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.

It was the insight (or terrible folly, depending on how you look at it) of Socrates (himself continuing a tradition that was begun by the so-called pre-Socratics) to wonder whether this commonplace language wasn’t, in fact, obscuring more fundamental realities. It occurred to Socrates that such an everyday understanding of things, the ability, for instance, to identify lamps as lamps, gives people a false confidence about the depth and scope of their knowledge. This problem, in Socrates’ mind, becomes more acute the more one moves from everyday objects like lamps and shoes, and into more complicated concepts like truth or beauty. The problem, Socrates suggested, is that while people might do a reasonably good job identifying things like shoes, and giving roughly effective, seat-of-the-pants definitions for them, they utterly fail to carry this skill over into what might be considered more complicated and also more important matters, like justice. Isn’t it a rather scary thing, asked Socrates, that the very people who are responsible for ensuring that our society is just—political leaders for instance—are completely unable to give even a working definition of what justice is?

Many of the most famous Socratic dialogues, beloved for well-nigh two and a half millennia now, consist of Socrates questioning supposedly knowledgeable interlocutors about how they would define things. With humor and wit, Socrates exposes the empty and contradictory nature of their responses. The conclusion, at least in these early dialogues often referred to as aporetic, is that we don’t really know shit. Thus Socrates’ interpretation of the Delphic oracle’s proclamation that he is the wisest of men. I’m the wisest of men, Socrates concludes, because I at least know that I don’t know shit.

The core problem that Socrates handed down to his pupil Plato—who in turn handed it down to his pupil Aristotle—
was this problem of definition. You can pose the problem as one of knowledge: How do I know that that thing is the thing that it is? You can also pose it as a question of existence: What is it that makes that thing the kind of thing that it is?

In trying to answer this question, Plato came up with some ideas that have come to be known as his theory of forms. The notion was that different particular things are what they are because they ‘participate’ in a set of universal and unchanging essences that exist in an ideal realm. One particular shoe might have this or that set of characteristics, being white, so many inches long, made of rubber, etc., but its essence as a shoe comes from the more general sense that it instantiates a type of form, Shoeness, of which the accidental properties (color, length, rubberiness) are only variations on a theme.

In giving a name to that theme, the underlying essence that makes a shoe a shoe and not something else, Aristotle— though he abandoned other aspects of Plato’s theory—returned to the basic question we asked above: “What is that thing?”. In Greek, it’s the simple question “Ti esti?” Aristotle broadened the question into more generic form: “Ti ein einai?” or “What is it for [a thing] to be [the thing that it is]?”. And then, in a simple and elegant grammatical/metaphysical move, Aristotle slapped the definite article, ‘to’, onto the front of the question. Now, you had a name for essence. You knew what you were looking for in answer to the ‘ti ein einai’ question. For the answer to the ‘ti ein einai’ question (what makes a thing the thing it is) is the essence of the thing, the ‘to tie in einai’ (the what it is for the thing to be that thing). Aristotle saw this ‘to ti ein einai’ as the specific formula or logos for thingness. For instance, he could answer that the ‘to ti ein einai’ for Socrates is ‘the to be a human being’, which can be further elucidated as ‘the to be the type of animal that is social and has language’.

So much for the brief primer in Greek metaphysics. But you may still be wondering what all this has to do with contemporary art movements in Europe and the United States. Well, for the last couple of decades important movements like Abstract Expressionism and more recently Minimalism have, among other things, undertaken their own aesthetic version of a philosophical interrogation of the stuff around us, the world, along the lines of the old ‘ti ein einai’ question. And it’s kind of interesting to try to figure out why.

As we all know, painting and sculpture (and pretty much every other medium in art) stopped being about getting the most accurate representation of things sometime during the 19th Century. In abandoning an outward focus on copying the ‘look’ of the world, many different movements in art started to focus more on the very nature and possibility of the forms and materials utilized by art. To put it colloquially, once painting and sculpture and other artistic mediums ceased to have one primary agenda (i.e. representation) it was natural that the question of what they were up to should jump to the forefront.

Some painters, for instance, started to get obsessed by the realization that painting was essentially constituted by applying pigments to a stretched canvass. They started to explore basic ‘moves’ in painting, like making a mark, using this or that color, creating shapes, using lines, framing the canvass in this or that way. We’ve been liberated by the move away from copying the world, these artists seemed to cry out, and now we can get at what painting is really about. Often, they would strip painting down to this or that fundamental gesture as if to say, “In its essence, painting is …”. Malevich’s white-on-white painting is a famous example of this impulse, but so is Barnett Newman’s exploration of the vertical line and the rectangle, Mondrian’s exploration of lines and proportion, Ad Reinhardt and his boxes of black, etc. If you read the writings, notebooks, manifestoes, and interviews of these artists it all merges into one, continuous ‘Eureka! We’ve finally got it!’.

And in all of these paintings, you could say that some form of ‘ti esti’ question is being asked: “What’s a line?”, “What’s a shape?”, “What’s a color?”. And the underlying or overarching ‘ti esti’ question to many of these works is “What is painting?”

It is as if the breakdown of the representational model for painting threw some of its practitioners into their own version of Greek metaphysics. They started painting the ‘ti esti’ question or sculpting it or drawing it. They started making paintings that were, themselves, claims about what is most essential about painting, about what makes a painting a specific kind of thing we can call painting. It is as if they asked themselves, “What is it that makes everything that is a painting, stripped of its accidental properties and inessential attributes, still fundamentally a painting?”. Typically, the brilliant Clement Greenberg captured the impulse most succinctly in his classic essay, “Modernist Painting.”

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.

Different painters had different answers to the question of what would most ‘entrench painting in its area of competence’ and they used different techniques to get there. They came to different conclusions as to what painting was about as they started to strip things down formally. Everyone had their own “Holy shit, I’ve zeroed in on the truth of my medium!” moment.

Ad Reinhardt, for instance, ultimately saw his painting-essentialism as a form of negative theology. He was stripping down to the absolute, or the negative image that gestured to the absolute. (Indeed, not a few abstract expressionists ultimately saw themselves as staring into the face of the Absolute, Truth, God. This is, in itself, another interesting connection back to Greek metaphysics for whom, similarly, the question of ‘what it is to be’ ultimately culminates in theology.)

Rothko thought that he was painting about ecstasy and doom. In fact, he painted ecstasy and doom so intently that it finally killed him. Pollock, in a quasi-Nietzschean vein, talked about painting what he was, and his controlled swirls and spatters did seem to capture the nature of some kind of Apollonian/Dionysian struggle, the internal dynamic of a quintessential Zarathustrian asshole.

That was the ‘expressionism’ in abstract expressionism. Painting was still about something, it just wasn’t about something tangible or within the world of appearances. It was about a more fundamental truth transcendentally prior to experience itself. All of this came about through acts of formal essentialism that tried to nail the very ‘whatness’ of painting. The giants of Modernism were getting rid of everything that painting wasn’t in order to capture most fundamentally what it was. Like Platonists with paintbrushes, they were scraping away the stuff that could be otherwise in order to find the thing in its essential nature.

Minimalism took this stripping impulse that much further. Like an exercise in abstraction from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, they tried to get rid of everything but the matter itself. There is thus a lot of overlap between abstract expressionism and minimalism. Many of the artists you can put in one category you could easily put in the other. But Minimalism’s focus on matter was more extreme and it shared more with a sculptural tradition. The Minimalist’s rallying cry, in layman’s terms, is something like “Here’s the stuff qua its very stuffness!”. The stuffness of stuff: Minimalism.

Minimalists like Robert Morris got interested in piles of stuff, no artifice, stuff in its most natural habitat. Most minimalists had some kind of impulsion toward the elemental; earth, air, wind, fire. Don Flavin wanted to show you light, plain and simple. “This is light,” he was saying, “not light on something, not light in a painting or falling across some figure. Just light, light for light’s sake.” The early Serra was like Haephestos throwing around his molten globs. In the footage from those ‘throws’ he looks like he’s standing there in the primordial soup with steaming dollops of prime matter.

And just as with the Abstract Expressionists, the essentialism is palpable. Get rid of everything that isn’t the real ‘whatness’ and this is what you get, the prime stuff, stuff without any of the other bullshit, stuff laid bare. That’s the fundamental impulse of Minimalism. That’s what they were all after, in one form or another.

And it was great, brilliant, heady art. But already now, in 1976, it feels like the mood is shifting, has already shifted. The essentialist attitude is giving way to an interest in the fuzzy areas around objects that the metaphysicians would call the inessential or the accidental. Artists are becoming fascinated by the stuff that happens for a moment, that isn’t determinate, that isn’t the one underlying reality.

But this is happening without it being a simple reversal, a valuing of the transitory over the intransitory, the finite versus the infinite. Heidegger once complained that Neitzsche’s overcoming of metaphysics was flawed because it accepted the basic categories of metaphysics and simply chose to privilege becoming over being instead of the more traditional privileging of being over becoming. The current crop of artists working in a Post-Minimalist environment are doing something interesting. They’re exploring objects and experiences with a fascination for the ways that substance and accident are overlapping and intertwined. From another perspective, they’re exploring the ways that substance and accident are rather insufficient categories to deal with the world in the first place. This is where they’ve rejected some of the assumptions of the essentialism that animated abstract expressionism and minimalism. But they’ve come to that position having internalized some of the lessons of essentialism in art. They’re still asking ‘ti esti’ questions, just without the need to answer that question with something fundamental, or with a single answer at all.

It may very well be the case that the ‘to ti ein einai’ for some objects and experiences is something finite and indeterminate, something vacillating and temporal. That doesn’t mean that only the vacillating and temporal is ‘real’. But it does mean that the category of ‘real’ encompasses much more than that allowed by the essentialist. Potentially, it includes just about everything, which would result in an immense leveling out of the ontological, and therefore epistemological, playing field. Everything plays a part in ‘whatness’. And ‘whatness’ is probably better thought of a something extended along a plane, rather than stratified in levels of greater and lesser depth or reality.

Following the suggestion of Joachim Klechner, I call this new generation of artists Semi-essentialists. Semi-essentialists are interested in conducting adventures and experiments along the extended plane of ‘whatness’ rather than in uncovering any hidden depths. Semi-essentialists are interested in works that don’t necessarily assert themselves right away as ‘substantial’ objects. They are, thus, interested in things that aren’t quite objects, or just stopped being objects, or exist somewhere between being and nothing and maybe even becoming too. A lot of our experiences happen in just such a place, as it seems. A lot of the things that lodge themselves most persistently in our memory were things we didn’t even notice as such the first time through.

This Semi-essentialist attitude can be discovered in some of the recent works of Eva Hesse, as well as in the Partially Buried Woodshed of Robert Smithson, who perished tragically in a plane crash earlier this year. Semi-essentialism can be discovered in the structures of Joachim Klechner, who has been building a small village outside of Graz composed entirely of people’s body hair. In Plato’s Parmenides, an aged Parmenides challenges a young Socrates’ early theory of forms by asking him whether there is a ‘form’ for hair or fingernails or mud. Klechner’s answer seems to be, "Why not?“ Hair, once a discarded and inessential part of the body, becomes the form and matter of a series of structures. From a distance, coming down a wooded path, it isn’t immediately apparent that the village has been constructed with a ‘backwards’ metaphysics.

Another Semi-essentialist is the Japanese artist Makari Kamatso. She has been doing a performance for the last several years in which she has slowly incorporated various ticks into her speaking style and everyday mannerisms. Consciously created, the ticks have now become second nature. She barely realizes that she has them anymore. The subtle incorporation of the ticks, ephemeral in one sense, has, from another perspective, completely transformed her personality. Watching a video of her in casual conversation in 1972 and then a video from this year is startling. Among other things, it’s the study of the primacy of accidents.

The American artist Norman Frost has been marking buildings, streets, signs, trees, etc., with a kind of translucent paint that can only be seen wearing specially designed glasses. He has been creating a ‘trail’ from New York City to Mexico City that can be followed by wearing the glasses and following the arrows and instructions on the paint. In one sense, he hasn’t changed anything at all. But when one puts on the glasses, the city, or the country, is completely transformed. It has become the background for a journey.

Because Semi-essentialists have discarded the impulse to strip away the veil, they’ve thrown themselves back into the world of appearances with an abandon. At the same time, they aren’t worshipping pure surface either. The point is still to mess around with experience, to try and find out what holds and what doesn’t. Perhaps in another vein you could say it continues to be an exercise in meaning and ‘aboutness’. Semi-essentialists are trying to isolate and present aspects of our world in such a way that they are noticed anew. In doing so, they’re continuing with impulses in art that have been around since the very beginning. But their studied naïveté in the face of experience is just that, studied. It has been achieved through a historical handing down of problems and a relationship to the immediate past in art movements. Semi-essentialism wouldn’t have the particular look and feel that it does without its immediate relationship to Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism.