Essay for On Others
By Matt Freedman
2005, New York City

For reasons that should become apparent momentarily, allow me to borrow from an earlier catalog essay. “It is a surprising and dismal truth, but catalog essays are not written to be read.” To be blunt about it, catalog writing is draped around the images of art out of a simple sense of decorum. As Boris Groys notes, “Images without text are embarrassing, like a naked person in a public space.” These words are nothing more than small fig leaves dangling in front of the On Others catalog, radiating nonverbal propriety towards their nonreaders. The exhibition now has, in Groys’ words, a “textual bikini.” What is the relevance of this confession? Let us see.

The On Others exhibition consists of a lashing together of five artists who in turn were previously bound serendipitously by time and circumstance; Patrick DeGuira, Melody Owen, Greg Pond, Jack Dingo Ryan and Steven Thompson. Greg Pond is also the curator of the exhibition. This particular confluence of artists constitutes an experimental investigation of a sort: Can a collection of work by a group of artists whose individual experiences and artistic inclinations intersect more or less whimsically resolve itself into a coherent meditation on the human condition? More broadly, can the very openness of a curatorial position actually allow an exhibition to more readily expose the linkages between its participants? And further, paraphrasing Pond himself, can these exposed commonalities reveal a greater system of collective thought that reflects the world in which they inhabit?

The experiment lends itself to Venn Diagraming. The artists are a mosaic of partial connectivity. Some of them come from the same part of the country, some come from the same schools, some have shown together previously, but no one precisely overlaps with every other artist in the show completely. To quote an abandoned web site: “The overlap areas are even more powerful than the circles themselves. Life occurs in the overlap areas. The overlap areas are where the 'truth' is. So, one uses Venn Diagrams to identify or presence truth.” As catalog texts should posit respectable intellectual hypotheses for their sponsoring exhibitions to resolve, we will argue that the work of the overlapping lives of the artists does in fact expose a thread running delicately through the larger cultural tapestry. And that is what we see in the On Others exhibition; an obsessive inventory of America’s mythic scrapbook. The families, the misfits, the wilderness, the kitsch, the beauty, the frontiers, the grotesque, the sublime, the religion, the murderous violence, the superstitions, the mythology, the dysfunction, the redemption. Everything is here, in all its unresolved, churning, compelling, inarticulate profundity.

The conventional conclusion of the unread critical essay is the issuance of a complicated and obscurely reassuring affirmation of the hypothesized position and a graceful trundle offstage. The somewhat more skeptical, if no less superfluous tactic taken here is to unearth one final quotation, this from Jorge Luis Borges, whose Avatars of the Tortoise helped inspire this exhibition in the first place. Following the advice of Groys, do not hesitate to throw out the word “words” in the following citation, and substitute the word “artists”. In the final analysis, here as elsewhere, words really do not count that much. Art does.

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them -- at least in an infinitesimal way -- does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.