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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.

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?

Daisuke Yamashiro’s work involves seeking out unexpected methods of communication. Yawn and see if anyone around you will yawn, for instance. Will someone nearby unconsciously reply? This piece tries to raise your sense of awareness without directing your attention to any particular object. Your participation in the work is more essential than your acknowledgment of it. Jayeon Kwon’s Sleeping Dolls are made with a similar underlying investment in the idea of being alert. The photographs depict staged compositions, but it is the artist’s daughters and not the artist who has composed them. The sleeping dolls are messages, essentially, that the two girls leave behind for their mother to discover and to interpret.

Look at Karin Campbell’s video projection. What do you see immediately and what do you see eventually? What’s closer, your mind or your eye? And which do you chose to trust? Which lends itself to your whim? The shadows you see ask for your interpretation. The shadows of the birds become bigger and more human. The shadows allow you this necessary step of remove to see through to your imagination. But what happens if you find yourself abandoned by a piece of work? Find the words “Touch Me” written in Braille with nails on the wall. What is more isolating than sensory deprivation or more paralyzing than harbored desires? Can irony really appeal to your senses? Consider Eric Baudart’s video, Pump. How different is the effect of a surprising observation vs. the presentation of a sequestered idea?

Almost Something wants you to visit these places – this terrain of near hits and misses that all of these works provoke. What is it to reckon with a piece of art that doesn’t assert what it aims to say in either physical or visual terms? What realm do your mind and your eye run off to in order to rekindle the spark of meaning? Is it really plausible that looking deeper will ease the strain on our collective psychic powers? Alas, as long as looking, seeing, and thinking remain as our available tools for understanding so will imagining, abstracting, and inventing be our means of providing a quality of newness to the world around us.

Rather than try to untangle the realm of the imaginary from that of the real, Amy Hsieh’s piece, Electro-reception, builds off of these mental glitches that instigate dreams and intuitions. She says “laundry drying racks remind me of electric transmission towers” and sets out to construct that very notion. The sculpture asserts her belief in gut feelings and everyday objects alike and exhibits a commitment to not suppressing or censoring her unusual brand of logic. Amy Hsieh believes that her work illustrates the ancient principal of the Tabula Smaragdina: What is above is like what is below – a concept that opens up numerous possibilities for metaphysical symmetries.

Occasionally, however, our wild imaginations rope in the real world too. We are taken over not just by subtle, half-conscious dreamy sensations, but by actual visual phenomena witnessed in a fully waking state. Yuji Oshima attributes a “strange feeling of the presence of supernatural phenomena” from the 25th floor of a building in Sao Paolo as the mysterious precursor to this video collage made from found footage material of UFOs. How often is seeing an act of will? How do the questions we ask determine what we will see? What does art want from the supernatural?

I’ll take up now the question of the conjurer. Does the conjurer see or know or neither? Does the conjurer take something you know and change it into something you WANT to believe in, devolving it in a way? How much invention goes along with belief? How much playing-along? Will ideas strike us like lightning or must we always be searching and seeking them out? Frank O’Toole’s Physiognomization demonstrates the mind’s ability to see unexpectedly and its willingness to play the part of the conjurer. It asks to what end do we seek out likenesses? Do images attest to the persistence of the mind to keep thinking, to know more, to stay alive? Nietzsche asks a similar question as he walks through the logic of dreams in Human, All Too Human, “How is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober, careful, and skeptical about hypotheses?” Nietzsche then decides: Dream-thought is so easy for us now because, during mankind’s immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea.

Next, consider the almost blank wall. Kerry Downey’s wall painting assumes a nearly devotional stance as well. The piece aims to pay homage to the act itself of erasing – to all whitewashed walls everywhere. How are surfaces built to begin with? How does the act of erasing relate to the act of hiding? How does hiding become evolving into something different altogether? The piece is emblematic of one of the questions hovering over the show …what is it I am (not) seeing? Can you make out the under-painting if you try? Can your eyes excavate any of what was painted before? What breaks the surface, what is being held back, what is being averted here? How much of painting is about being able to start over and to imagine again from the beginning?

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.

Start at the Observation Post by Robert McCarren. It seems appropriate to begin here, to begin by considering this work that is big and visible, yet it aims to take on a subsiding presence. The work seems to say, “Don’t look at me, look out from me.” The Lookout wants to direct your attention not toward itself but toward what it stands above and what surrounds it. Does is denote itself sculpturally, is there an apparent eye behind how it stands or does it assume practicality and sound building conventions as an aspect of its martyrdom? Take note of what you do or don’t see from here. What kind of perspective does the Lookout offer? From here we can look out on all that we have yet to ask ourselves or to see.

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."

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.