In Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya, the characters are in the grip of an ennui so pervasive that they can barely lift themselves from their chaise lounges to deal with their own failures and bankruptcy. Chekhov called the play a comedy and meant the dissolution of the aristocrats depicted in the play to be the objects of our laughter and derision. During the time he was writing, around the end of the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia was on its last legs, and the land owning aristocracy was seeing the gradual erosion of their power base by a new breed of creature - the moneyed middle class.
As earning money was beneath them - even talking about working for a living was just too tedious - they were unable to cope with the changes of society and their inherited wealth was gradually being whittled away. Even if the revolution hadn't come along in 1917, judging by Chekhov's depiction, the whole society would have probably collapsed under the weight of its own stupor sooner or later anyway. Empires don't collapse because of armed rebellion, but because of the jaded appetites of its ruling class. Having had their own way for too long they either sink or seek to sate their desire for something new through experimentation in drugs and other dissolute behaviours.
In Zach Plague's new novel, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, being released on July 28, 2008 from Featherproof Books, we are dropped into the world of the students and the hangers on of The University of Fine Arts and Academia. The University has institutionalized the visual arts and turned training artists into a cynical process that has sucked the life out of creativity and made art just another commodity. Instead of the urge to paint springing from the desire to create, it has become just another means of filling the void of boredom.
With art being merely another distraction from the "boring, boring," the term they use to describe the emptiness of their lives, the characters are in constant search of anything else to alleviate the tedium. For the majority that means endless rounds of parties, drinking, experimenting with weirder and weirder drugs, and, of course, sex. Adelaide and Allister have both done their best to buck the system and subvert the process by actually doing something with their art and questioning the status quo. Unlike most of their peers, their motivation wasn't merely seeking distraction from the "boring, boring", but were attacks upon the system that had sucked the life out of art.
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