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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.

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.