almost something insider forum

the power

facsimilies of library books

Nick Normal creates facsimilies of books. He has agreed to mix some of these "fakes" in with the reference materials and other projects which will be presented in the references/background materials section of the show.

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Title: there, that is the power
Medium: drilled hole and dust, rope or cord-like object, cardboard, photocopies
Size: dimensions vary

Cities are constructed over time, installing new technologies underground (fiber-optic lines, sewer channels, etc.) and above-ground (wireless transmitters, skyscrapers, etc.). Buildings and structures are contained within themselves yet linked to the outside world through conduits, channels, plumbing, etc. A place such as Flux Factory is largely constructed from within by its own members, with walls built and wiring of devices installed to suit the needs of Flux Factory's members and projects. Quite often these methodologies are not recognized or acknowledged as artworks in and of themselves.

Let’s continue by identifying some of the work most riddled by the possibility of not being seen. Find There, that is the power and Fluorescent Lights. Reuben Lorch-Miller’s fluorescent light fixture replicas appear as the everyday objects that they are meant to represent. Through the extent of mimicry employed in their making, however, they heighten your sense of what we actually stop noticing about things when we take them for being ordinary. The soundtrack to this piece, the continuous hum of the artist imitating the hum of a fluorescent light, is more likely to catch your attention than the fixtures themselves.

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."

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.

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facsimilies of library books

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