Word: torpor
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Nauman doesn't think art has much to do with pleasure. Just about everything that could turn you off is catnip to him: aggro, solipsism, tension, repetition, torpor and bad jokes that may have come out of a misanthrope's fortune cookie. Boredom too. Try watching a fuzzy tape of Nauman overstretching a simple phallic pun by very slowly "manipulating" a long fluorescent tube. You don't so much enjoy this show as endure it; you get through it. Then, in the coffee shop, you peruse the catalog and find such hyperbolic drivel as this, by co-curator Kathy Halbreich...
Angel Angel is told from the alternating points of view of Augusta and her two twentyish sons Mathew and Henry, aimless young men who want to rouse their mother out of her torpor but haven't the emotional strength. It will take an outsider to revive this troubled lot, and she arrives in the form of Bette Mack, a taciturn beauty in pink sneakers as drawn to the Irises as they are to her. Stevens surrounds Bette with an excess of winged imagery to indicate that she is the savior who will lift the Irises from their aggrieved inertia...
...person who spurs Richard out of his marital torpor is Anna Danilova, a young Russian poet who arrives in London in 1990 on an apparent mission of mercy. Her brother, having served a sentence back in Moscow for currency violations, is still being held in jail. Anna's plan is to circulate a petition signed by prominent Western intellectuals that declares her to be a world-class writer whose relative is being persecuted by Soviet officials; they might then be shamed into releasing the prisoner. Since Richard is an established authority on the literature of her homeland, Anna asks...
...difficult to say what may happen once Russians have had a better look at this rabble-rousing politician who is part showman, part shyster. Despite the fact that the country seems to have stabilized during the summer's torpor, there is an underlying sense that the balance of power could shift at any moment. But whatever happens, Zhirinovsky has changed the style and conduct of Russian politics irretrievably. No national political figure has done more to sound the alarm about the fragility of Russia's young democracy, or its vulnerability to irresponsible leadership. As for what that might mean, perhaps...
...year-old patient with a frontal lobotomy who was described as "grossly apathetic" and lying in a "motionless torpor...