etherealize

As a less local conflict with only vague territorial implications for the US, and as a more protracted war that gave opportunity for institutional participation through the Red Cross and other organizations, World War I was susceptible to Lost Cause etherealization.

The conflation of absence and loss induces either a metametaphysical etherealization, even obfuscation, of historical problems or a historicist, reductive localization of transhistorical, recurrently displaced problems--or perhaps a confusingly hybridized, extremely labile discourse that seems to derive critical analyses of historical phenomena directly from the deconstruction of metaphysics and metametaphysical, at times freely associative (or disseminatory), glosses of specific historical dynamics" (p.

The stakes of Trecartin's (and Fitch's) painterly gestures are etherealization disguised as materialization: turn burdensome bodies into animated arrows, and lift the person from the doldrums of humanness by upgrading unmarked skin into brightly apotropaic abstraction.