almost something insider forum

[ 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.

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.

Daisuke presents a direct link to semi-essentialism in that he studied with Makari Kamatso at the Tokyo Art Institute. He became interested in the potential thing-like nature of feelings and sensations. They happen, they're real. But then again, they are only an effect. If nothing else, they need a body to happen. They’re secondary characteristics, as the philosophers might say. And still, when a body yawns it's as if, for those few seconds, there's nothing else. Daisuke, in a nod to Kamatso and semi-essentialism, calls yawns 'primary accidents'.

Sometimes, erasing things is more interesting than adding stuff. Kerry and Cecile’s works are in the tradition of Ronald John Radi Os, which was created by erasing selected words from Milton’sParadise Lost in order to create a new and different poem. Interestingly, there’s another good poem in there, but you only notice it by removing things, taking things away, erasing.

During his years living and working with artist Sherry Levine, Nick Normal became influential in developing the notion of artistic 'appropriations'. Levine herself was much taken with Macpherson's thoughts on semi-essentialism and Normal and Levine co-authored an important essay titled "Bad Platonism: Copying Copies." In his recent work, Nick has gone a step beyond Levine's famous copies of Modernist art and has begun making replicas of things that are already secondary works. In an interview for Artforum in 1984, Nick said, "The library book is the opposite of the first edition, that's why they're great, they're like the prostitutes of the book world and equally honest by being so."

The warp and woof of everyday communication is like a rich quarry for the strange and intriguing when one pokes at it a bit. It's like when you say the same word over and over again and it suddenly sounds crazy. In her youth, Olivia wrote a short book on Aristotle's Categories. Working on the text so closely convinced her of a thesis Aristotle would have argued against. Human language doesn't reveal anything more basic at all. It just gets more complicated. But, she argues, this is no reason to despair of meaning. The trouble is that there is so much meaning, not that it is fragile.

Robert McCarren, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Nick Normal, Jayeon Kwon

It's a basic attitude of semi-essentialism that the 'real stuff' is right there. Of course, this is nothing new in art. Works of art have long served to show us things or bring attention to phenomena that might otherwise have been missed. Or they show us things in a new way. Works of semi-essentialism are unique perhaps in the simple fact that they nestle so closely among the things that are already there. At the same time, a certain amount of work is required. It isn't the point, contra Fluxus, that art and life are simply one. It's that art can peek out from all kinds of places. One needs to cultivate, therefore, a knack for noticing things.

Frank O'Toole, Yuji Oshima, Eric Baudart

One of the important concepts for semi-essentialism is that of second nature. Human beings have second nature. It's the nature we make for ourselves versus the nature we’re given. The structures of social life are the structures of human nature. But second nature isn't always easy to acquire. It's an achievement.

The works of Frank, Yuji, and Eric explore the ways in which the process of naturalizing our own cultural products can sometimes create weird after-effects. The process of achieving second nature sometimes gets stuck in overdrive and can’t turn itself off.