almost something insider forum

Jacques Tati's "Playtime"

Simon and Seulgi's "Rosalie"

Catherine Ross' "Fingering and Footing"

Sebastien and Marie's Tati inspired walk/dance

Phill during the performance

Amy's electroreception and Miwa's kite-project with Phill's projection

watching Phill's projections with Cecile's 50 below

crowd watching the performance

Marie Daubert Flicker

Elodie Huet "le controleur"

Elisabeth Smolarz "the walk"

Kato Hideki and James Fei

Asmira Woodward-Page and Nina Maria Lee playing Ravel's duo

Barker Trio: Welf Dorr,Brian Osbourne,Andrew Barker

Nate Wooley, John McLellan and Jonathan Moritz

Yuji's Alliance for Progress Bossa Nova

Catherine Ross Laundromat on the roof

Rooftop Drumming by Sebastien

gummo out on the roof

Marie Losier Films

Nowhere Man

David Gassoway reading J.M. Tyree's essay on Robert McCarren, on Robert McCarren's observation platform

[ Miwa put up golden name plaques of all the people who helped set up the show but are not direct participants. Reminiscent of all the Donors plaques stuck all over most buildings in the US, she was motivated in part by this writing of Pessoa. What if instead of thanking God before eating, a family thanked all the people who made the meal possible, from the farmer or cowherd, trucker, shelf stocker. Other humans are what make your life possible. -- Marco ]

I'm in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I'm slowly taking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things, words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: I turn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it - but still I see it as a dress and not cloth - and the light embroidery and the work involved in it. And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, the factories and the labor unfold before me - the factory where the cloth was made, the factory where the twist of silk, darker in tone than the dress, was made, which went into making the twisted little things in the border now in their place next to the neck; and I see the components of the factories, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate into the offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, the accounts involved in it all; but it isn't only that: I see, beyond that, the domestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories and those offices ... All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have before me, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don't know what sort of face, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress.

[ Thank you to Leslie Johnston and the staff at the UVA libraries for providing us with a digital copy of the essay by James Macpherson to which Morgan Meis refers in his guidebook. There will be copies availble for reading at the show, but here for your advance viewing pleasure is Macpherson's seminal work, "Somethings and the things in between" as printed in 1976 in Art Discourse. -- Francis ]

"Somethings and the things in between"
by James Macpherson

You could say that the Western philosophical tradition started with a very simple question: What is that thing? It‘s the kind of question one might ask when confronted with an unfamiliar object or event. It’s a question that is the very antithesis of complicated theory. When you ask, “What is that thing?” you’re asking for something straightforward, you’re groping for basic, everyday understanding. If I ask, “What is that thing?” and you say, “A lamp,” I’m probably going to be satisfied. Now I know what the thing is.

The first chunk of reports from Dr. Minskoff:

Location 01: Objectively a segment of concrete floor in which arcs are discernible from the initial pouring and smoothing. Subject Eleanor G. described "A sea captain, looking over his shoulder at me. He is angry." Two subjects found nothing in the area, but Christian identified "a funny little man in a hat," and giggled at the figure. Both of these episodes were cataloged photographically with subject's help.

Horus

Introducing the Decompressionists

by Ranbir Sidhu

A United States Navy experiment during World War Two had battleship hulls painted in a gaudy mixture of bright colors. The ships, when viewed on the horizon, became invisible. For the past century, an international art movement has managed to perform a similar trick. Decompressionists are everywhere today, and much as it impossible to imagine the language of current day advertising without James Joyce as an inspiration, the visual and verbal rhetorics of the modern world would be much the poorer had it not been for Decompressionist anti-experiments. Yet few know of their existence, and fewer still recognize a Decompressionist work when they encounter one. This is as much their own decision, and it is not the purpose of this short introduction to uncover them or even to summarize their thought and work with a breezy shorthand. To know Decompressionist work, it must be experienced firsthand.

poem 1

handwritten in tiny print (most likely in pencil or ballpoint pen, perhaps sharpie marker) in a relatively obscure part of the gallery (i'm thinking along the underside of the windowsill, but this will of course depend on the floorplan of the show). mentioned in one catalogue as a scrawl of graffitti left over by a previous artist named Granger Tolman.

Steinway Street                                                                           
                                                                                          
Cardboard televisions can accentuate                                                      
the product in a furniture store window.                                                  
Smudgy noseprints yearn for Lite FM, air                                                  
conditioned showrooms.   

poem 2

the "card" of a nonexistent work. the piece should be described in one of the catalogues and attributed to Granger Tolman, but the card should not be mentioned.

In the final chapter of Franz Kafka's novel Amerika, the immigrant protagonist, Karl, joins something called "The Nature Theater of Oklahoma." The Nature Theater is a vast organization that recruits unemployed people in American towns and cities, feeding them and putting them to work in their productions, each according to their abilities and skills. Since no one is ever turned away ("everyone is welcome"), The Nature Theater is also a kind of nationwide, all-embracing charity. One feels that Karl will thrive there, even though the novel is incomplete and ends with the new recruits riding off by train into the landscape of the West. Exactly what sort of art such a massive undertaking might produce is never revealed. All we know is that The Nature Theater of Oklahoma has a splendid gilded box seat specially designed for the President of the United States. The rest is left to the imagination - the grand, perpetually unfinished possibility of America.

Mapping the Void at the Heart of the Twentieth Century

by Gyorgy Singh Ahluwalia

Bunker Chic:Chic Bunker,
or Bruckheimer Among the In-Substantialities

Only when YOU finally EXPECT it, does the UNEXPECTED happen.
--The Delphi Graffito, circa 1917

To employ a term first coined by Harkness (1955), the ‘compensatory idiom’ of early Decompressionist work, essentially the void itself, the hole, that into which the structure, its foundation undermined, falls, represented as much a hole in search of a void as it did, if we believe the Codex P ascribed to the Madrid Theorists, the void itself. It was not that early Decompressionist thought lacked the later subtlety, that particular nuance which allowed it to tether nothingness to nothing, to suck, in a sense, air from an already existsing vacuum; instead—and here we enter those particularly treacherous waters where, if we are to follow a post-Glasnoverian reading and give Moody (1963, not 1976) his due, we are in danger of allowing nothing to, in fact, once again become something—the marked nuance of early (here I follow the Stackpole Chronology and read early as pre-Bunker, not pre-Hiroshima) Decompressionist work is marked by its ability to avoid the traps of paradox that led to so much of the later work being abandoned before it was begun. Indeed, it was clearly an infection of post-Hiroshima Paradox that contributed directly to Retreat 1968! the show in which, as we all now suspect, nothing was put on display nowhere, no one told about it, and which no one remembers ever organizing, contributing to, naming, attending, or taking down. The critical difference, and here the Stackpole Chronology serves us well, between pre-Bunker and post-Hiroshima, or Paradox Tremens and Paradox Ad Absurdum as Boole (1983) helpfully calibrated it, rests in those missing months, between the death of Hitler and the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb over a densely populated city.

All of the artists in this show are either consciously working in the tradition of semi-essentialism or producing works that reflect the basic themes of semi-essentialism. For a full description and analysis of semi-essentialism from a decidedly more academic standpoint, please take a look at James Macpherson’s seminal essay from 1976, “Somethings and the Things in Between.”[1]

We’ll use the following working definition for semi-essentialism: works of semi-essentialism don’t flaunt the fact that they exist, but they don’t run from it either. In a word, works of semi-essentialism are subtle. They don’t like to announce their presence right off the bat. But they also aren’t obscure for the sake of being obscure and they aren’t ‘subverting’ or ‘rupturing’ or ‘questioning’ anything, necessarily. The point, as Macpherson once quipped, is that, “Between things and nothing there’s a fair amount of interesting crap going on.” The world we actually live in, though sometimes fail to notice, is the world in which semi-essentialism operates.

THROUGH ALMOST SOMETHING

The work here in Almost Something will seep in to your consciousness before it physically jumps out at you. Already, you have a feeling it is here. The works that surround you are visually enigmatic, disguised, camouflaged, conceptual, or invisible. By writing this, I hope to fill the room with questions instead ? questions that the works ask of you, questions that the works ask of themselves, and questions that you will ask of the work. What are you? What do you mean to tell me? How can I see you? These are some of the oldest, most fundamental questions we can ask in this world ? questions we find ourselves asking when we are most alone but begin to feel a certain presence, when we are visited by the idea that something is with us that is waiting to be seen. Like this, the work in Almost Something concerns itself with just how exactly to reveal itself to you. It wants you to react, to see it, but begs of you to seek it out eagerly and to look around closely. You must consider whether the quality of being ?almost something? shelters the work within a cloak of ambiguity or rightly conveys an ability to be provocative and skillfully unfamiliar. Is there something that almost something inherently resists becoming?