heavily exploited...
...Absurdum...
...risk. Camp is low-level satire, and it tends to destroy both the past and the present with a snicker. Far from being a "great creative sensibility," as acclaimed by Susan Sontag, camp is anti-sensibility. Its intrinsic nature is sterile, and it applies the tactic of reductio ad absurdum to imply that all cultural values are equally sterile. Thus at one moment No, No Nanette fashions an affectionate valentine to the past, and in the very next moment perforates it with a derisory dart from the present...